Martin Wattenberg
@wattenberg
Human/AI interaction. Visualization as design, science, art. Professor at Harvard, and part-time at Google's People+AI Research initiative.
bewitched.comJoined July 2008
Martin Wattenberg’s Tweets
Here's a close-up of hue and brightness heads in a vision transformer. Work done with tremendous help from Aoyu Wu and !
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Language models have some beautiful spiral plots reflecting positional patterns. And a vision model has heads that arrange images according to brightness and hues. But there’s a lot more to find! What else can you see?
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Visualize transformer attention!
AttentionViz, created by Catherine Yeh and expanded by Yida Chen, helps you explore transformer self-attention by visualizing query and key vectors in a joint embedding.
Paper: arxiv.org/abs/2305.03210
Website: attentionviz.com
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Toasters have blinking lights, cars have speedometers. Should chatbots have dashboards too?
A speculative essay: The System Model and the User Model: Exploring AI Dashboard Design
arxiv.org/abs/2305.02469
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I want to show the NSF there would be broad support+utility for a "National Deep Inference" service for >100b LLMs.
If your research would be enabled by an inference service on open LLMs w API access+overrides to internal activations, params, gradients:
Please Like this thread!
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Students explore the aesthetics of computing in new computer science course at SEAS. "CS73: Code, Data, and Art" is co-taught by and , and teaches students how to create abstract art and communicate data sets through visualizations. buff.ly/3GXpkTE
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Starting to get used to Mastodon. Find me at @wattenberg@mastodon.social
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For information on the application process, see seas.harvard.edu/computer-scien
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Thinking about grad school next year? Interested in visualization, machine learning interpretability, or human/AI interaction? Consider Harvard. and I are continuing to build our lab!
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The labyrinthine patterns traced by birds on the wing – in pictures
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I'm teaching with for the first time, and am completely impressed with how polished and friendly the system is. Every detail is on point. Last class a student spontaneously said, "OpenProcessing is just so great." I agree!
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The project is a systematic study of how a neural network represents more features than it has neurons, under a variety of conditions. (Oh, and I can't tweet without a typo, apparently. That's of course!)
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Tiny neural networks have a surprisingly rich inner life, and may hold clues to how their larger cousins work. This image: evolution of feature vectors during learning. Full story: transformer-circuits.pub/2022/toy_model (in collaboration with the great interpretability team at @AnthopicAI)
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SMASHOMANCY is a "divination system for cracked phone screens" and retains pole position as one of my favorite living creatives.
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We've had this dream for a while and now it's becoming real! @aleffert and I made a divination system for cracked phone screens called
SMASHOMANCY
We're doing screen readings at a repair shop TODAY from 4:30-6:30 PM at 1099 Irving St. in SF! Drop your phone & join us.
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Replies are showing a rough consensus of red/brown for the past, and blue/green for the future. But not everyone agrees, and that consensus hides wildly different metaphors. Fall foliage, receding galaxies, old photos, atmospheric fog...
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What are good chart colors to represent past, present, and future? Not looking to "gray out" a prediction, but just represent time.
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All excellent images, but the "cyclops" picture is just startlingly good. Kudos for a brilliant prompt.
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"Candid portrait photographs" of Athena, Hades, and the Cyclops, "taken by Annie Leibovitz."
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The new baby name data is out! Check out to find out the latest trends. What alcoholic drink appeared as a name for the first time? Which famous robot is erasing a name? Which steamy series had the biggest effect?
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The year's biggest baby name style influencer: Raya and the Last Dragon. In a landmark for Asian characters, Raya was America's #1 fastest-rising popular name, and Namaari the #1 rising uncommon name
#AAPHM #AsianAmericanPacificIslanderHeritageMonth
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Kudos to the folks at the National Digital Forecast Database, for a decade of data that flowed a lot more steadily than the wind!
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Ten years of watching the wind swirl!
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Ten years ago #OTD, @viegasf and @wattenberg released "wind map." Then came @cambecc's earth.nullschool.net.
My story for Earth Island Journal.
earthisland.org/journal/index.
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Finally, deliberate mess! From the results for "Art as a scientific instrument" I picked something that was sketchy and not totally coherent. Perfect for a shaky metaphor 😉
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Tricks: When talking about large audiences, I wanted a crowd—but not one that was dark or scary. I knew from earlier experiments that "travel poster" often produces a light, airy feeling. So my prompt was, "A travel poster showing a crowd of happy people"
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Tweaks: I wanted to illustrate the idea of looking at something from different viewpoints. None of my prompts produced what I wanted, until I asked for a medium that was a little more "perspective"-oriented. Here's the result for "Multiple perspectives (pen and ink)"
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Lucky hits: sometimes I would type a phrase, and in the first few attempts get an image that felt right. Here's an illustration for "Understanding a model" (for a slide on understanding a machine learning model)
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A thread on using #midjourney to create illustrations for a talk.
Very different from art / exploration / whimsy, and an interesting example of human-AI interaction!
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A graph from my daughter's reading assignment. The software that digitized the text seems to have found a secret message hidden in the bar chart...
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"A poster warning about the danger of too much Twitter"
If you squint, you can see real words emerging from the pseudo-text. (Oh, and apologies to my fellow tweet addicts!)
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A shiny new name grapher!
namerology.com/baby-name-grap
Full description here:
namerology.com/2022/03/08/the
For visualization aficionados: compare the line vs. stacked graph views. Such a contrast, and useful in different ways.
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This paper has a wealth of tantalizing findings about what transformer networks are doing. And as always from these authors, wonderful diagrams!
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Our first interpretability paper explores a mathematical framework for trying to reverse engineer transformer language models: A Mathematical Framework for Transformer Circuits: transformer-circuits.pub/2021/framework
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Looking for a postdoc position in data visualization, human-centered machine learning, or both? Consider joining our lab at Harvard! Here’s the official announcement: main.hercjobs.org/jobs/15670780/
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Join me Tuesday 3pmET/12PT to #AMA iama.link/YGP5 about interpreting deep nets, AI research in academia vs industry; life as a PhD student. I am a new Prof at Northeastern ; postdoc at Harvard; recent MIT Phd; Google, Msft, startups
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What a fantastic group—welcome to all!
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1/21 Banner year for Harvard CS!
New hires include Sham Kakade @ShamKakade6 and Fernanda Viegas @viegasf (joining @wattenberg), as well as David Alvarez-Melis, Anurag Anshu @AnuragAnshu4, Sitan Chen, and Jonathan Frankle @jefrankle
seas.harvard.edu/news/2021/10/s
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And for information on the application process, see: seas.harvard.edu/computer-scien
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Thinking about grad school next year? Interested in visualization, human/AI interaction, or computational art? Consider Harvard! and I are building up our lab and will be looking for students. Our DMs are open.
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