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Andrew Ng and the Quest for the New AI

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Re: Andrew Ng and the Quest for the New AI

#21

Post by alanthonyc »

hvs wrote: post #5

OT: His online Machine Learning class last year was great. He is the best professor I've ever had, and explains things so clearly that you understand them the first time. You are lucky if you ever get to work or study under him.

It’s great this year as well. Very enjoyable class.

Re: Andrew Ng and the Quest for the New AI

#22

Post by kinofcain »

netrus wrote: post #3
kinofcain wrote: post #2

There is a very quick reference to the person who inspired him, Jeff Hawkins, whose book is worth a read: http://www.amazon.com/On-Intelligence-Jeff-Hawkins/dp/080507... Edit: update link

Link does not load CSS for me, but this does: http://www.amazon.com/Intelligence-Jeff-Hawkins/dp/B000GQLCV...

Thanks, had stripped the tracking codes off the mobile link, but it doesn't load right on desktop.

Re: Andrew Ng and the Quest for the New AI

#23

Post by EthanHeilman »

We should stop trying to claim every new method is "like the brain". We don't have any clear understanding of how the brain works. One can be inspired by a particular and likely wrong cognitive theory, but one can not say one is building "machines that can process data in much the same way the brain does" truthfully without a deeper, and currently unavailable, understanding of the functioning of the human brain.

Re: Andrew Ng and the Quest for the New AI

#24

Post by konstruktor »

Cushman wrote: post #17
konstruktor wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please think about what a source is. This isn't reddit.

Bullshit. There is nothing wrong with using personal experience for reference so long as it is properly cited. It beats "This guy is wrong (source: random blog post that I didn't really read)", anyway. Edit: To be clear, I don't love the Reddit snowclones, but there's nothing wrong with the sentiment behind "I'm a scholar in this field, and I think this guy is a hack."

So misapplying the term source and saying that one has a degree gives one enough credibility as a scholar to turn a dismissive and colloquial statement into a worthwhile contribution to a discussion about AI?

Re: Andrew Ng and the Quest for the New AI

#25

Post by pfg »

psbp wrote: post #11
rzendacott wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's awesome to hear! I'm taking the Coursera class now, and it's been great so far. It just started a couple weeks ago, so it definitely isn't too late to join! https://www.coursera.org/course/ml

I wish Coursera followed the Udacity model. I always find out about these classes after they're already weeks in progress or over.

You can star any Coursera class to receive notifications whenever new sessions are announced.

Also, I believe it's still possible to join the current session (first assignment was due this weekend, but you can turn it in late with just a 20% penalty.)

Re: Andrew Ng and the Quest for the New AI

#26

Post by mark_l_watson »

hvs wrote: post #5

OT: His online Machine Learning class last year was great. He is the best professor I've ever had, and explains things so clearly that you understand them the first time. You are lucky if you ever get to work or study under him.

I second this! I have taken 7 Coursera classes, and most of them "lightly": just doing as much work as I needed to for passing the class, with just a few classes that I did put a lot of energy into. Andrew's class was in this second category: I kept taking the tests and tweaking the homework assignments over and over again until I got a 99.5% score in the class. His class was lots of fun and also very useful material. Recommended!!

Re: Andrew Ng and the Quest for the New AI

#27

Post by jbelanich »

gavanwoolery wrote: post #13

Hmm...I don't mean to be a skeptic, but I do not see any new theories here. Neural networking has been around for a long time, as have an abundance of theories and implementations around it...some people have gone so far as to build an actual brain replica (a digital version of the bio/analog thing). Neural networking is extremely powerful, but to be of any use, you need a lot of computing power. As it turns out, our…

You're correct in that neural networks as a model have been around for a long time. However, those networks were restricted to be shallow because backpropogation didn't work well on networks with many hidden layers. Only recently have researchers developed learning procedures that can learn these deep architectures efficiently, using some clever unsupervised learning techniques. And surprisingly, they are finding that these deep networks perform remarkably well, beating the state of the art in a number of benchmarks.

You are also right that you do need a lot of processing power to get neural networks to work well. But that is changing rapidly. Hinton's convolutional neural network has the state of the art in the ImageNet benchmark, yet was trained using significantly less power than google brain. Regardless, you don't need google scale computation to get deep networks to work well. The point of google brain is to see how far one could push neural networks.

Re: Andrew Ng and the Quest for the New AI

#28

Post by aespinoza »

drcross wrote: post #9
aespinoza wrote: post #6

I thought the man behind the Google Brain was Ray Kurzweil ( http://www.wired.com/business/2013/04/kurzweil-google-ai/ ).

Kurzweil is a hack. (Source: I've an Msc in Robotics and read all his books)

Dude, I am sure you know more than me in the field of robotics and A.I. but I don't think Google would spent so much money on a hack.

Re: Andrew Ng and the Quest for the New AI

#29

Post by primaryobjects »

rzendacott wrote: post #8
hvs wrote: post #5

OT: His online Machine Learning class last year was great. He is the best professor I've ever had, and explains things so clearly that you understand them the first time. You are lucky if you ever get to work or study under him.

That's awesome to hear! I'm taking the Coursera class now, and it's been great so far. It just started a couple weeks ago, so it definitely isn't too late to join! https://www.coursera.org/course/ml

I'm also taking the class. Just finished the logistic regression programming assignment. Great stuff. You can take those algorithms and kind of add a bit of magic to your software.
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