Show Notes
Tom sits down with Geoffrey Hinton, University Professor Emeritus at the University of Toronto, and co-winner of the ACM Turing Award and of the 2024 Nobel Prize in Physics. Geoffrey explains how he got into the field, from his days as an aspiring carpenter to his conversion to a neural network researcher. He explains the burst of neural network progress in the mid-1980s when the backpropagation training algorithm came into widespread use, and the re-emergence of deep neural networks in 2012 when he and his students soundly defeated the best computer vision methods around. Geoffrey discusses his early realization that those GPUs being sold to accelerate video games were the perfect hardware to accelerate neural networks as well, his journey from academia to Google, the competition among the big AI companies, and his views on where AI is and might be headed.
More from Machine Learning: How Did We Get Here?
Tom sits down with Bruce Buchanan, a PhD Philosopher turned machine learning researcher. Bruce produced a key milestone for machine learning in the 1970s by creating the first program that discovered new symbolic knowledge publishable in a scientific journal. Bruce has held professorships at the University of Pittsburgh (Philosophy and Medicine) and Stanford University (Computer Science). Tom Mitchell is the Founders University Professor at Carnegie Mellon University. Produced by the Stanford Digital Economy Lab.
Tom chats with John Laird, who has spent the past 40 years trying to build an AI agent that accomplishes the full range of human cognitive abilities, beginning with his 1980s PhD research on the SOAR model of human cognition with Allen Newell and Paul Rosenbloom. John E. Laird received his Ph.D. from Carnegie Mellon University in 1985, and is John L. Tishman Emeritus Professor of Engineering at the University of Michigan. He is one of the original developers of the SOAR architecture and leads its continued development and evolution. He was a founder of Soar Technology. He is a AAAI, ACM, AAAS, and Cognitive Science Society Fellow. In 2018, he was co-winner of the Herbert A. Simon Prize for Advances in Cognitive Systems.
Tom meets with Kai-Fu Lee, a pioneer in using machine learning to significantly advance speech recognition. Kai-Fu, former president of Google China and now Chairman of Sinovation Ventures and CEO of 01.AI, has led speech, machine learning and AI efforts at several top firms, and is now one of the top AI venture capitalists in China.
What is the relationship between neural network approaches in machine learning, and real neural networks in the brain? Today's guest Jay McClelland is a cognitive scientist who has spent decades studying this question. Jay is Lucie Stern Professor of Psychology and (by Courtesy) of Linguistics and Computer Science and Director of the Center for Mind, Brain, Computation and Technology at Stanford University. He discusses his 50 year journey modeling cognition in the brain with artificial neural networks, and his role in the 1980s emergence of neural networks in machine learning.
Tom interviews Daphne Koller, a Stanford professor turned serial entrepreneur. Daphne is widely known for her research at the intersection of machine learning and probabilistic reasoning. Daphne is a member of the U.S. National Academy of Engineering, and is currently CEO of Insitro, a company at the intersection of machine learning and human biology.