9 ms·
Apple hires CMU professor as director of AI research to smarten up Siri
- arcanus 10y agoHis expertise is in deep learning, not that this is a surprise. Was Siri already based on neural nets?
- guptaneil 10y agoYup https://www.wired.com/2014/06/siri_ai/ https://www.wired.com/2014/06/siri_ai/
- hiddencost 10y agoThat's actually really misleading. A system like siri is split up into different parts: -- speech to text -- natural language understanding ( entity recognition, intent classification, entity resolution) -- language generation and speech to text It sounds like what they're saying is that DNNs are used for their speech recognition (speech is split into acoustic and language modeling, and DNN speech models have been state-of-the-art for about 4 years). It's kinda a "so what?" that they were using DNNs for their acoustic models, and nothing to do with the interesting parts of the system. If they were using DNNs for their NLU system back then I'd be kinda surprised.
- future1979 10y agoCan you point at a good survey article, blog post, course or book that goes into the NLU aspect? I've watched a bunch of courses on DNN but feel that stuff doesn't apply well to NLU aspects. The speech rec stuff used to be done with HMMs until recently but as you said, DNN is now the way to go for it.
- hiddencost 10y ago(also, sorry, the speech stuff was using HMM+GMM models, and now mostly use HMM+DNN models [so, we replaced the gaussian mixture model with a DNN, but kept the HMM], although some people are moving over to RNN models which doesn't use HMMs (connectionist temporal classification)) This is a great course, about NLP generally: http://cs224d.stanford.edu/syllabus.html http://cs224d.stanford.edu/syllabus.html A typical NLU system might be: an intent classifier to predict intent (e.g., "play music"). This can be pretty much anything (SVM, logistic regression, RNN, I don't care, try stuff and see what works for you) a segmentation model or slot-filling model (so label every word as either junk or "album name" or "song name" or whatever). This requires a sequence model, e.g., HMMs, CRFs, LSTM-RNNs. Here's a nice example: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/TASLP_RNN_SLU_2015.pdf https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/wp-content/uploads/...
- utkarshsinha 10y agoAny sufficiently human-like capability is likely to be based on neural networks in this age.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- jheriko 10y agoI got spam trying to sell me uber when I visit on my phone. No thank you TechCrunch... shame on you
- jheriko 10y agoI guess we must all love getting abusive ads with our content then... lesson learned
- spike021 10y agoSounds like a major concern of him being hired by Apple is whether or not he'll be able to publish research. I wonder how that'll work.
- shas3 10y agoJust mull the power and influence of deep learning: Yann LeCun is in FB, Geoffrey Hinton and part of his lab are affiliated with Google, Ruslan Salakhutdinov is now with Apple. In addition to this, there are other alumni of LeCun, Hinton, and Bengio dispersed across different notable companies like OpenAI, etc. Aside from the post-WW2 semiconductors-spurt, I can't think of a 'technology' that has become so suddenly so important as deep learning. You have a few scientists who spawned the fields of neural networks and deep learning in charge of what appear to be significant research efforts at the top tech companies (by market cap). Like silicon semiconductors and integrated circuits, deep learning approaches are likely to be the primary set of algorithms underlying many future 'intelligent' products and services. You will likely see a similar thing in biology/biotechnology with CRISPR in the near future.
- bogomipz 10y agoI don't know who any of these people are. I am assuming they are all at the top of their field. Can you recommend some blogs or new sites geared specifically to AI news that you follow. Its a subject I am interested in. Thanks.
- fspacef 10y agoIf you are really new to AI and want a broad understanding of the topic, I really recommend this book as a quick read: "Artificial Intelligence: What Everyone Needs to Know" by Jerry Kaplan https://books.google.com/books?id=5fvmDAAAQBAJ&printsec=frontcover&dq=what+everyone+needs+to+know+about+AI&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwj-rqe0hOPPAhWFth4KHcFfCokQ6AEINTAB#v=onepage&q=what%20everyone%20needs%20to%20know%20about%20AI&f=false https://books.google.com/books?id=5fvmDAAAQBAJ&printsec=fron...
- Osmium 10y agoHow about a book for a more technical, practical introduction? I'm (hopefully) just starting a new position where some of the team is using machine learning techniques in an applied sense (i.e. it's not a CS position, they're not researching new methods, just applying existing ones). I'd like to get a good overview of common mistakes, pitfalls, etc. to look out for from a newcomer's perspective. I have used neural networks naively and briefly in a project about 6 years ago, but I know a lot(!) has changed since then.
- fnbr 10y agoSmart move by Apple. I'll be following their moves to improve Siri closely. The fact that they're hiring researchers as strong as Ruslan makes me feel that they've got real potential to drastically improve Siri going forward. I think that Siri has the potential to improve non-linearly. If they can get Siri to be slightly more useful, the millions of iPhone owners will instantly use it more, creating a virtuous feedback loop.
- IBM 10y agoIt's not clear if the acquisitions they've made in the past have been integrated into any of their products yet. It's certainly within the realm of possibility to wake up one day and use a new and better Siri. http://www.businessinsider.com/apple-vocaliq-siri-2016-9 http://www.businessinsider.com/apple-vocaliq-siri-2016-9
- fnbr 10y agoDo you have any idea why that is? Are they all acquihires?
- IBM 10y agoI would say almost all of Apple's acquisitions are acquihires and for intellectual property but I don't see how that has any relation to how long it takes to integrate the people/tech into existing products. My guess is as good as the quotes in the article.
- vonnik 10y agoThis headline doesn't include the most important information. Russ was part of the big bang in deep learning about 10 years ago when he was Geoff Hinton's student. His name is on the 2006 papers about RBMs.[0] CMU is a great school, but Russ is not a random guy from CMU. He's a deep learning veteran who's done a lot of important work, which makes this a huge hire for Apple. They were lacking a marquee name for their AI team, and now they have it, and that's probably going to accelerate their recruiting and product development. https://www.cs.toronto.edu/~hinton/science.pdf https://www.cs.toronto.edu/~hinton/science.pdf
- joe_the_user 10y agoA marque name may be useful for Wall Street or the media but it seems unlikely it will help them recruit, for two reasons. 1) Machine Learning is one of the most quickly advancing fields of learning today, maybe ever. Having discovered a lot ten years ago likely isn't as important as what you have done now. The importance of the machine learning people that do AMAs on reddit (Lacune etc) is that they lead teams of people now who are working with streams of big data now, publishing state of the art results now. Which brings the second point... 2) Machine learning has advanced to its situation by being an incredibly open field, with arxive being the default repository for publications. Just doing this hire doesn't give any indication that Apple has relaxed its posture of restricting all information coming out of its research. This closed-to-publication position makes them much more unattractive to cutting-edge machine learning researchers than the presence of a single big name researcher could make them attractive. (and I'm no cutting edge researcher myself, just an observer but I think you can find similar comments from real researchers in places)
- system16 10y agoThis is fair, but as we've seen with their recent approach to Swift, Apple's shown it's at least possible for them to pursue a more open approach. I'd like to think Maps and Siri have been a huge wake-up call to them that you can't apply the same closed-door approach to product development when your product require mountains of data to provide a good user experience. Then again, time will tell.
- HNSucksAss 10y agoRemember when Apple's RF expert told them not to put the iPhone's antenna in contact with the user's skin and they did it anyway? Yeah. Apple has a long history of ignoring the advice of the experts it hires, and instead promoting incompetent hacks like Jony Ive.
- grandalf 10y agoI'd never used Siri in the 5+ years I've been using an iPhone. Then I switched to Android for a month while awaiting the iPhone 7 (my previous phone screen cracked and could not be repaired a month before the new release). After being impressed with "OK Google" I decided to try out Siri on my iPhone 7. I have been shocked how much better "OK Google" works than Siri. I think Apple has a fair bit of catching up to do in this area. With OK Google you can basically just tell it what app to open, what to do, etc., and it works. With Siri, something as simple as asking her to play a song doesn't actually start playing the song, it forces you to interact with a clunky UI on the siri screen first, then it doesn't even open the correct song in Apple Music.
- gkop 10y agoSiri is really bad. Another grievous example is once you choose a Bing result to explore from the Siri screen, there's no apparent way to get back to the results screen to try another one.
- gok 10y agoReactivate Siri, scroll down.
- IBM 10y agoI'm not sure what "clunky UI" you need to interact with, you can play music without touching your phone. You literally just say "Hey Siri, play Two Weeks by FKA Twigs" and it will begin playing. It shows your request being transcribed when its made but that screen goes away on its own shortly after. Most people's complaints about Siri as far as I can tell (via Twitter mostly, so it's a tech crowd) is that it's basically not Google Now. That is, Apple doesn't have a search engine so it can't answer general interest/trivia questions unless it's specifically related to a domain Apple has included (such as Wolfram Alpha or MLB for baseball). Now many people think it should be able to do that, but that's certainly not what it was designed for. Siri is a "personal assistant" to help you do things on your device via voice. They've recently begun to expand these integrations by creating a Siri API which will probably expand to cover more domains over time.
- rileymat2 10y agoBeyond AI they have lots of basics to get right. Hey Siri turn on flash light... I cannot do that.
- gnipgnip 10y agoHmm. Is Turi going to be separate from Apple AI division ?
- robinhouston 10y agoWhen I open this link on my iphone, I am forcibly redirected to a spammy ad at http://adsfoundation.xyz/861/YTozOntzOjEwOiJyZXF1ZXN0X2lkIjtzOjIyOiI1ODA2MTg1YzI0ZGYxNjcyNjc1Njc0IjtzOjEzOiJ0cmFja2luZ19saW5rIjtzOjE1MToiaHR0cDovL2c5aS5zZXZtb2IuY29tL3RyYWNrZXIvY3JlYXRpdmVfYz9jYW1wYWlnbl9pZD0xMTk5JnB1Ymxpc2hlcl9pZD01NDUmc3ViX2lkMT01ODA2MTg1YzI0ZGYxNjcyNjc1Njc0JnN1Yl9pZDM9VUtfVERDRU5UaHR0cCUzQSUyRiUyRmRhaWx5c3Rhci5jby51ayI7czo5OiJ0aW1lc3RhbXAiO2k6MTQ3Njc5NDQ3MDt9 http://adsfoundation.xyz/861/YTozOntzOjEwOiJyZXF1ZXN0X2lkIjt... Is this happening to anyone else?
- IgorPartola 10y agoYeah but I heard NucleusOS was a bust and Belson is on his way out.
- boraturan 10y agoA bit late? Things started to move slowly at Apple, Siri, Apple Pay... becoming more of a hardware company