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Ask HN: What is the most exciting development in your field right now?

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Re: Ask HN: What is the most exciting development in your field right now?

#271

Post by siddboots »

lngnmn wrote: post #79
siddboots wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This seems incredibly cynical in light of the current breakthroughs in machine learning, and probabilistic modelling. It really feels to me as though the AI revolution isn't something to dream about anymore, because we're living in it. I find it difficult to deny the achievement of tangible progress that is implied by, for example, the self-driving car.

Modeling is a new form of pseudo-scientific speculation. ML is closer to reality as long as the training sets are not a dogmatically interpreted noise, like it usually is in finance and other pseudo-sciences. You could read about a fundamental difference between a properly controlled, replicable scientific experiment and computer simulation according to some abstract/unverified model and why results of such simulatio…

What do you mean by "modelling" here? Your criticism seems to span everything from physical simulation to statistical inference.

It sounds kind of like you think that all attempts to codify human knowledge are bunk!

Re: Ask HN: What is the most exciting development in your field right now?

#272

Post by Existenceblinks »

petra wrote: post #97
Existenceblinks wrote: post #20

Embedded systems - Wireless Sensors Networks, I know it has been there for long time but IoT would encourage it more. It could enable development of different kinds of devices as well. Look at camera industry for example. There should be more types of sensor to be more popular than just the image sensor. Quadcopter/Drone/AI etc. In my view, there are still a huge room of applications where wireless and sensor combine…

>> a huge room of applications where wireless and sensor combined Can you please expand on this ?

I was thinking of a group or cluster of quadcopter flying together.

There are some nice protocols and topologies in Wireless Sensor Network topic. While devices' sensors collecting environment data they can communicate with each other in several ways (e.g. ad-hoc, hierarchy) and command each one to behave in different ways (e.g. quadcopters maneuver in whatever beneficial pattern)

Some more ideas on that flying object example, it could calculate overall battery usage and balance it all over cluster by wireless charging on the fly.

Underwater devices or robots would be more interesting.

Re: Ask HN: What is the most exciting development in your field right now?

#273

Post by aabajian »

neves wrote: post #240
aabajian wrote: post #110

I'm entering radiology residency, and I'm very pro-automation / machine learning. There's a contentious debate in the field about whether radiologists will be replaced: https://forums.studentdoctor.net/threads/will-ai-replace-rad... HackerNews is very developer-focused. If you guys saw what a radiologist does on a 9-5 basis you'd be amazed it hasn't already been automated. Sitting behind a computer, looking at images…

20 years ago I did some software to analyze satellite images of the Amazon to monitor deforestation. We got a result that matched the quality of human experts. The problem has always been political and economical, not technological.

I agree, nevertheless it's exciting to see some progress being made (see the heart flow and iSchemaView companies cited below). Incidentally, there is a new angle to the radiologists push back - interventional radiologist are generally quite in favor of automating reads. This year IR is its own specialty, but coupled to three years of DR training. This is the speciality that I'm entering. I want to be an interventionalist while advocating for the adoption of machine learning systems on the diagnostic side.

Re: Ask HN: What is the most exciting development in your field right now?

#274

Post by rybosome »

_fh5n wrote: post #120
sarthakjain wrote: post #15

Deep learning architectures built by machines (so we no longer have to design architecture to solve problems) https://arxiv.org/abs/1611.01578 Transfer Learning (so we need less data to build models) http://ftp.cs.wisc.edu/machine-learning/shavlik-group/torrey... Generative adversarial networks (so computers can get human like abilities at generating content) https://papers.nips.cc/paper/5423-generative-adversarial-n…

All these are definitely cool, but I think we're still a long way from leaving the "look at this cool toy" status and stepping into the "I can add value to society" status. Furthermore, if we consider that most of these DL paper completely ignore the fact that the nets must run for days on a GPU to get decent results, then everything appears way less impressive. But that's just my opinion. I love working in deep lear…

There is a LOT of investment in model training right now, with frameworks, specialized hardware (like Google's TPU), cloud services, etc., not to mention the GPU vendors themselves scrabbling like mad to develop chipsets that accommodate this more efficiently.

It's going to take less and less time and money to train a useful model.

Re: Ask HN: What is the most exciting development in your field right now?

#275

Post by amelius »

jdormit wrote: post #232
amelius wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm feeling that React Native is just another artificial constraint we developers have to deal with. I would have preferred it if Facebook (and/or Apple, Google) would have pushed WebApps more instead. A web browser, with the right amount of love, would be more than capable of doing the stuff that React Native can do.

Google still is! Progressive web apps now have the ability to be installed "natively" on Android devices [0], meaning they show up in the app drawer like any other app rather than being limited to a home screen icon. I think these are the future. Once they catch on with mainstream consumers, native apps won't stand a chance against the convenience of simply visiting a website to install/use. Plus, on the developer en…

That sounds absolutely fabulous!

But do you think that Apple would embrace this technology, given that e.g. their app-store is generating lots of revenue?

Re: Ask HN: What is the most exciting development in your field right now?

#276

Post by spuz »

neves wrote: post #240
aabajian wrote: post #110

I'm entering radiology residency, and I'm very pro-automation / machine learning. There's a contentious debate in the field about whether radiologists will be replaced: https://forums.studentdoctor.net/threads/will-ai-replace-rad... HackerNews is very developer-focused. If you guys saw what a radiologist does on a 9-5 basis you'd be amazed it hasn't already been automated. Sitting behind a computer, looking at images…

20 years ago I did some software to analyze satellite images of the Amazon to monitor deforestation. We got a result that matched the quality of human experts. The problem has always been political and economical, not technological.

I'm not sure if there was more to your story that you missed. Was your software successful? Is it in use today? Is automation widespread in the study of Amazonian deforestation?

Re: Ask HN: What is the most exciting development in your field right now?

#277

Post by Existenceblinks »

petra wrote: post #97
Existenceblinks wrote: post #20

Embedded systems - Wireless Sensors Networks, I know it has been there for long time but IoT would encourage it more. It could enable development of different kinds of devices as well. Look at camera industry for example. There should be more types of sensor to be more popular than just the image sensor. Quadcopter/Drone/AI etc. In my view, there are still a huge room of applications where wireless and sensor combine…

>> a huge room of applications where wireless and sensor combined Can you please expand on this ?

Well, one obvious example is the space probe(rosetta) that use sensor to detect comet's surface and sent data back to earth: http://kdvr.com/2016/09/30/rosetta-landing-comet-chasing-pro...

Re: Ask HN: What is the most exciting development in your field right now?

#278

Post by asafira »

In my field of quantum information processing, the current hype is all about "Quantum Supremacy". The field currently has its sights set on the goal of producing an experiment where a quantum system performs a computation faster than any known computer can --- perhaps computes something that no current computer can compute in a reasonable amount of time. Unlike much of the work in the field up to this time, this requires a cray amount of engineering, more than a typical lab can undertake if they hope to be publishing interesting results in the meantime. My hypothesis is that this will likely happen from either a company (IBM, Google) or a government lab (if they will be allowed to publish).

Re: Ask HN: What is the most exciting development in your field right now?

#279

Post by Existenceblinks »

terragon wrote: post #127
Existenceblinks wrote: post #20

Embedded systems - Wireless Sensors Networks, I know it has been there for long time but IoT would encourage it more. It could enable development of different kinds of devices as well. Look at camera industry for example. There should be more types of sensor to be more popular than just the image sensor. Quadcopter/Drone/AI etc. In my view, there are still a huge room of applications where wireless and sensor combine…

>> Look at camera industry for example. There should be more types of sensor to be more popular than just the image sensor. Could you please elaborate on this. I don't understand how the camera industry could go beyond image sensors. They wouldn't be the camera industry anymore if they did that.

I mean the other sensors should be able to make their own big industries as well. Sorry about that.

Re: Ask HN: What is the most exciting development in your field right now?

#280

Post by chrisguitarguy »

Advertising. Definitely first party data for targeting. An advertiser takes some data from its CRM, sends it to the big social sites and google, and then uses the list to target those folks specifically or create look-a-likes. Actual cross device targeting (because people are logged in), extremely personalized and relevant.

This is coupled with a move away from cookies[0].

0. https://adwords.googleblog.com/2017/01/making-youtube-better...

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