ayman's blog:

Behind Twitter’s Biased AI Cropping and How to Fix It

Tue, 14 Jul 2026 10:50:10 -0700

Note: this was first published 2020-28-09 on Medium; reposting here via PESOS.

Twitter’s AI crop has a bias. When given a large photo that contained the press photos of Mitch McConnell and Barack Obama, the AI picks Mitch. Swap the position of the two pictures, and the AI picks the white guy again. This behavior has led to a lot of random experimentation online. Still, it’s important to cover what we know, what Twitter’s response was, what caused the problem, and how to fix it.

Remembering Frank Nack

Mon, 13 Jul 2026 11:17:23 -0700

On July 10, 2026, Dr. Frank Nack passed away. He was a professor at the University of Amsterdam’s Informatics Institute. More so, he was a dear friend and mentor to me. I came to know Frank when I was a newly minted PH.D. publishing in ACM Multimedia’s Interactive Arts track. Part of Frank’s research focused on communication, creativity, and interactive narratives which were all themes in my research at the time. I still remember the thoughtful conversations and helpful guiding feedback he provided me when we first met.

VAR Killed the Football Star

Thu, 09 Jul 2026 08:44:53 -0700

The FIFA World Cup is in full swing and so are the various controversies. There’s a lot to discuss but I don’t want to get political, so let’s focus on the VAR or Video Assistant Referee. In the old days of football (by which I mean soccer to some of you), you did what you could get away with. If you snuck offsides a bit and the line referee didn’t see you, you’re good. If you get the ball over the goal line and the keeper circles it out as if they caught it and sent it back out, that’s fine if the referee didn’t call the goal. If you miss a header and punch it in with your fist, no problem. It all hinged on did a human referee see it and call it: not an algorithm, not a video replay.

Hello, world (now with POSSE)

Wed, 24 Jun 2026 13:48:01 +0200

Welcome! Here we are again restarting with blogging again. I won’t lie...part of the intermittency is my attention span. Part of it is infrastructure. To be quite honest, migrating just became exhausting. But I think I found the right beat. But first, a bit of history.

I heard about blogging before it was called so in the late 90s. A sysadmin at the university I was at was very excited about a self-publishing platform. Years later, early 00s, I set up a blog: probably Movable Type but I forget exactly which one. It was a complex install and upkeep and probably had tons of security holes. It was fun! I could post funny stories about my day to day life with the occasional photos and my friends (like the people in grad school with me) could comment. No strangers. No creeps. No (anonymous) jerks. This site was running on a developer box I had in graduate school and it got wiped; I lost my stories and photos and content. I moved to a Wordpress self hosted (a much easier install!) but lost that when I left that university. I tried to stash a backup this time but never figured out how to restore it to a new host. Since then Tumblr, Twitter (micro-blogging), and other consumer hosted things came my way. Then I started using Medium which was cool but never felt like it was mine. Substack seems to be the latest cool place but I want to own my content.