51–60 of 102 posts
Not that it's a bad thing. Lots of smart people did interesting things at IBM, just as people at Microsoft Research are doing some great things - albeit usually without anyone seeing the work in progress.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The common lament about Google being just a place that optimizes ad clicks is overused, and lazy thinking. I don't even think it's a conclusion that's the result of actual thought anymore, just reverb. Google is a big company. It would not even be worth it or effective to have every single engineer dedicated to this ad click business. There's a team for that, and there are lots of other teams, for lots of other inter…
Google simply hasn't been around long enough to earn the kind of credibility that Bell Labs and Xerox PARC had.
A few will recall that neural networks all but died from the US after Minsky's damning book. Hinton gave backpropagation which is one of the foundational pillars of feed-forward neural net algorithms. With his new thrust on whats called "deep belief networks" he is challenging his own early seminal contribution in the field. Not often do you see researchers throw away such huge swathes of their own work and start again to solve the same problem. Unless you are Niklaus Wirth of course.
Some background is necessary to get the inside jokes, but I have tried to minimize the requirement.
Geoff Hinton doesn't need to make hidden units. They hide
by themselves when he approaches.
Geoff Hinton discovered how the brain really works.
Once a year for the last 25 years.
Markov random fields think Geoff Hinton is intractable.
Geoff Hinton can make you regret without bounds.
Geoff Hinton doesn't need support vectors. He can
support high-dimensional hyperplanes with his pinky.
All kernels that ever dared approaching Geoff Hinton woke up convolved.
The only kernel Geoff Hinton has ever used is a kernel of truth.
After an encounter with Geoff Hinton, support vectors become unhinged
Geoff Hinton's generalizations are boundless.
Geoff Hinton goes directly to third Bayes.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Backpropagation
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perceptrons_%28book%29
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Niklaus_Wirth
Re: Downvotes. I seem to have touched a nerve. Yes I agree humor is frowned upon here, and I largely agree with that, but when its not humor for humors own sake, I sometimes make an exception. Not everyone would know who Hinton is, but may gauge that he is someone important from these fun anecdotes. But of course you are free to like it or dislike it, no hard feelings either which way.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
To be honest... kind of. They release papers but most of the layers at the bottom are Google proprietary. Certainly the source code is proprietary. Hell, even most of the information about GFS is proprietary, despite having a successor. From an academic perspective, their disclosure is kind of crap.
It's always been interesting to me that someone publishing a paper in computer science (especially someone working at a University) would not want to open source the code that produced those results. It's the best kind of repeatable experiment. I recently went looking for any code published by Hinton, since I've been doing some neural network research as a hobby, but was unable to find any at all.
This tends to result in very poor code, since the people who write it do not practice their craft. And very poor code isn't usually released because people are embarrassed.
I'm certainly generalizing here, but this seems to be the trend as I see it. It is a sorry state of affairs, and I try to do my best to encourage publishing code with the people I work with. (Code reviews are great.)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
For what it's worth, I was thinking the same thing. I don't feel this way about Google hiring programmers in general, but I think at this point they've hired some significant double-digit percentage of the world-class machine learning professors in the world, and as I understand it those people don't publish (many) papers anymore.
http://research.google.com/pubs/ArtificialIntelligenceandMac...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> i wish at least that the efforts would get published in new papers You mean like this very large list? http://research.google.com/pubs/papers.html > and open source software Or this also very large list? https://code.google.com/hosting/search?q=label:google
Dont get me wrong.. google is much better than its "predecessors" in that field.. eg: microsoft, apple, ibm.. but in the end is only one company, with its capital open in the stock market, with boards and everything else.. while google now is half good/half evil.. who can garantee that in the future when larry and sergey goes away.. that the company wont be ruled by a Larry ellison clone? ps: while google have a pret…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
[deleted]
1. They don't sell info, they just target ads 2. Google are an AI company, who currently make most of their profit from ads. They are well aware that there are big opportunities for them to make profits outside targeted ads.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I would argue that Google has had the largest impact on information dissemination , since the invention of pen and paper. Advertising is just a means for providing comfortable livelihoods to these excellent people. There's no better place for these people to be working. We got some spectacular output when some bright folks ended up working together in a phone company, better than any university. Why not Google?
Not the means, it's the end, and everything feeds to that. Especially search with their "updates," Chrome, Android, UI etc. Hinton has his work cut out, make users click on ads! Looks like playing with colors has been milked already. " I would argue that Google has had the largest impact on information dissemination , since the invention of pen and paper. " Because they are a search engine and is used by most people.…
HN'ers may have a good laugh at these taken from Yan LeCun's page. LeCun made it a tradition to have Hinton jokes in the lines of Chuck Norris ones (or more appropriately Doug McCllroy ones). A few will recall that neural networks all but died from the US after Minsky's damning book. Hinton gave backpropagation which is one of the foundational pillars of feed-forward neural net algorithms. With his new thrust on what…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The common lament about Google being just a place that optimizes ad clicks is overused, and lazy thinking. I don't even think it's a conclusion that's the result of actual thought anymore, just reverb. Google is a big company. It would not even be worth it or effective to have every single engineer dedicated to this ad click business. There's a team for that, and there are lots of other teams, for lots of other inter…
Google simply hasn't been around long enough to earn the kind of credibility that Bell Labs and Xerox PARC had.