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Google’s Jeff Dean’s undergrad senior thesis on neural networks (1990) [pdf]

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Re: Google’s Jeff Dean’s undergrad senior thesis on neural networks (1990) [pdf]

#51

An underappreciated aspect of this is finding an academic department that would allow you to submit something this concise as a senior thesis. My experience, mostly in grad school, was that anyone editing my work wanted more verbiage. If you only needed a short, one-sentence paragraph to say something, it just wasn’t accepted. There had to be more. Jeff Dean is an uncommonly good communicator. But he also benefited f…

I have in the past been subadvisor to various bacc. theses.

I value conciseness dearly, and prefer quality over quantity in scientific writing, i.e. I would accept incredibly short theses, if the content is sufficiently presented (reproducible and comprehensive), and most of all, contains a valuable contribution.

The reason I typically have to request "more verbiage" and an own section on the state of the art, is because I need to force my students to confront their sitcom ideas with the history of "what has been done before, and what the actual current problems are".

Unfortunately, the approaches of most students are neither new nor particularly interesting in this regard.

Re: Google’s Jeff Dean’s undergrad senior thesis on neural networks (1990) [pdf]

#54
post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the U.S., one's undergraduate institution does not correlate to success as much as it does in certain countries like France or Japan, where universities are a pipeline for elite selection and grooming. Also, not all intelligent American kids can or want to go to elite schools, even if they are academically qualified. In the U.S., you often hear stories of kids turning down really good schools for ones they felt we…

Thanks for the list but I am not entirely sure about Sergey Brin and Larry Page’s alma mater.

Interesting fact: those two went on to create the search engine Google. You should check it out.

Re: Google’s Jeff Dean’s undergrad senior thesis on neural networks (1990) [pdf]

#55

An underappreciated aspect of this is finding an academic department that would allow you to submit something this concise as a senior thesis. My experience, mostly in grad school, was that anyone editing my work wanted more verbiage. If you only needed a short, one-sentence paragraph to say something, it just wasn’t accepted. There had to be more. Jeff Dean is an uncommonly good communicator. But he also benefited f…

> anyone editing my work wanted more verbiage

I _never_ got that feedback. My mentors all emphasized economy of language and nobody cared how "thick" my thesis was.

This is a pretty amusing story about verbiage.

Back in the old days, you would send a manuscript/research article to colleagues/friends by _snail-mail_ to get their feedback. You'd wait a month, and maybe they would mail a 'red-inked' copy of your manuscript back to you.

My Ph.D. advisor sent out a draft to a colleague who was famous for being harsh with the red-ink.

After a month, my advisor receives the manuscript in the mail.

* He turns to page 1. No red ink!

* He turns to page 2. STILL no red ink! [He must looove the paper]

* Keeps turning pages (no red ink!!).

* On page 10--in red ink--is written, "Start here."

Re: Google’s Jeff Dean’s undergrad senior thesis on neural networks (1990) [pdf]

#56

It's really impressive that Jeff accomplished so much despite going to UMN for undergrad.

Looking back. I should have gone to my in-state school. There might be an incremental difference in quality, but I would not have rushed to get it done a year early, and would have actually done meaningful research and probably PhD.

Re: Google’s Jeff Dean’s undergrad senior thesis on neural networks (1990) [pdf]

#57
post #2

Quite incredible that he was interested in NNs back in 1990. He closed this thread very well.

They were very popular when they came out and until SVMs were introduced to the United States.

Then when the data explosion started during the 00s, it laid the groundwork for the NN comeback.

Re: Google’s Jeff Dean’s undergrad senior thesis on neural networks (1990) [pdf]

#58
post #53

Interesting coding style with too much whitespace. Is it some standardized pattern? I found something similar in the code written by John Carmack.

To my eyes this seemed like a completely normal amount of whitespace. The only thing I personally prefer that you would reasonably reduce is moving the left block delimiter from its own line (But left block braces being on their own line is fairly common for C/C++ projects afaik)

Re: Google’s Jeff Dean’s undergrad senior thesis on neural networks (1990) [pdf]

#60
post #49

An underappreciated aspect of this is finding an academic department that would allow you to submit something this concise as a senior thesis. My experience, mostly in grad school, was that anyone editing my work wanted more verbiage. If you only needed a short, one-sentence paragraph to say something, it just wasn’t accepted. There had to be more. Jeff Dean is an uncommonly good communicator. But he also benefited f…

It's kind of remarkable. There really is no literature review in this paper. As a supervisor I would have no problem with a content part of this length, but I would also insist on doing the scholarly work that is not demonstrated here. Don't just throw out some code and describe it but put it into the context of what exists. Give credit to where ideas originate. That shouldn't add too much. No more than a few pages.…

That seems to be a key difference between science and engineering. One likes to survey the field and insist that their paper offers something novel - no matter how big or small. The other just wants to do some solid work and get the results.
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