It's been an incredible week, with 3 major milestones

  • Microsoft won the image recognition Image-net challenge (see results) with an "extremely deep" network. The difficulty when dealing with such networks is to facilitate information flow and avoid so-called "vanishing gradients". Their approach based on residual learning is detailed in this paper.

  • Progress in"one-shot" machine learning where algorithms learn representations with very limited training sets. The approach here, called Bayesian Program Learning is detailed in this Science article

  • Google announced groundbreaking achievements in quantum computing, including a 100-million-fold speed-up over traditional approaches on a specific problem. In the long-term, this could shake up all the AI/ML field.

In the News

An advance in Artificial Intelligence rivals human abilities

Great article covering both Image-net and the progress on one-shot machine learning.

nytimes.com


Why 2015 was a breakthrough year in Artificial Intelligence

A few interesting charts on the acceleration in the number of AI projects, systems and usage.

bloomberg.com


Also in the news this week...

  • The NIPS conference in Montreal took place this week. This year's hot topics and accepted papers can be viewed with this tool
  • Tensorflow gains traction outside of Google
  • $15M grant given to Cambridge to create a new interdisciplinary institution on AI and its implications for humanity

Learning

Managing AI in a multiplayer game

Great piece on the intelligence baked into the Gigantic video game and its implementation. By the game developers.

gamedevdaily.io


How much memory does a Data Scientist need?

Over a few years, the memory available in AWS instances and laptops has grown more rapidly than the size of datasets used by data scientists. So where is the big data?

fullstackml.com


The Tesla AutoPilot

Interesting look at the technology behind the engineering marvel

wccftech.com

Software tools & code

Evaluation of deep learning toolkits

Focuses on the big names out there: Caffe, CNTK, Tensorflow, Theano, Torch

github.com


Simplified interface for Tensorflow

In the spirit of scikit-learn

github.com

Hardware

Facebook shares its ML server design

Named Big Sur, this server design packs 8 Nvidia GPUs and is disclosed by Facebook through the Open Compute Project.

venturebeat.com


Emergent chip vastly accelerates Deep Neural Networks

A small chip, called EIE, maximizes the role of SRAM in processing the inference side of neural networks and yields impressive speed improvements.

nextplatform.com

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