Bits & Bytes

Researchers from the University of Pennsylvania’s Institute for Biomedical Informatics benchmark 13 state of the art ML algorithms on 165 publicly available classification problems, and present the results in Data-Driven Advice for Applying Machine Learning to Bioinformatics Problems. In the end they learn what every Kaggler knows… Gradient Boosted Decision Trees work really well.
AI gets really interesting when we can write software that creates better models faster for us, which is why Neural Optimizer Search with Reinforcement Learning [PDF], a Google Brain paper presented at the recent ICML conference, is so interesting. The team used reinforcement learning to train an RNN to search for better ways to train small convolutional networks.
There’s been a bunch of chatter in the press of late about who’s winning the “AI war.” See America Can’t Afford to Lose the Artificial Intelligence War, How Baidu Will Win China’s Ai Race—And, Maybe, The World’s, and China’s Plan for World Domination in AI Isn’t So Crazy After All for more. As I’ve said before, proficiency in AI will bode well for individuals and companies; the same holds true for nations.
Sony’s getting in on the deep learning framework action with its Neural Network Console, a tool for training, evaluating and designing neural nets. I’ve not played with it, but it’s got an interesting GUI for designing deep neural networks.
A follow-on to the Facebook AI language-creating-bots kerfuffle: Natural Language Does Not Emerge ‘Naturally’ in Multi-Agent Dialog.
Do yourself a favor and follow @KaggleDatasets on Twitter. You don’t want to miss out on goodies like this 360k favicon dataset.
A new post on Apple’s ML research blog talks about how they’ve used Deep Learning to give Siri a more natural, smoother voice in iOS 10 and 11: Deep Learning for Siri’s Voice: On-device Deep Mixture Density Networks for Hybrid Unit Selection Synthesis.
I’ve mentioned Fast.ai’s Deep Learning for Coders online course before, and they also offer an in-person version. Last week they announced the availability of a diversity scholarship to help address the diversity crisis in AI.