https://vernadankers.com/ Recent content on Verna Dankers Hugo -- gohugo.io en © Verna Dankers Thu, 07 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000 https://vernadankers.com/collection/day02/01-netlify/ Sat, 02 Jan 2021 00:00:00 +0000 https://vernadankers.com/collection/day02/01-netlify/ So far, we’ve been leveraging GitHub Pages for publishing. This works great, but for blogdown we’ll start using Netlify. Let’s start RIGHT NOW with a site we’ve already built and published. Pre-requisites Pick either your postcards site, or your distill site from day 01. Refresh your memory- which repository was it again? https://vernadankers.com/collection/day01/01-github/ Fri, 01 Jan 2021 00:00:00 +0000 https://vernadankers.com/collection/day01/01-github/ Profile https://docs.github.com/en/github/setting-up-and-managing-your-github-profile/personalizing-your-profile Pin projects to profile https://docs.github.com/en/github/setting-up-and-managing-your-github-profile/pinning-items-to-your-profile Profile README This is new! Let’s do it: https://docs.github.com/en/github/setting-up-and-managing-your-github-profile/managing-your-profile-readme https://vernadankers.com/collection/prework/ Fri, 01 Jan 2021 00:00:00 +0000 https://vernadankers.com/collection/prework/ Welcome to the Introducing Yourself Online workshop! We look forward to meeting you. Before attending the workshop, please complete the following prework. Set up RStudio Cloud Sign up for a free RStudio Cloud account at https://rstudio.cloud/ before the workshop. I recommend logging in with an existing Google or GitHub account, if you have one (rather than creating a new account with another password you have to remember). I want you to be able to work from your own laptop in this workshop, but Cloud is an important back-up plan should you run into troubles. https://vernadankers.com/collection/day01/02-postcards/ Sat, 02 Jan 2021 00:00:00 +0000 https://vernadankers.com/collection/day01/02-postcards/ Pre-requisites First, make sure you have the latest version of the postcards package installed from CRAN: install.packages("postcards") Restart your R session. If you use RStudio, use the menu item Session > Restart R or the associated keyboard shortcut: Ctrl + Shift + F10 (Windows and Linux) or Command + Shift + F10 (Mac OS). packageVersion("postcards") [1] ‘0.2.0’ Create GitHub repo Online. Clone GitHub repo usethis::create_from_github("https://github.com/apreshill/global-postcard.git") :sparkles: Commit & Push! :sparkles: https://vernadankers.com/collection/day02/02-blogdown/ Fri, 01 Jan 2021 00:00:00 +0000 https://vernadankers.com/collection/day02/02-blogdown/ Pre-requisites First, make sure you have the latest version of the blogdown package installed from CRAN: install.packages("blogdoown") Restart your R session. If you use RStudio, use the menu item Session > Restart R or the associated keyboard shortcut: Ctrl + Shift + F10 (Windows and Linux) or Command + Shift + F10 (Mac OS). packageVersion("blogdown") [1] ‘1.0’ Create GitHub repo Online. Clone GitHub repo usethis::create_from_github("https://github.com/apreshill/global-blogdown.git") :sparkles: Commit & Push! :sparkles: https://vernadankers.com/collection/day01/03-distill/ Sat, 02 Jan 2021 00:00:00 +0000 https://vernadankers.com/collection/day01/03-distill/ Pre-requisites First, make sure you have the latest version of the distill package installed from CRAN: install.packages("distill") Restart your R session. If you use RStudio, use the menu item Session > Restart R or the associated keyboard shortcut: Ctrl + Shift + F10 (Windows and Linux) or Command + Shift + F10 (Mac OS). packageVersion("distill") # [1] ‘1.2’ Create GitHub repo Online. Clone GitHub repo usethis::create_from_github("https://github.com/apreshill/global-distill.git") :sparkles: Commit & Push! https://vernadankers.com/collection/day02/03-blogdown/ Sat, 02 Jan 2021 00:00:00 +0000 https://vernadankers.com/collection/day02/03-blogdown/ Hi, I'm the here-bot cat! Use me to find your way in your website. Here I am: content/collection/day02/03-blogdown/index.md To remove me, delete this line inside that file: {{< here >}} My content section is: collection My layout is: single-series part 2! does this work? now for some very cool things more get ready! https://vernadankers.com/blog/news-2026-05/ Thu, 07 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000 https://vernadankers.com/blog/news-2026-05/ Presenting "Hidden in plain sight: injecting LLM memories for evaluation and safeguarding" at Utrecht University, U-NLP seminar. In this talk, I focus on a memory injection paradigm and present two use cases. Firstly, I introduce our new unlearning testbed, LACUNA, which injects synthetic personally identifiable information (PII) into known parameters to evaluate whether unlearning methods actually target the parameters that store the memories they aim to unlearn. We use LACUNA to demonstrate that state-of-the-art unlearning methods do not target the correct parameters, raising questions about whether they truly unlearn or merely obfuscate PII. https://vernadankers.com/blog/news-2026-03/ Sun, 01 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000 https://vernadankers.com/blog/news-2026-03/ Honored to receive the IVADO postdoctoral fellowship! https://vernadankers.com/blog/news-2025-12-video/ Thu, 18 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0000 https://vernadankers.com/blog/news-2025-12-video/ Video available for "Memorisation: myth or mystery?", presented at the Ivado workshop on Deploying Autonomous Agents. Watch on YouTube. https://vernadankers.com/blog/news-2025-11-thesis/ Thu, 20 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000 https://vernadankers.com/blog/news-2025-11-thesis/ My PhD thesis is now available here. https://vernadankers.com/blog/news-2025-11-blackboxnlp/ Sat, 15 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000 https://vernadankers.com/blog/news-2025-11-blackboxnlp/ Attending BlackboxNLP and honored to give a keynote: "Memorization: myth or mystery?". Abstract: "In deep learning, the perspective on memorization of training examples is undergoing a paradigm shift. Previously linked to overfitting and poor generalization, memorization is now seen as benign, beneficial or concerning, depending on the data involved. This shift raises questions about the mystery that is memorization: what should and shouldn’t models memorize, how is memorization implemented internally, and, more fundamentally, can we talk about memorization as a phenomenon that is separate from generalization or is this a myth? https://vernadankers.com/blog/news-2025-08/ Fri, 01 Aug 2025 00:00:00 +0000 https://vernadankers.com/blog/news-2025-08/ Received the IJCAI 2025 JAIR award for Compositionality Decomposed! https://vernadankers.com/blog/news-2025-07/ Tue, 01 Jul 2025 00:00:00 +0000 https://vernadankers.com/blog/news-2025-07/ I defended my PhD and am joining Prof Siva Reddy as a postdoc at Mila and McGillNLP. https://vernadankers.com/contact/ Mon, 25 Feb 2019 13:38:41 -0600 https://vernadankers.com/contact/ ** Contact page don’t contain a body, just the front matter above. See form.html in the layouts folder. Formspree requires a (free) account and new form to be set up. The link is made on the final published url in the field: Restrict to Domain. It is possible to register up to 2 emails free and you can select which one you want the forms to go to within Formspree in the Settings tab. https://vernadankers.com/elements/ Mon, 18 Feb 2019 12:27:33 -0600 https://vernadankers.com/elements/ Font Sizes A A A A A A A A 6rem (96px) 5rem (80px) 3rem (48px) 2.25rem (36px) 1.5rem (24px) 1.25rem (20px) 1rem (16px) .875rem (14px) Type Samples Head­line Sub­head­line Level 1 Heading One page to rule them all...well, not really. This page displays sample typography and page elements to illustrate their style. Things like headings and paragraphs showing the beautiful type scale, form elements, tabular data, and image layouts just to name a few. https://vernadankers.com/contributors/ Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000 https://vernadankers.com/contributors/ Thank you to all the folks who have contributed both technical and creative skills to this project: Desirée De Leon :giraffe: (designed 5 of the custom color themes, made illustrations for the workshop, and provided general aesthetic feedback along the way) Garrick Aden-Buie :mage: (debugged headroom.js and lent his panelset.js code to the theme) Allison Horst :dog2: (awesome illustrations of campfires, seedlings, and evergreens, as well as my R Markdown hedgehog mascot :hedgehog:) https://vernadankers.com/license/ Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000 https://vernadankers.com/license/ My blog posts are released under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.