Baidu Hires Andrew Ng
technologyreview.com
technologyreview.com
With the MOOC movement healthy and growing, I now plan to dedicate more of my time toward AI (Artificial Intelligence) and machine learning. I will be joining Baidu as their Chief Scientist to help build out a research organization, headquartered in Silicon Valley. Both education and AI have been longstanding passions for me. I believe some of my skills will allow me to make a contribution to the latter.
Norvig > Kurzweil
http://on-demand.gputechconf.com/gtc/2014/presentations/S465...
Combine this with Andrew Ng, whose own student Adam Coates matched Google's cat detector network with 64 consumer grade GPUs, and we are in for interesting times...
http://www.stanford.edu/~acoates/papers/CoatesHuvalWangWuNgC...
Deep Learning:
AI Brain - World's first RI
'The Institute of Deep Learning (IDL) is the first formally established research institution projected to be Baidu's “Artificial Intelligence Lab”.'
Baidu devotes a lot in algorithm and machine learning. But when it comes to Chinese market we can see that technology does not even play an important role in one companies' success (marketing and government relations plays a more important role).
I am wondering how long will baidu keep investing in deep learning as it has so many troubles in international market (where technology really matters).
Google Translate: Sorry, you need to retrieve the pictures we could not download, please be retrieved from the local to upload pictures. Baidu knowledge map Thank you for using the beta version, we will continue our efforts to enhance the effect.
When I tried to upload an image, it would just hang, sometimes freezing Chrome.
Eventually I got this: http://shitu.baidu.com/i?ct=2&tn=shituresult&pn=0&rn=10&quer...
It recognized and returned other cats of a similar color, which is pretty cool. Just wish the way there was a little cleaner.
Maybe Baidu's expanded Deng's saying. Now it doesn't matter if a cat is mangy and covered in fleas, as long as it catches mice.
Richard Feynman?
How does one exactly become one of these people? Is any of this information public yet?
Most of the academic/industry papers are available. Just browse the nips/icml/sigir/etc conference websites.
But then you'll need to apply that knowledge - ideally by working in the industry. Or you can go try your luck in kaggle and other competitions.
Most Machine Learning research that is not done by top secret labs is available publicly. Start looking at papers by Geoffrey Hinton. Could also take a look at word2vec if you are into NLP.
There's a lot of other knowledge/expertise/intuition that's required to make working implementations. There have been some deep learning tutorials at recent conferences that might be more in-depth. (See my previous comment [1] for details.)
Another good way to learn is to look at some open source implementations, such as caffe from berkeley [2] or overfeat from NYU [3].
In addition to showing how to choose architectures or set params, they also have tricks for speeding things up. This is actually very important, as they can make orders of magnitude difference (training in hours vs days).
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7742192
http://www.universityworldnews.com/article.php?story=2014032...
It just happens that Google isn't based in China, therefore they were able to make the decision not to expand to China.
But in the US, Google will have to accept basically anything the government demands, as long as it is backed by the courts. (which isn't that hard since the government just invents secret courts based on secret laws that back almost 100% of the governments demands)
I'm pretty sure that China has caused less deaths or generally harm to innocents than the US has in the last 20 years.
Guantanamo
When China isn't a single-party authoritarian state, maybe then we can talk.
MOOC + in person coaching could solve the problem. We don't need professors, we need coaches (experts in education, psychologists) to keep people motivated and not drop off. Also, in large cities study groups could generate the same feeling as going to a real class.
What we are missing in MOOCs is the motivational effect of meeting people (in real life) who are serious about learning and seeing them work hard. That is what makes us believe we can do it too.
Sometimes though, moocs are held to standards and goals they never ever set themselves, like replacing universities, which none of them actually want.
From the MOOCs' point of view, this is a worthwhile feature because while it does increase the false positive rate tremendously, it also increases the true positive rate : more people sign up for the course because the barrier to entry is low and end up completing it.
Also, it does a wonderful job of introducing a new product to the market : I do not know a single friend in my circle who has not tried out Coursera. And guess what, I would happily pay up if they charge a reasonable fees in the future!