All Quotes

"If we want to improve the current conditions of Muslims, we must first liberate them from the men of religion."

"The intellectual, social and political context is affected by the deep impregnation of societies by Salafist currents which have succeeded, even partially, to suppress the recourse to common sense and dialogue.."

"Rising extremism can only be fought by reviving Islamic philosophy and modernist thinking."

"Every religious institution will strive to deform the image of religion."

"This is not true of Islam only but of Judaism and Christianity."

"Religion, in itself, does not require an institution, for it is a very personal relation between man and God."

"This really came about because the man who hired me for my first post-doc position was a chemical engineering professor at Cornell. Reflecting on this with the hindsight of decades, this transition from chemist to chemical engineer suited me. I like the focus on solving practical problems that engineers tend to focus on."

"First and foremost, you have to be in it for the long haul. There are no quick fixes. There are plenty of setbacks. There aren’t always too many incentives to promote diversity over other aspects of your job, like research output, promotions and career development, etc. Expect progress to be slow; change moves slowly but you have to keep ‘fighting the good fight.’ You have to be involved because you consider promoting diversity to be part of your ‘moral compass.’ And not because of the rewards; there aren’t many of those. You do it because it’s the right thing to do."

"I think there is some broadness to the definition of what counts as a foundation model, and more generally, artificial intelligence."

"François Chollet posits that intelligence is not about how well a specialized model performs, but how good it is in learning new things, or in other words,"

"How well it can generalize across tasks."

"In this sense we are probably still far away from general intelligence and this is one of the reasons why I personally don’t like the term artificial intelligence."

"We don’t really understand and agree on what intelligence is."

"In large language models such as ChatGPT, the key to their success was the scale, being able to create very large models that can be trained on huge amounts of data."

"We don’t yet have anything of comparable scale in biology, and probably the main limitation is the amount of data we have."

"It is very expensive to obtain experimental data."

"It will be possible to overcome the lack of experimental data with simulation and it’s an interesting question how to combine simulated data."

"One example is Recursion that scaled-up cell-painting technologies, allowing to image hundreds of millions of cells and see what happens to the cells. *When you perturb them either chemically or genetically."

"What I would like to do is to take a step back and look at the next generation of data sources where the consumer of the data will not be a human but a machine."

"If we say that the data does not necessarily need to be viewed by human scientists, we can come up with completely new experimental data sources."

"I am honoured and delighted to join Oxford, which has unparalleled expertise in AI and related fields and amazing students."

"I am looking forward to forging new collaborations and synergies within the Department and beyond that would allow us to develop the next generation."

"Learning methods that solve real-world problems and at the same time have the trust of domain experts and the broader public."

"I went into chemistry instead of engineering because I thought engineers drove trains."

"It's estimated that 30 percent of type II diabetes patients have NASH [nonalcoholic steatohepatitis, a severe form of fatty liver disease]."

"Yahoo has a very large, diverse, and fast growing user base plus massive amounts of content and data."

"This is the perfect environment for fundamental research on the Web."

"I am excited to join Yahoo!’s leading Internet researchers in exploring emerging search technologies that will distill all the information that the Web has to offer to the maximum benefit of our users."

"The industry is pretty small, and I had offers from Yahoo and the other big guys in search."

"I have many friends at all three, and no matter which one I chose, two-thirds of my friends would be unhappy that I didn’t chose them."

"My background is research."

"People often ask what is the difference between research and advanced development."

"It’s a very interesting question these days, because it used to be that research looks five years forward and advanced development is much shorter term."

"That’s not true any longer because the cycle has become so short."

"Research and advanced development are beginning to sync up."

"The goal of research is to advance the state of the art in the world."

"The entire research community together advances the state of the art."

"Companies, such as IBM and Microsoft, support research because the pie gets larger and everyone benefits."

"Yahoo intends to pursue a similar open approach to development, research and publishing and the research environment and goals at Yahoo are more compelling to me right now."

"I was in New York, but I am very glad to be back in California."

"I was working in Hawthorne, just outside of Manhattan, and lived in Riverdale, it was nice."

"There’s no place like New York, culturally."

"By the way, we have offices in New York; Yahoo Research has an outfit there in the old HotJobs office."

"I broke my shoulder skiing four years ago, and now that I’ve moved back to California."

"Not while skiing, but While I was at AltaVista, I traveled a lot."

"On a trip from Rome to Zurich, I was writing email and doing other things you normally do on a business trip, and seated next to me was a Korean-American girl, 9 years old, very talkative."

"She was asking me lots of questions, what do you do, what kind of computer is that."

"I was telling her I work at AltaVista."

"I know that it’s a search engine, but we are not allowed to use it."

"So a precocious 9 year old knows what I am working on, that was pretty amazing. *If I had said Digital or Compaq, she would have no idea what I was talking about."