My visit to Professors in Berkeley: Ziad
Published:
Visit to Professor Ziad (School of Public Health)
Takeaways
Applied Mathematics? Cannot be the top in one field? Try to be in the top 5% in several fields!
In serious scenarios, like medical systems, how much do we value interpretability? Very much. Interpretability in this area means that we want our models to perform well on data they haven’t seen before. Besides, we need to know if it really has a sense of “science”. For example, if I edit the symptom a little, what kind of change will happen in the output, and is the change aligned with the biology?
Why do we still need mathematical models? “The bitter lesson” has said: the data and compute will definitely outperform engineered architecture. We need them. First, “Garbage in, garbage out”. We need mathematical models to make some data more “high-quality”. Secondly, sometimes we cannot directly investigate the things we want. Hence, we should use mathematical models to find proxies.