Asst. Professor in Computer Science. Alumnus: @IUTOIC and @ubd_brunei
Bandar Seri Begawan, Brunei
Joined March 2009
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Take good care of your health. With poor health (physical or mental), there is very little you can do for yourself, let alone for others. ✍️📌🙏 #HealthTips #Lifestyle #Ageing
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One of the things the data analysts on our side obsessed over was "composition"—whether the electorate looked close enough to 2024 for Republicans to win. And despite polls that showed a Democrat blowout, the data kept on telling us the same story: in some states turnout was merely OK, in other states it was downright amazing, and in no state was it catastrophic. There was a genuine sense of optimism on our team: our people were showing up.
So, I asked the smartest data guy I know, does that mean we're going to shock the world? "No," he told me. "We might do better than the polls suggest. But the data is telling us that a lot of Trump/Vance 2024 voters are pissed and planning to vote for the other guys. Our voters are turning out, but they may not vote for us."
Well, that looks prophetic now. Our voters did show up. In Florida, for example, the electorate was 9 points more Republican than Democrat, just a couple points worse than 2024. Undoubtedly there were places we could have done better on turnout. But the main problem is not turnout. The main problem is that many people who voted for Trump/Vance in 2024 voted for Democrats in 2026.
There will be a lot of infighting and arguing over what happened and why that is. One of the pollsters I really respect told me that our economic messaging wasn’t sharp enough down the stretch. I’m sure that’s true.
But the real reason we lost is obvious to almost everyone.
Another pollster—one of the smartest people I know in politics, told me yesterday we’d lose the generic ballot by 13 points. I felt negative going into Tuesday, but even I was shocked by this. In his polling, he saw that a lot of Trump 2024 voters were angry and planning to vote for Democrats. He asked those voters who had abandoned us what would cause them to come back on our team. The top four answers, accounting for nearly all of the responses were:
1) End the war
2) Focus on cost of living/inflation
3) Put America First
4) Change our relationship to Israel
Our voters showed up. And the above four reasons are why many of them voted for Democrats. This is according to a pollster who nailed the results. While many spent Monday attacking Rachel Campos Duffy for calling for a diplomatic resolution to the conflict, it turns out her political advice was sound. (She’s also a great person.)
In the next few months, there's going to be a lot of gaslighting. Expect to hear any number of establishment politicians say the solution to our woes is amnesty. I'm open to the idea that we should change enforcement—by focusing more on businesses that hire illegal labor, for instance. But anyone pushing amnesty is lying to you.
The reason we lost is the war. The president himself said so last night.
If you'd like to argue it was worth it, that losing the Senate for the next 6 years was worth it, then do so. Argue it was a worthwhile cost to pay. Agree or disagree, that's at least honest.
But everyone knows why we lost. And any honest conversation about where we go from here must start there.
I remain hopeful about our country. To the people who are pissed off and want to say, “I told you so”: you’re right, you did tell us so. Take that energy into electing Republicans who share your worldview. To the people who are just pissed at the results, you should be. Let’s take that anger and get back to the work of saving our country.
💔😭
Rotos de dolor, con un nudo en la garganta y sin poder creer que esto sea verdad, desde el CD Tenerife comunicamos el trágico fallecimiento, este martes, día 3 de noviembre de 2026, a las 8:00 horas, de Jesús de Miguel Alameda.
No hay palabras de consuelo; no hay absolutamente nada que mitigue este sentimiento repleto de tristeza. Estamos junto a su desolada familia, junto a sus seres queridos, junto a todo el tinerfeñismo que hoy llora por este cruel desenlace.
La familia de Jesús de Miguel agradece todas y cada una de las muestras de apoyo recibidas, e igualmente solicita, de corazón, máximo respeto a su privacidad, en estos terribles momentos.
🖤 DEP
Umar Yahya retweeted
Be careful with this one. Creating fake data and imputing missing values in your data can actually be a very BAD IDEA. If the intention is simply to demonstrate a pattern or trend in the overall general structure of a data set, then it may be okay. But if it’s done in order to claim that you now know the actual specific missing value, then that is misleading and incorrect. Missing data might itself be the actual signal of something more significant and actionable.
Source: lnkd.in/p/e4kkmw3x
Umar Yahya retweeted
China says it has lifted nearly 100 million rural people out of extreme poverty over the past decade through new roads, jobs, subsidies and relocation. In some communities, clean energy also played a role.
Al Jazeera's Katrina Yu reports from Jinzhai County, Anhui, China.
Umar Yahya retweeted
More than 100,000 people in Japan are now aged 100 or older bbc.in/4cMmccg
Umar Yahya retweeted
Awesome updated 309-page PDF eBook >> "Patterns, Predictions, and Actions: Foundations of Machine Learning" arxiv.org/abs/2102.05242
…sharpen your Probability, Calculus, and Linear Algebra knowledge with this!
—————
#ML #DataScience #DataScientist
Umar Yahya retweeted
As millions of students around the world return to school for the new academic year this month, AI is spreading in classrooms and is changing the students’ learning process.
We take a look at how AI is affecting students’ learning aje.news/4bzdth
Umar Yahya retweeted
Inter-University Council for East Africa(IUCEA) invites suitably qualified nationals of the East African Community (EAC) to apply for cohort 4 of the KfW- funded Scholarships to pursue Master’s studies in the EAC partner States. Find the detailed call for applications here: unche.or.ug/eac-scholarship-…
Umar Yahya retweeted
Free 436-page PDF download…
Linear Algebra — Open Textbook:
open.umn.edu/opentextbooks/t…
#Mathematics
Umar Yahya retweeted
Fifteen years ago, @Coursera and online courses changed education. It worked better than almost anyone expected, expanding access by opening up where you can learn. But how you learn remains largely the same as it has for centuries: it is still one-size-fits-all, taught the same way to each person who shows up.
We now have an opportunity to change how learning happens. With advances in AI, we can now build a custom learning guide for each person. We will turn learning from one‑to‑many to one‑to‑one. I'm starting LearnVector to invent this next generation of learning. We are starting with a $100M investment from Coursera, and plan to collaborate closely with Coursera and Udemy.
Good learning needs much more than just a chatbot. Research shows that chatbots without guardrails harm learning. They help complete tasks and enable students to do better on homework. But cognitive offloading to a chatbot results in them being less skilled. And, you cannot always trust what a chatbot tells you.
In contrast, LearnVector will plan a path with you, adapt to how you learn, and patiently stay with you until you’ve mastered new skills.
One thing has not changed in all this time. People want learning they can trust: material that is accurate, relevant, and worth the effort you put into it. Anything less wastes the most valuable thing a learner has: time. Coursera has a trusted library of materials from authoritative sources. LearnVector plans to work with Coursera to bring this trustworthy learning to everyone. I'm grateful to Greg Hart and the entire Coursera team for supporting LearnVector.
I look forward to working with our talented team to change how we learn, and accelerate human development.
learnvector.ai
Umar Yahya retweeted
UPDATE: PSST Dr. Ramathan Ggoobi says government will, starting in FY 2026/27, stop funding the organisation of public national celebrations such as Women’s Day, Labour Day and Independence Day, with funding to be limited to a few religious functions.
#NBSUpdates
Umar Yahya retweeted
"Chairman, a country without reserves is not sovereign. The potential of this Bill to destabilize Uganda’s balance of payments is our primary concern as a central bank. For example, last financial year the overall balance of payment surplus was USD 1.5 billion. That’s how we were able to increase our reserve coverage by USD 1.5 billion. Today as we speak our reserves are close to USD 6 billion. Why? Because these inflows have been coming in. The moment you tamper with these inflows here, we risk running down our reserves, and that is economic disaster for a country.” Governor Atingi-Ego on the Protection of Sovereignty Bill 2026 in an appearance before Parliament today.
Umar Yahya retweeted
1/ New paper from @ylecun et al on alternative approach for AI to learn more biologically...
paper basically says AI is super smart but still can't learn like a toddler can...
the main critique
Umar Yahya retweeted
Don't let your brain become yogurt because of AI.
Exercise your mind.
Think.
Learn AI by hand.
These workbooks will teach you the fundamental building blocks of deep learning:
• Matrix multiplication
• Dot product
• Activations
• Linear layers
• Gradients
And every single thing you need to understand deep learning from first principles.
The Matrix Multiplication book is a beautiful, 254-page workbook that covers every imaginable detail of matrices.
No computers.
You only need the book and a pencil.
Umar Yahya retweeted
A really dangerous situation. Too many submissions. Too many generated papers. Little responsibility.
1. In 2026, more than 24,000 submissions were made to the International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML). It’s TWO times more than in 2025. To fight it, the organizers now require researchers to pay $100 for every subsequent paper.
2. LLM adoption has increased researcher productivity by 90% (there’s a recent paper in Science).
3. The number of papers is becoming far too high. Submissions to arXiv have risen by 50% since 2022.
4. There are simply not enough reviewers. Plus, many scientists no longer want to invest precious time in it for free.
5. We can’t easily identify AI-made papers from the genuine ones.
__
Important words from Paul Ginsparg, a co-founder of arXiv:
“AI slop frequently can’t be discriminated just by looking at abstract, or even by just skimming full text. This makes it an “existential threat” to the system.”
Basically, we’re getting closer to the tipping point.
📍 Many professors blame the AI.
But the problem is likely elsewhere:
1. Without a sufficient number of papers, many PIs can’t get funded. They have to prove their credibility to reviewers. Their proposals have to rely on prior publications. In many countries, there are some informal (or even formal) expectations for how many papers a group with a certain size has to publish to survive (funding-wise).
2. Our students / postdocs need papers if they want to be hired in faculty roles. Yes, some departments hire people with few publications. But the majority still want to ensure their faculty can get funded. If funding is partly a function of papers, this is used in decision-making.
3. The number of papers is important if you want to get high-level awards. Many of them are not given because you published one paper (even if it’s great). They are given because you made a meaningful CONTRIBUTION to the field. How do you make it? Publish more papers.
4. Tenure promotions in many places take the number of your papers into account (often indirectly). Your tenure may get delayed if you don’t publish enough. Not everywhere, but for many mid- to low-ranked universities this story is more or less the same.
+ There are many more to mention.
📍My opinion:
Much of this is rooted in how funding is distributed.
There is a strong correlation between the requirements at a university and the funding acquisition criteria.
If funding were based ONLY on the quality of published papers, universities would hire people for the quality of their science. If funding agencies strongly discouraged publishing too many papers, universities wouldn’t expect numbers from faculty during promotions. And some supervisors wouldn’t pressure students and postdocs to publish unfinished studies and low-quality data.
Yes, we need good detectors of fake papers.
But we also need the right policies and better funding allocation criteria.
