Sherol's 2023: Some Things Never Change
Just kidding about outgrowing adventures and becoming a different person...
First of all, I fell off the map this year. A few people have been asking for updates, even noting that I hadn’t written anything in a while (I’m glad someone enjoys these 😅). A year ago, I talked a bit about “going underground,” facetiously perhaps (at the time), but my focus words were: understanding, underground, convergence, collaboration. Part of being “underground” is that you are so hidden that you become unable to put into words how things are going. I had previously said that 2022 was the climb up the slide, and 2023 would be the ride; so, let me now tell you how that went…
I can frame 2023 in three ways:
In an email wrote back in October:
(1) before pandemic, I was always frantically treading water, (2) throughout the pandemic, I started seriously treading water towards land, and (3) now, I feel like I can see the ocean floor under my feet (but still swimming!). Never having felt like I had something to lose is adjacent to feeling like I've been treading water my whole life. Maybe now I can feel the ground under my feet, but I'm still not out of the water. It feels like land might be 2 months away.
From where I stand now, I’m realizing that it’s not that I’ve profoundly changed, but that the ground beneath me is profoundly different. If anything, I managed to make it to land without compromising who I’ve always been. So, if you’ve ever known me, I’m (for what matters) exactly that same person. I’ll go through my year (month by month) to help synthesize what I mean.
I’ve never had a clear understanding of what I am about until now. For one, my priority in life is to love fully with my heart, soul, mind, and strength. I’ve found the boundaries of what that means (and it will take 2024 to unpack it all). So many things converged, namely the three themes of my life: (1) Jazz, (2) Jesus, and (3) Video Games (or tech/AI). I’ve always felt like I could retell my life from these three perspectives, and for both Jazz and Jesus, it seems I’ve respectively reached capstone crowning achievements. For whatever reason, the Video Games, Tech, and AI, aspects of things don’t have that same sense of closure. (I suppose there is still more to be done before I reach a similar place of contentment).
Roughly every month, there was a significant convergence of what amounts to decades of efforts. We don’t see the fruits of sowing until harvest, and this year was just a taste of the mast year to come.
a year in which a tree or shrub (such as an oak, hickory, or hazel) growing in a particular region produces an unusually large number of fruits, seeds, or nuts : the periodic production of a greater than typical amount of mast (https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/mast%20year) 🐿️
January - Jazz Cruise to the Virgin Islands
Blue Note at Sea Cruise had open rooms that they gave away to their partners. Of which, Monterey Jazz Festival was able to offer to their board members. While I was sailing around the Caribbean, hanging out with the greats, I had that crowning achievement feeling, that my “Jazz” story had reached a capstone (almost like the ending or conclusion of this hero’s journey). It’s what 15 years of helping a jazz festival and a lifetime of loving music brings. From a poor student who couldn’t afford to be a patron to joining the board of directors, it been such a meaningful arc.
Cost: 1 week of travel.
February - Preaching on Sunday Morning
For my Jesus capstone, it was being invited to preach on Sunday morning at a very well known church. I even started the sermon with, “if you knew me back then, you would think I was the last person who would be allowed to stand up here.” The series was on going “Back to Basics.” My message was about the basics of being “extra,” and how it’s hard to love the things we don’t understand. There definitely is something ineffable about speaking; maybe it’s the courage and faith it takes to speak something into existence, but I can almost feel lives changing around me when anyone speaks authentically. I suppose I was always trying to prove myself worthy of the Church, and now, I feel like I can go back to basics, and what makes me extra no longer needs justification.
Cost: 3 days of travel.
March - Generative AI Summit
I’ve never officially held authority, so I don’t really know what leadership is in that context, but I’ve always managed to “sherol” some people into joining in on an adventure or two. For this in particular, I was curious to know all the most interesting projects in AI, and dreamt up a summit around creativity and generative AI back in 2017. It had been ongoing every other year, and without fail, interest stirs for a group of people to come together and make this event possible. I’m still not exactly sure what it’s supposed to become, but there is something uniquely valuable about it. This year, as I’ve become more of an advisor, I realize that roles, streams, and process help to distribute efforts evenly such that the sum of the parts could be even greater.
Cost: 30 minutes per week for 2 months + 2 day event.
April - AI for Writing Assistance Workshop in Germany
This was another (seemingly) effortless collaboration. 10 people came together and wrote a 2-page workshop paper that got accepted to the Intelligent and Interactive Writing Assistants Workshop at CHI in Germany. When passions align there often feels like an exponential return, taking joy in doing things to the best of what we can offer. It was a really beautiful springtime in Hamburg, and we got to invite the organizers to the local Google office for breakfast and lunch.
Cost: 4 days of travel + writing a 2 page position paper.
May - Mumbai and Malabar Squirrels
I was on a call with some lady-friends and them I was about to head to India to attend a wedding. They said, “you don’t sound excited.” Immediately, I had the deja vu of, “oh no, there is an expected emotional response that I have failed to emote!” Then I started talking about seeing the giant rainbow squirrels in Maharashtra to distract from that. Whimsy goes a long way sometimes. It was a colorful time in a colorful city! 🌈
(Remember this story for when we get to July)
Cost: 1 week of travel.
June - Plenary Invite for AI Human Flourishing Symposium
I was invited by the dean of Liberal Arts and Sciences of APU to be a plenary speaker for their “Human Flourishing in the Age of AI Symposium.” It’s often hard to know which events to commit to, but there was something that felt right about this invitation. Commitment depends much more on the people and relationships than anything else. Although I do think I have developed my own distinct view within the AI conversation that the world’s been having nonstop, besides linking to my slides, I will need to unpack that another time. I’ve been working in AI for almost 20 years.
Cost: 2 days of travel.
July - Neurodiversity Results
I finally got the results for what took months to schedule and assess. I’d had the ADHD diagnosis since college, but as of July, I have an ASD diagnosis from Stanford. I thought a bit about how much I wanted to share about such matters, but life isn’t that long and what do I have to gain by keeping such things hidden? It’s something that is unchanging about me regardless of whether I have a name for it or not. To be quite honest, it’s liberating in the sense that it helps me forgive myself for my past faux pas.
Cost: ~2 hr intake appointment, ~2 hr assessment, ~ 2 hr results over 6+ months.
August - Passion Talks!
We ran the Passion Talks Poster Session in person this year at a retreat in Santa Maria. I wasn’t sure if people would be up to making a poster for their passions and present them science conference style, but it worked beautifully. People are more willing to take risks when regarding their passions! (Technically, this was early Sept).
Cost: 3 days of travel.
September - Monterey Jazz Fest
There’s something truly magical about jazz in Monterey. We brought a team of 20 volunteers to help steward directions for the arts. As leaders and active agents in the world, we aren’t bystanders to circumstance, rather we get to weigh in on what the future ought to be. Especially as iconic as the Monterey Jazz Fest is, my hope is that we lead in all aspects looking forward as we’ve had in the past.
Cost: 4 days of travel + 1.5 hours of board meetings every other month.
October - New Team!
This is a convergence of so many things, it wouldn’t even fit in its own blogpost. In fact, I’ve probably already written a book about this transition. The AI space has changed so much so quickly that it’s been nonstop action. I’d never felt more believed-in and understood as I do now, which makes me want to do my best (…to save face 😂, but also to prove what faith enables). Here was my intro to the group:
Hi! So excited to be part of the amazing efforts happening with LLMs and evaluation in this group! My 🎓 PhD was in CS and was towards evaluating the Authorial Leverage of Artificial Intelligence for storytelling. Narratologists argue that all our sensory inputs are only understood as stories we tell ourselves, so this area of understanding ourselves and one another is a huge ❤️ passion of mine. In addition to evaluation, my current research interests are Representational Alignment and Natural Language steering (aka chat interfaces). I also really like squirrels 🐿️, and have posted hundreds of videos on YouTube (youtube.com/@squirbles); like, comment, subscribe! I have a ML blog where I keep track of what I'm reading at expressive.substack.com, and for volunteering, I serve on the board of directors (with Clint Eastwood!) for the 🎷 Monterey Jazz Festival. I'm trying to revamp my web presence, but for now, I use sherol.org (more about me can be found there). Looking forward to learning from and with all of you! 🎉
Cost: 1 week of onboarding + ~3 month transition.
November - Philanthropists, Investors, and Evangelists
I was being very judicious about speaking engagements this year, but decided to say yes to three talks for three different groups all happening within the same week. Mostly, it is easy enough to give variations of the same AI talk, but challenging to do so in a way where it is as meaningful to each group. (Talk slides are linked at the end)
Cost: the same 20 min talk given three times (2 local + 1 virtual).
December - TBC Advisory Board
It must have been 2017, when I was attending a TBC event. I was being my scrappy self, handing out (basic looking) Passion Talks flyers (8.5x11 b&w printouts). I recall being noticed by Nancy Ortberg, and (impromptu) given a seat at the table at the VIP book signing with Condoleezza Rice (with a bunch of people wearing suits). 6 years later, Nancy invites me to join the board of advisors for TBC (nonprofit founded by Pat Gelsinger) where I got to eat dinner with a bunch of people in suits.
Cost: a night at Pat Gelsinger’s house.
Conclusion
2024 is going to be an adjustment year from treading water to being on land. I’m going to take a nice break in January to do a bit more thinking and writing. I know 2023 still looks like a bag of stuff bunched together, but it also feels like it’s converging nicely. Next year, my hope is that this update reads less like it was written by an LLM, regardless of now nuts things get (hopefully not as unhinged as this year!). For now, I’d like to stay underground a bit longer, at least until I get my land legs.
Besides all of that my youtube.com/@squirbles channel has over 2k subscribers, so maybe that’s the fourth theme of my life.
I hope you are all doing well. I don’t know what a mast year means for me, but I hope you get to enjoy the fruits of the your years of sowing. Thanks for reading and being part of my life.
My harvest is your harvest, Sherol 🐿️🥜
Misc Artifacts
Talks I gave:
Newsong Service (February) - [youtube]
AI and Human Flourishing (June) - [slides]
AI Digital Day Talk (November) - [slides]
AI Gathering Talk (November) - [slides]
Papers I co-authored:
Towards an Authorial Leverage Evaluation Framework for Expressive Benefits of Deep Generative Models in Story Writing - https://in2writing.glitch.me/
Leveraging Contextual Counterfactuals Toward Belief Calibration - https://arxiv.org/abs/2307.06513
Getting aligned on representational alignment - https://arxiv.org/abs/2310.13018
Interviews & press:
https://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2023/october/artificial-intelligence-robots-soul-formation.html
“As a tool, AI doesn’t achieve anything intrinsically,” says Sherol Chen, a research engineer at a big tech company. “We ought not to reassign our callings and responsibilities to the tools we invent.”
https://www.apu.edu/articles/apu-hosts-human-flourishing-in-the-age-of-ai-conference/
“With all things, we should create with hope and humility. What and how we create is our responsibility,” she said. “This also means understanding the tools we use and the impact our creations make on our neighbors.”
https://www.1flourish.com/responsibleAI.html
AI can augment human creativity and democratize creativity
Sherol, an AI Research Engineer from a top tech firm, has been working on ways that AI can provide creative leverage for over 10 years. She works on representational alignment for how generative models can better adapt to user intent, and is excited about the ways we can use technology to teach and cultivate creativity in people across diverse communities.
What does it mean to be human? What does it mean to be conscious?
Sherol is often asked how we should be using AI. She feels that the question is ultimately about the type of people we want to be as part of human society. That answer should inform how we use the tools we invent, not the other way around.
Most of my writings in 2023 were about AI/ML, here are my 2023 posts:
Thanks for sharing! Happy New Year!
5 squirrels if you count the emoji ones... I think... sounds like a lot is going on but you are taking it in stride! Praying for more in 2024!