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Yann LeCun, Geoffrey Hinton and Yoshua Bengio win Turing Award

nytimes.com

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Re: Yann LeCun, Geoffrey Hinton and Yoshua Bengio win Turing Award

#141

Post by myaccount80 »

jlgray wrote: post #122
908087 wrote: post #61

It saddens me to see these people being given awards for improving the surveillance and manipulation capabilities of advertising corporations. This isn't how you encourage people to use their abilities to contribute to society in a positive way.

Science and technology are generally agnostic to their usage, and will be used to both positive and negative ends whose magnitude is proportional to the power of the underlying technology.* AI has the potential for massive positive effects as well as massive negative effects. What saddens me is that we have systems and incentives in place which encourage governments and corporations to use powerful technologies to ne…

But LeCunn still works for Facebook. I don’t understand why such a smart person should spend his time working for such a company.

Re: Yann LeCun, Geoffrey Hinton and Yoshua Bengio win Turing Award

#142

Post by hobo_mark »

orbifold wrote: post #5

For a more balanced view of the history of deep learning see Schmidhuber‘s review http://people.idsia.ch/~juergen/deep-learning-overview.html and http://people.idsia.ch/~juergen/who-invented-backpropagation... .

Bloomberg podcast about Schmidhuber, which was also quite entertaining: https://m.soundcloud.com/bloomberg-business/deeper-minds-rea...

Re: Yann LeCun, Geoffrey Hinton and Yoshua Bengio win Turing Award

#143

Post by jessriedel »

simonster wrote: post #118
nabla9 wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wright brothers were most likely not the first to achieve heavier-than-air powered flight. But they made the first controlled, sustained flight. Controlled flight was the real breakthrough in aviation. It's the same with Hinton et. all. They were among many other pioneers, but what really sets them apart is that they made it all work. They also analyzed why it works.

Schmidhuber's take on the Wright brothers: https://www.nature.com/articles/421689c https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-00491-5

> In 1890 Clément Ader made the first manned, powered, heavier-than-air flight, of 50 m, in his bat-winged monoplane.

Seems disingenuous to not mention that this device only worked due to ground effects and "flew" 8 inches off the ground (according to Wikipedia).

Re: Yann LeCun, Geoffrey Hinton and Yoshua Bengio win Turing Award

#144

Post by stochastic_monk »

slashcom wrote: post #137
jimfleming wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Highway connections are actually used heavily in NLP in combination with LSTMs.

And replaced by residual connections in transformers, which are absolutely dominating LSTMs now.

Transformer-XL uses recurrence, and most NLP SOTA is still with LSTMs. I’m not sure I’d expect attention mechanisms to fully replace recurrence.

Re: Yann LeCun, Geoffrey Hinton and Yoshua Bengio win Turing Award

#145

Post by Jach »

Well deserved. I was thinking maybe it's a bit too soon (the Turing Award isn't exactly timely awarded) but remembered it's 2019...

If you wanted a first-rate CS education, you could do a lot worse than to go through the winners of the Turing Award[0] and review their seminal works. I've only sampled maybe half of them but every time I pick one I learn something interesting.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turing_Award#Recipients

Re: Yann LeCun, Geoffrey Hinton and Yoshua Bengio win Turing Award

#146

Post by scarejunba »

briga wrote: post #133
luminati wrote: post #129

The Chinese must be furious. I was at a local government plenary session at Chengdu (long story) a couple of year back. The lead speaker kept waxing about how China invented and contributed AI to the world. I mentioned some points about about China's AI contributions/influence : 0. Algorithms -> The OGs as celebrated by this Turing Award (Canadian, but mostly led by American universities. On thing I did mention was d…

Do you really think China has done anything on the level of these three? Basically every new neural network architecture in recent memory is underpinned by Hinton's work on back-propagation. China has done some fantastic work in ML, but I think the award was a long time coming for these three.

It's obvious he doesn't think China has done anything on the level of these three. Literally everything about his comment says that.

Re: Yann LeCun, Geoffrey Hinton and Yoshua Bengio win Turing Award

#147

Post by chillacy »

luminati wrote: post #129

The Chinese must be furious. I was at a local government plenary session at Chengdu (long story) a couple of year back. The lead speaker kept waxing about how China invented and contributed AI to the world. I mentioned some points about about China's AI contributions/influence : 0. Algorithms -> The OGs as celebrated by this Turing Award (Canadian, but mostly led by American universities. On thing I did mention was d…

I think the lead speaker was full of hot air, but let's not fall into the trap of overestimating the changes in 2 years and underestimating the changes in 10, assuming the US government doesn't have a response to china's AI initiatives.

Re: Yann LeCun, Geoffrey Hinton and Yoshua Bengio win Turing Award

#148

Post by obviuosly »

nabla9 wrote: post #44
obviuosly wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Various researchers, e.g. Werbos, Linnainmaa, Bryson and Yu-Chi Ho have been doing backprop in neural networks before Hinton et al. Hinton was merely a popularizer of the idea.

Wright brothers were most likely not the first to achieve heavier-than-air powered flight. But they made the first controlled, sustained flight. Controlled flight was the real breakthrough in aviation. It's the same with Hinton et. all. They were among many other pioneers, but what really sets them apart is that they made it all work. They also analyzed why it works.

> but what really sets them apart is that they made it all work [citation needed]

Werbos and others were very aware that the method worked and also of the implications of it:

> This approach makes it possible to develop generalized, adaptive artificial intelligence, capable of achieving results comparable to what is discussed in science fiction

http://werbos.com/Neural/SensitivityIFIPSeptember1981.pdf

The Hinton cartel happened to be in the right condition that allowed them to ignore the politically correct BS starting at the turn of the century which rendered the study of neurons, IQ and intelligence massively unpopular; and ruthless enough to only cite one another and call themselves the "fathers of deep learning" rather than actually citing the originators of these ideas.

Re: Yann LeCun, Geoffrey Hinton and Yoshua Bengio win Turing Award

#149

Post by obviuosly »

backpropaganda wrote: post #84
obviuosly wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Various researchers, e.g. Werbos, Linnainmaa, Bryson and Yu-Chi Ho have been doing backprop in neural networks before Hinton et al. Hinton was merely a popularizer of the idea.

"merely" People deserve credit for taking an idea and running with it. Without Hinton's efforts (in 1987, 2006, or 2012), deep learning would have never seen the explosive growth.

> People deserve credit for taking an idea and running with it.

Yes, as popularizers.

> deep learning would have never seen the explosive growth

This is extremely unlikely to be true. I think the explosive growth occured because neurons and intelligence were unpopular in the 2000s because of PC, deferring progress in this area to occur explosively later. The Hinton cartel were not the only people who were aware that AI research "has become silly" (in his own words).

Re: Yann LeCun, Geoffrey Hinton and Yoshua Bengio win Turing Award

#150

Post by vbuwivbiu »

backpropaganda wrote: post #84
obviuosly wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Various researchers, e.g. Werbos, Linnainmaa, Bryson and Yu-Chi Ho have been doing backprop in neural networks before Hinton et al. Hinton was merely a popularizer of the idea.

"merely" People deserve credit for taking an idea and running with it. Without Hinton's efforts (in 1987, 2006, or 2012), deep learning would have never seen the explosive growth.

"would have never..." it's not possible to make such an assertion unless you have access to at least one copy of this universe that doesn't include him. Maybe in all the other universes the exact same thing happened except someone else did it. Maybe in some of those universes, without him and his popularizing of this technique, some other better technique flourished. Who knows?

Stating "would never have" is nothing more than telling a story.

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