2024 is coming to an end, so it is again time for me to reflect on what I have read this year. I ended up reading 39 books this year, of which most were non-fiction, and many were health-related. Just like every year, I will summarize all the books I have read. My five favorite (☆) books of the year were: The Idea Factory (9.) I’m Off Then (11.) Situational Awareness: The Decade Ahead (14.) Good Energy (26.) Winter Swimming (28.) However, it is always difficult to pick the top five books ...| Florian Hartmann
This post describes my work at Google: https://blog.research.google/2024/03/social-learning-collaborative-learning.html| Florian Hartmann
As the year is coming to an end, it is time for me to reflect back on what I read this year. Just like last year, I ended up reading about a book a week. That’s a pretty good pace for me, and one that I plan on keeping next year as well. My five favorite (☆) books of the year were: Nonviolent Communication (3.) Sophie’s World (11.) The Cuckoo’s Egg (14.) The Undoing Project (30.) Outlive (45.) For the first half of the year, I read my usual mix of tech, nonfiction, pop-scientific and ...| Florian Hartmann
This post describes my work at Google: https://ai.googleblog.com/2023/03/distributed-differential-privacy-for.html| Florian Hartmann
A habit that I have had for a few years is that I try to focus each year on some particular goal. In the past years these have been things such as learning to cook well or deeply understanding how to invest. For 2022, I decided to focus the year on reading. Concretely, I decided to read a book a week. Following the traditionofthepastyears, this blog post summarizes all books I have read this year. This thus amounts to 52 books for the 52 weeks of the year. In case this post is too long for yo...| Florian Hartmann
Much has been written about how federated learning (FL) can enable training much better models and help build more intelligent systems. This essay instead discusses a more personal aspect: Why working on FL as an individual is interesting, meaningful and fun. You can either take this as an advertisement for why one should work one FL, or as a personal reflection on why I am still passionate about it after working in the space for a few years. Fast and strong feedback loops One thing that init...| Florian Hartmann
For thepastfouryears, I have been doing yearly reading summaries now. Initially, I started because I really enjoyed reading such lists from other people. Now, I mainly write them because it is a great way to reflect back on the year. This year is no different in that regard. --- Software Engineering at Google In 2016, Google published a book about Site Reliability Engineering, the SRE book. Last year, the SWE book followed: A very detailed account of how software engineering works at Google. ...| Florian Hartmann
This post describes my work at Google: https://ai.googleblog.com/2021/11/predicting-text-selections-with.html| Florian Hartmann
I work on collaborative learning with LLMs at| florian.github.io
A fun thing I recently learned about Large Language Models (LLMs) is that they understand base64, a simple encoding of text. Here’s a demonstration: the base64 encoding of What is 2 + 3? is V2hhdC...| florian.github.io