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The primary author is a Google Brain Resident (https://research.google.com/teams/brain/residency/ https://research.google.com/teams/brain/residency/). The Brain

The primary author is a Google Brain Resident (https://research.google.com/teams/brain/residency/ https://research.google.com/teams/brain/residency/). The Brain Residency is a really great program for starting a career in Deep Learning and ML research, and I'm really impressed by how quickly these new researchers churn out great work like this. disclosure: I work at Google Brain

cynicaldevil 10y ago
Wow this feels tailor made for people like me. I want to do further studies in deep learning after I graduate, but I'm not really keen on spending 4/5 years of my life on it. I'll be keeping an eye on this....
cr0sh 10y ago
I really would like to, someday, do the residency, but at the same time, I don't know if I can. Right now, I'm doing the Udacity Self-Driving Car Engineer Nanodegree. I won't rehash that or my other knowledge here... My issue, though, is my age, coupled with the fact that I don't have a real degree (I've got this old associates degree from a tech trade school that is almost worthless). After I finish the Udacity thing, I have this idea of pursuing an online BA, then an MA - likely in CompSci. But, we are likely looking at anywhere from 4 years or more (likely more) to do both things - and not a small amount of money. After that point, I'll be close to 50 years old. There's a very good and likely chance that the residency won't be around at that point; or even the possibility that technology around ML may have radically changed the world to the point where it would be difficult (or even meaningless) to try to "catch up"... Still - I'm not going to let that possibility stop or restrain me; that said, is it viable for me to even think about this kind of thing - doing such a residency? Would I even have a chance of being considered, vs someone younger? Furthermore - how does one do a residency of this nature, while still paying bills (I live in Phoenix, AZ - I own a house, plus have other bills)? These are just questions I have - not really concerns, as I am no where near the point I need to be to do the residency - and there isn't any guarantee that I will be. I'll just continue to enjoy to journey, rather than worrying about a specific end-goal.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- ericjang 10y ago
  > is it viable for me to even think about this kind of thing - doing such a residency? Would I even have a chance of being considered, vs someone younger? Furthermore - how does one do a residency of this nature, while still paying bills (I live in Phoenix, AZ - I own a house, plus have other bills)? Good on you for pursuing continued education. Yes it's viable - never lose hope in yourself for anything. The Brain Residency has no age requirement; in fact, the program looks for diverse academic/career experiences. You'd be surprised how close you are to your dream job if you are passionate, hardworking, and lucky. I too, was intimidated by the math & magic of ML when I first took Andrew Ng's Intro to Machine Learning Course 4 years ago (my first exposure). I took regular CS courses in college and started focusing on ML 1.5 years ago. Beyond taking courses, I highly recommend building your own projects - it exercises your independent research ability and creativity. The Brain residency pays a good wage for the SF Bay Area (comparable to new grad salary at average tech firms), so you should be able to pay your bills. I've heard rumors that many other companies highly invested in ML are following in Google Brain's example and starting similar residency programs. Your ML career path need not be at Google, though we're a pretty solid choice ;)
  - saycheese 10y ago
    >> "disclosure: I work at Google Brain" + >> "I too, was intimidated by the math & magic of ML when I first took Andrew Ng's Intro to Machine Learning Course 4 years ago (my first exposure). I took regular CS courses in college and started focusing on ML 1.5 years ago." ------ That's awesome, congrats! Appears you have written about it too: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13440813 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13440813
  - cr0sh 10y ago
    > I too, was intimidated by the math & magic of ML when I first took Andrew Ng's Intro to Machine Learning Course 4 years ago (my first exposure). Thank you for your kind words and encouragement. I will take them to heart. I got my first taste of modern machine learning when I took Andrew Ng's ML Class (sponsored by Stanford), in the fall/winter of 2011; I completed and passed it. At the same time, I was also taking Thrun and Norvig's AI Class; I had to drop out due to personal reasons. In 2012, after Thrun founded Udacity, they released the CS373 "Build Your Own Self-Driving Vehicle" course (I probably have that title wrong for the time; they changed the name of the course later) - it was meant as a stand-in for the original AI Class (I think there were licensing issues or something that prevented them from presenting it - they later incorporated it as a part of their offerings). I jumped at the chance, and completed that course as well. When they announced this Nanodegree course, I knew I had to apply. So far, things are going well with the course. I'm in the November (2016) cohort, and currently working on the behavioral cloning project. I do have in mind several personal projects to pursue, once I can come up for air from this course (most of my free time has been consumed by it). I do need more education, though, which is why I want to pursue the BA and MA. Two of my weak areas are calculus and stats/probabilities - which ML is heavily reliant on (plus, I really want to understand what is going on "under the covers" as well). Onward and upward!
ilaksh 10y ago
Are any of you trying to apply some of these ideas to general intelligence or is that only Deep Mind? If for example Google Assistant is ever going to be able to _really_ understand what people are talking about, it will most likely need to be based on a virtually embodied agent gradually trained somewhat like a human child. If you or any of the other Google Brain team members are interested, you should study the existing field of AGI. See 'AGI-16 videos intelligence' on youtube for example. I mention this because these papers such as the one linked here frequently reference general or animal-like intelligence, yet almost all of the best funded AI efforts seem explicitly ignorant of or dissmissive of the existing AGI research.
- nl 10y ago
  You understand that AGI16 is a futureism conference and has little to do with actually building anything that works? Whilst theories like a 'virtually embodied agent trained like a child' sounds like it makes sense there is nothing to say it will work, except that humans are like that. But we don't know how brains work enough to copy that anyway.
  - cosmoharrigan 10y ago
    > AGI16 is a futureism conference I would like to point out that the AGI Conference series [1] is an academic conference, with refereed proceedings published in the Springer Lecture Notes on Computer Science [2]. [1] http://agi-conf.org/ http://agi-conf.org/ [2] http://link.springer.com/book/10.1007%2F978-3-319-41649-6 http://link.springer.com/book/10.1007%2F978-3-319-41649-6
    - nl 10y ago
      It's weird. Some of those papers are pretty good, but most of the videos are bad.
    - argonaut 10y ago
      It is a legitimate conference. That doesn't mean it's any good. It doesn't have any standing in the AI or machine learning research community (unlike: NIPS, ICML, AAAI, KDD, CVPR, ACL, etc...). The Springer LNCS series is just an oddball mishmash of papers from all sorts of sources. A legitimate publication, but not one with any standing in the community. It's unfortunate that which conferences/journals are "good" (e.g. worth reading) or not is one of those things that's really 100% obvious to anyone in the research community, and totally esoteric to anyone not in the community.

cynicaldevil 10y ago

Wow this feels tailor made for people like me. I want to do further studies in deep learning after I graduate, but I'm not really keen on spending 4/5 years of my life on it. I'll be keeping an eye on this....

cr0sh 10y ago

I really would like to, someday, do the residency, but at the same time, I don't know if I can. Right now, I'm doing the Udacity Self-Driving Car Engineer Nanodegree. I won't rehash that or my other knowledge here... My issue, though, is my age, coupled with the fact that I don't have a real degree (I've got this old associates degree from a tech trade school that is almost worthless). After I finish the Udacity thing, I have this idea of pursuing an online BA, then an MA - likely in CompSci. But, we are likely looking at anywhere from 4 years or more (likely more) to do both things - and not a small amount of money. After that point, I'll be close to 50 years old. There's a very good and likely chance that the residency won't be around at that point; or even the possibility that technology around ML may have radically changed the world to the point where it would be difficult (or even meaningless) to try to "catch up"... Still - I'm not going to let that possibility stop or restrain me; that said, is it viable for me to even think about this kind of thing - doing such a residency? Would I even have a chance of being considered, vs someone younger? Furthermore - how does one do a residency of this nature, while still paying bills (I live in Phoenix, AZ - I own a house, plus have other bills)? These are just questions I have - not really concerns, as I am no where near the point I need to be to do the residency - and there isn't any guarantee that I will be. I'll just continue to enjoy to journey, rather than worrying about a specific end-goal.

deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
ericjang 10y ago
> is it viable for me to even think about this kind of thing - doing such a residency? Would I even have a chance of being considered, vs someone younger? Furthermore - how does one do a residency of this nature, while still paying bills (I live in Phoenix, AZ - I own a house, plus have other bills)? Good on you for pursuing continued education. Yes it's viable - never lose hope in yourself for anything. The Brain Residency has no age requirement; in fact, the program looks for diverse academic/career experiences. You'd be surprised how close you are to your dream job if you are passionate, hardworking, and lucky. I too, was intimidated by the math & magic of ML when I first took Andrew Ng's Intro to Machine Learning Course 4 years ago (my first exposure). I took regular CS courses in college and started focusing on ML 1.5 years ago. Beyond taking courses, I highly recommend building your own projects - it exercises your independent research ability and creativity. The Brain residency pays a good wage for the SF Bay Area (comparable to new grad salary at average tech firms), so you should be able to pay your bills. I've heard rumors that many other companies highly invested in ML are following in Google Brain's example and starting similar residency programs. Your ML career path need not be at Google, though we're a pretty solid choice ;)
- saycheese 10y ago
  >> "disclosure: I work at Google Brain" + >> "I too, was intimidated by the math & magic of ML when I first took Andrew Ng's Intro to Machine Learning Course 4 years ago (my first exposure). I took regular CS courses in college and started focusing on ML 1.5 years ago." ------ That's awesome, congrats! Appears you have written about it too: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13440813 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13440813
- cr0sh 10y ago
  > I too, was intimidated by the math & magic of ML when I first took Andrew Ng's Intro to Machine Learning Course 4 years ago (my first exposure). Thank you for your kind words and encouragement. I will take them to heart. I got my first taste of modern machine learning when I took Andrew Ng's ML Class (sponsored by Stanford), in the fall/winter of 2011; I completed and passed it. At the same time, I was also taking Thrun and Norvig's AI Class; I had to drop out due to personal reasons. In 2012, after Thrun founded Udacity, they released the CS373 "Build Your Own Self-Driving Vehicle" course (I probably have that title wrong for the time; they changed the name of the course later) - it was meant as a stand-in for the original AI Class (I think there were licensing issues or something that prevented them from presenting it - they later incorporated it as a part of their offerings). I jumped at the chance, and completed that course as well. When they announced this Nanodegree course, I knew I had to apply. So far, things are going well with the course. I'm in the November (2016) cohort, and currently working on the behavioral cloning project. I do have in mind several personal projects to pursue, once I can come up for air from this course (most of my free time has been consumed by it). I do need more education, though, which is why I want to pursue the BA and MA. Two of my weak areas are calculus and stats/probabilities - which ML is heavily reliant on (plus, I really want to understand what is going on "under the covers" as well). Onward and upward!

ilaksh 10y ago

Are any of you trying to apply some of these ideas to general intelligence or is that only Deep Mind? If for example Google Assistant is ever going to be able to _really_ understand what people are talking about, it will most likely need to be based on a virtually embodied agent gradually trained somewhat like a human child. If you or any of the other Google Brain team members are interested, you should study the existing field of AGI. See 'AGI-16 videos intelligence' on youtube for example. I mention this because these papers such as the one linked here frequently reference general or animal-like intelligence, yet almost all of the best funded AI efforts seem explicitly ignorant of or dissmissive of the existing AGI research.

nl 10y ago
You understand that AGI16 is a futureism conference and has little to do with actually building anything that works? Whilst theories like a 'virtually embodied agent trained like a child' sounds like it makes sense there is nothing to say it will work, except that humans are like that. But we don't know how brains work enough to copy that anyway.
- cosmoharrigan 10y ago
  > AGI16 is a futureism conference I would like to point out that the AGI Conference series [1] is an academic conference, with refereed proceedings published in the Springer Lecture Notes on Computer Science [2]. [1] http://agi-conf.org/ http://agi-conf.org/ [2] http://link.springer.com/book/10.1007%2F978-3-319-41649-6 http://link.springer.com/book/10.1007%2F978-3-319-41649-6
  - nl 10y ago
    It's weird. Some of those papers are pretty good, but most of the videos are bad.
  - argonaut 10y ago
    It is a legitimate conference. That doesn't mean it's any good. It doesn't have any standing in the AI or machine learning research community (unlike: NIPS, ICML, AAAI, KDD, CVPR, ACL, etc...). The Springer LNCS series is just an oddball mishmash of papers from all sorts of sources. A legitimate publication, but not one with any standing in the community. It's unfortunate that which conferences/journals are "good" (e.g. worth reading) or not is one of those things that's really 100% obvious to anyone in the research community, and totally esoteric to anyone not in the community.