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Yann LeCun, Geoffrey Hinton and Yoshua Bengio win Turing Award
- 908087 8y agoIt saddens me to see these people being given awards for improving the surveillance and manipulation capabilities of advertising corporations. This isn't how you encourage people to use their abilities to contribute to society in a positive way.
- mav3rick 8y agoThen you must be sad when the Internet was invented as well ? How about cars ?
- 908087 8y agoI didn't realize the internet or cars were created by the employees of advertising corporations for the sole purpose of furthering their surveillance and user manipulation capabilities. Also, my comment was about people being given awards, not people inventing things.
- joshuamorton 8y agoNone of these people do that though, they all work on theoretical research. Do you hold the same opinion of the people at Bell labs who got Turing or Nobel awards?
- mindcrime 8y agoI didn't realize the internet or cars were created by the employees of advertising corporations for the sole purpose of furthering their surveillance and user manipulation capabilities. Seriously man? Do you think you might be being just a little bit hyperbolic there? I mean, it's pretty darn clear that Deep Learning isn't "created ... for the sole purpose of furthering ... surveillance and user manipulation capabilities" when almost all of the papers on the topic are freely available on arXiv, and source code for nearly every important implementation is available as Open Source, usually in multiple languages, using multiple different frameworks (which are almost all Open Source as well). I mean, sure, Google use Deep Learning to display ads... great. But you, or me, or anybody else, can also use the same techniques for our own (presumably more noble) ends.
- gerash 8y agoIt saddened me when Boyle and Smith won the Nobel prize in Physics for inventing CCD which powers digital cameras and is of no use other than surveillance by big brother. Don't get me started about Alexander Graham Bell /s
- fizzledbits 8y agoLet’s withdraw the Nobel from Einstein while we’re at it.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- jlgray 8y agoScience and technology are generally agnostic to their usage, and will be used to both positive and negative ends whose magnitude is proportional to the power of the underlying technology.* AI has the potential for massive positive effects as well as massive negative effects. What saddens me is that we have systems and incentives in place which encourage governments and corporations to use powerful technologies to negative ends. * Obviously there is room to quibble about the positive/negative balance of individual technologies, e.g. gunpowder, bio-weapons, etc., however I am sure a circumspect analysis could find positives even in things developed primarily to improve the efficiency of war.
- myaccount80 8y agoBut LeCunn still works for Facebook. I don’t understand why such a smart person should spend his time working for such a company.
- ousta 8y agoare you serious? there is no way to do research on massive amounts of data at the public level anymore. if you want to change things its in the private. + money is also good
- gzeus 8y agoits about time :)
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- swalsh 8y agoI have a browser extension that replaces the phrase "Artificial Intelligence" with the phrase "A bunch of if statements". This might have been one of the top results.
- 0xfaded 8y agoI'm also quite dismissive of AI overuse. My preferred substitution is s/Machine Learning/Machine Guessing. However, these are 3 people who overcame a lot of nay-sayers to prove some something could actually work. I remember back in university the lecturer said that neural networks couldn't scale because of the vanishing gradient problem. It was actually very easy to be critical, you want fit a massive number of parameters which are not-very-orthoganal to an under constrained problem? Sounds pretty dumb to me! I think these 3 deserve recognition for their tenacity and the new world of "under defined gradient decent", sometimes called DL, which they opened up.
- TaupeRanger 8y agoComputational Statistics is probably most accurate.
- dna_polymerase 8y agoThe description available on the ACM website right now doesn't mention AI: "For conceptual and engineering breakthroughs that have made deep neural networks a critical component of computing." [0] As it should be. The whole AI buzz misleads people into thinking we are close to solving things we actually are not. Like upload filters capable of differentiating fair use and copyright infringement. [0]: https://amturing.acm.org/award_winners/hinton_4791679.cfm https://amturing.acm.org/award_winners/hinton_4791679.cfm
- return0 8y agoYou guys need to get over it. Intelligence is not a well defined term. AI is fine do describe something that works "humanlike" even though we don't kno why. I would dare you to give a definition of "AGI"
- orbifold 8y agoFor a more balanced view of the history of deep learning see Schmidhuber‘s review http://people.idsia.ch/~juergen/deep-learning-overview.html http://people.idsia.ch/~juergen/deep-learning-overview.html and http://people.idsia.ch/~juergen/who-invented-backpropagation.html http://people.idsia.ch/~juergen/who-invented-backpropagation....
- bobosha 8y agoNo invention occurs in a vacuum, most creations are recombinant effects.The pieces of the puzzle might very well have existed, but Hinton deservedly receives credit for putting the various pieces together for backprop IMHO.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- obviuosly 8y agoVarious researchers, e.g. Werbos, Linnainmaa, Bryson and Yu-Chi Ho have been doing backprop in neural networks before Hinton et al. Hinton was merely a popularizer of the idea.
- nabla9 8y agoWright brothers were most likely not the first to achieve heavier-than-air powered flight. But they made the first controlled, sustained flight. Controlled flight was the real breakthrough in aviation. It's the same with Hinton et. all. They were among many other pioneers, but what really sets them apart is that they made it all work. They also analyzed why it works.
- kodz4 8y agoOctave Chanute in the case of heavier than air flight. He was the spark and the hub that connected most of the pioneers. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Octave_Chanute https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Octave_Chanute
- TicklishTiger 8y agoI have the feeling this got so many upvotes because people think this is related to the turing test. And that we have a chatbot now that can trick the average person into thinking it's a human. It's not. It's about some incremental progress in making neuronal networks classify stuff.
- fooker 8y agoPretty sure the Turing award is at least as well known as the Turing test.
- TicklishTiger 8y ago"Pretty sure" how? Google trends seems to indicate the opposite. https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?q=turing%20award,turing%20test https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?q=turing%20award,tu... But it's not about "well known" anyhow. It's about significance. A turing test winning chat bot would be a much bigger breakthrough then an incremental improvement in image and text classification.
- ccjnsn 8y agoDepends with what bias you want to read the data. It could mean no one needs to Google turing award because everyone knows what it is and don't know what the Turing test is.
- BlackJack 8y agoMaybe for the general public, but I'm sure the HN audience knows much better given the amount of people who studied computer science or are in tech.
- plibither8 8y agoMaybe elsewhere, but I'm quite certain that the HN crowd did not confuse the two, or even think about linking it with chatbots.
- Rainymood 8y ago
- myth_buster 8y agoWell deserved! Imagenet challenge and 2012 has been an inflection point but few have slogged through the AI winter and made it through to the other side.
- sachin18590 8y agowas this the year Relu became mainstream? the paper itself was out there few years before too right
- rjtavares 8y agoI believe he's mentioning this: > On 30 September 2012, a convolutional neural network (CNN) called AlexNet achieved a top-5 error of 15.3% in the ImageNet 2012 Challenge, more than 10.8 percentage points lower than that of the runner up. This was made feasible due to the utilization of Graphics processing units (GPUs) during training, an essential ingredient of the deep learning revolution. According to The Economist, "Suddenly people started to pay attention, not just within the AI community but across the technology industry as a whole." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ImageNet https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ImageNet
- ignoramous 8y agoGeoffrey Hinton's tech-talk in 2007 (!) at Google is a great watch (with a heavy dose of technical jargon [0] plus some dry British humour interlaced throughout). He explains digit recognition (vs SVM) [1], document classification (vs LSH), and breifly summarises image classification [2] problems and how they were solved: https://youtu.be/AyzOUbkUf3M https://youtu.be/AyzOUbkUf3M You could instantly see the results he presents were way better than what was state of the art at that time. Amazing. --- [0] Grant Sanderson (3Blue1Brown) started a youtube-series covering Neural Networks (4 episodes, so far) that helps gain an intuitive grasp on the topic: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLZHQObOWTQDNU6R1_67000Dx_ZCJB-3pi https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLZHQObOWTQDNU6R1_6700... [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/MNIST_database https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/MNIST_database [2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/AlexNet https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/AlexNet
- li4ick 8y agoAlthough 3b1b's videos are awesome, his NN videos are heavily inspired by this: http://neuralnetworksanddeeplearning.com/ http://neuralnetworksanddeeplearning.com/. Even the code on his github page is taken from there.
- ignoramous 8y agoYes. I think Sanderson does mention as much in one of his videos that he's borrowing the course and structure from Michael Nielsen.
- amelius 8y agoI think NVidia deserves part of the award, as they have been a major factor in the progress of NNs.
- BucketSort 8y agoIs this a meme? No they have not. Sure they are a popular hardware provider, but NN have been around before they were even a company. I think Fukushima deserves a spot here too, before giving it to Nvidia, but there are so many people that have contributed to NN, so I guess those in the spotlight take the glory if it must be taken.
- yongjik 8y ago...Fukushima? Is it a typo for someone (or some company)?
- BucketSort 8y agoHe's credited with first introducing the CNN architecture (Neocognitron) and a way to train it with unsupervised learning, inspired by the neurological research of Hubel and Wiesel and his earlier work in training neural networks with unsupervised learning (backprop is now used instead). Probably one of the most famous neural network papers. https://www.rctn.org/bruno/public/papers/Fukushima1980.pdf https://www.rctn.org/bruno/public/papers/Fukushima1980.pdf
- metalens 8y agohttp://vision.stanford.edu/teaching/cs131_fall1415/lectures/Fukushima1988.pdf http://vision.stanford.edu/teaching/cs131_fall1415/lectures/...
- king_magic 8y agoFor making insanely painful-to-deal with dependencies and effectively instituting de facto vendor lock-in for deep learning? Nah.
- delish 8y ago
- ArtWomb 8y agoCongrats! Absolutely well deserved. Simons' Foundations of Deep Learning seminar this Summer 2019 will seek to illumine some of the issues around reproducibility, failure modes, etc https://simons.berkeley.edu/programs/dl2019 https://simons.berkeley.edu/programs/dl2019
- nortonsetupkey 8y agoDownload and install your Norton product https://nortonsetup-key.com https://nortonsetup-key.com. Sign In to Norton. If you do not have a Norton account, click Create account and complete the sign up process. In the Norton Setup window, click Enter a New Product Key. To enroll in Automatic Renewal Service for your Norton subscription, Get Started
- li4ick 8y agoI think Schmidhuber should be up there. LSTMs are everywhere, not just NLP. The latest Starcraft 2 bot from Deepmind uses LSTMs extensively in its architecture.
- high_derivative 8y agoYes seems political to snub him, but then ACM is an American association.
- theWheez 8y agoDr. LeCun is a French native, for what it's worth
- screye 8y agoBut has spent almost all of his professional career in A&T labs, NYU, FB and Toronto. That's not true with Schmidhuber.
- dirtybird04 8y agoumm two of the award recipients are Canadians
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- high_derivative 8y agoI encourage downvoters to read the article below for a perspective on how LeCun, Hinton and Bengio may have unfairly excluded a wealth of prior work in their version of deep learning history: http://people.idsia.ch/~juergen/deep-learning-conspiracy.html http://people.idsia.ch/~juergen/deep-learning-conspiracy.htm... Note for people put off by the link: The conspiracy refers to the title of a paper by the Turing award winners, not Schmidhuber's.
- nabla9 8y agoSchmidhuber's significance in the field is not at the same level. He invented one type of neural network, but the "Canadian mafia" launched the whole Deep Learning revolution with multiple breakthroughs and theoretical understanding. LSTM's are clever and they were bleeding edge up to 2014, but once they were understood better as a bypass mechanism, attention, context vectors and averaging networks and causal convolution are starting to replace them.
- Tistel 8y agoI would love to hear a long form podcast with all three (and a CS knowledgeable interviewer)
- tyu1000 8y agoThere's a Youtube channel called something like 'AI Channel' that has relevant talks. LeCun did a big one a few months ago. Hinton has had at least one Google Talk.
- kasperset 8y agoThis is the closest I could find. https://www.thetalkingmachines.com/episodes/history-machine-learning-inside-out https://www.thetalkingmachines.com/episodes/history-machine-...
- Tistel 8y agothats is a great interview. the right level of detail. The interview starts ~10 minutes in. Thanks for the recommend!
- mostafab 8y agoThe knowledgeable interviewer should be Schmidhuber, that will be fun
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- currymj 8y agoExtremely pleased to see the weird feud with Schmidhuber sparking up again, completely pointless feuds like that are very entertaining, especially since all involved figures have done good work and don't seem to be sabotaging each other's students. It's like pro wrestling for nerds.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- whymauri 8y agoThis is such a smug and pointless comment. Flagged. This site never ceases to amaze me. I'm assuming flagged for ad hominem, while this guy just basically insults everyone else in the thread. Nice!
- return0 8y agoI somehow associate Hinton with Terry Sejnowski more than his later collaborators. They are all pioneers and this is well deserved regardless, even late!
- mistrial9 8y agoas a non-specialist, it seems like several important and distinct areas of inquiry are just lumped together in the celebration of a "winner" for ML Text, language, human chat Image recognition from blurry, multiple views, multiple lighting conditions photos formal patterns with large numbers of variations These are not at all the same, yet the praise seems to want to declare "the best" and "beating competitors" .. why is something so multi-faceted, reduced to the logic of a sports event ?
- robotresearcher 8y agoThe achievement is mainly about the fundamental techniques they developed, not the application domain. The techniques have been applied to many things since, hence the large impact.
- isoprophlex 8y agoi want to get on the hype machine and holler inaninties while i shoot my revolver into the ceiling. we must glorify the efforts of a arbitrarily chosen single individual, in the hope of someday becoming that lauded singleton, the one allowed by decree to piss on the heads of those fools below who didn't win the race.
- panchicore3 8y agohow much is changed since those geniuses started to work in this particular field? Me coming from web full-stack dev and see how things change fast and I find myself jumping from A way to B way very quick these days. I just need to know your perception of how fast thing goes and changes on ML.
- Voloskaya 8y agoYou change frameworks and tools pretty frequently but they are still all built around the same building blocks: html, css, javascript etc. It's pretty much the same in ML. These people built the building blocks that we still use in ML everyday (e.g. backpropagation, ConvNets etc). But the fine-tuning, packaging and tooling of these techniques also changes all the time and it can be hard to keep up. Having moved from full-stack web to ML I have a similar feeling about the pace of things.
- tw1010 8y agoDo you think (HN) that this incentive boost will mean more people who're working on fringe risky ideas will get the energy and persistence to keep going? Will we see a bump in 10 or so years of innovations coming from people who would have otherwise given up (had this award not been given)? Hard to measure of course, but what's your hunch?
- BucketSort 8y agoIf anything it's demotivating. Other people that have also contributed greatly were just ignored by this award. While those that received the award were mostly represented by big corps Facebook(LeCun) and Google(Hinton) -- even though these three are deserving as well, especially Hinton. Awards like this are quite stupid. The award isn't even based on a single breakthrough, but on their "collective achievement." This was just a PR thing. Who does science for awards anyway? I thought that was an athlete thing.
- ignoramous 8y ago> Other people that have also contributed greatly were just ignored by this award. Curious: Apart from Jurgen Schmidhuber, who else do you think were left out and why do you think so?
- deepnotderp 8y agoTbqh schmidhuber absolutely deserves a spot here. Not just for LSTMs, but also predictability minimization, various interesting intrinsic motivation concepts etc.
- ipunchghosts 8y agoWake sleep algorithm baby! Long live the Helmholtze machine!
- g9yuayon 8y agoCompanies should jointly give CIFAR a big fat award too. :-D Without CIFAR's 10 million dollars back in 2003 to the research groups of 15 people, led by Hinton, the research groups may have dissolved due to lack of funding, and our history would be different.
- devilmoon 8y agoIt's interesting to me that most comments are confusing Deep Learning with the whole field of AI in general, when it is actually a subset of Machine Learning. Well deserved anyhow!
- darksaints 8y agoThis is well deserved, but IMO it also signals an upcoming AI winter. This cycle has happened several times before: 1) Some scrappy researcher on a low budget develops a new AI technology that shows promise in a specific area. 2) More researchers take that idea and successfully apply it more broadly. 3) Massive investment in research happens, pushing PhD candidates into extracting every possible nuance out of that technology. 4) Researchers, encouraged by the broad success, begin to think we've found the one true key in the quest towards general intelligence. Suddenly all the researchers are Neats. The research funding is now mostly businesses instead of governments and non-profits. They grow overconfident that it can be used for virtually anything, funding everything in sight. 5) Starry-eyed futurists start lionizing the founders of the new revolution as geniuses, publishing flowery bullshit about how the world will be forever changed and how the General AI revolution is only 5-10 years away. 6) Surprise! It actually can't be used that broadly. Improvements stall, and CEOs start to realize that they can't just dump data in and get money out. It becomes a commercial disappointment, triggering disinvestment. 7) The Neats, disappointed that their glamorous and simplistic theory of general intelligence, start to disappear. Newspapers begin to make fun of all of the visionaries, comparing them to the people that said flying cars were 5-10 years away. 8) A handful of Scruffies take over the now low-funding AI winter, working hard on minimal budgets until a new breakthrough is found and we return back to #1. This article is showing that we're solidly within stage 5, and we're already seeing signs of stage 6. When everybody is buying, it's time to sell.
- mindcrime 8y agoThere's good reason to think that the AI Winter / AI Spring cycle is done. AI techniques are now creating so much real world value (more so than in the 80's / 90's) that there may well not be any more "AI Winter" events. Or perhaps they will be, but they'll be less pronounced. Maybe an "AI Fall" instead of "AI Winter". Part of that too, is that I think people now realize that narrow AI is sufficient to create tremendous value, and that it doesn't necessarily matter if the "AGI breakthrough" happens anytime soon or not. It's hard to be sure, but I don't see the kind of collapse that happened in the past happening anytime soon.
- 8y ago
- amelius 8y agoAnd we still don't know if/how biological brains perform backpropagation. Perhaps we should consider calling NNs "weight networks" instead.
- ska 8y agoThat was pretty much hashed out in the 70s when NN interest got going again. I'm not sure there is much value in recapitulating the discussion....
- erikpukinskis 8y agoWell, we do have new perspective after 50 years. Also, there is educational value in conversation. What is the value to you in shutting down a conversation someone else is interested in having? At least cite the answer to the question if you feel it's settled scholarship.
- masko 8y agoYeah that might be a better name. Sometimes it's called a "computation graph", since that's exactly what it really is. A network of nodes computing weights and derivatives based off inputs and/or outputs.
- mosicr 8y ago30% of Google ML workload is LSTM. Only 5% is CNN. https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/gcp/an-in-depth-look-at-googles-first-tensor-processing-unit-tpu https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/gcp/an-in-depth-look-... Schmidhuber should have gotten the award too.
- mostafab 8y agoAcademic geopolitics. The "deep learning mafia" has striked again, excluding the guy from the other side of the Atlantic, Schmidhuber
- luminati 8y agoThe Chinese must be furious. I was at a local government plenary session at Chengdu (long story) a couple of year back. The lead speaker kept waxing about how China invented and contributed AI to the world. I mentioned some points about about China's AI contributions/influence : 0. Algorithms -> The OGs as celebrated by this Turing Award (Canadian, but mostly led by American universities. On thing I did mention was due to the sheer factory production of Chinese PhDs, there is a lot of stuff arxiv from China ) 1. Frameworks -> Tensorflow, PyTorch (American) 2. Hardware -> Nvidia (American) 3. Distribution -> Github (American) 4. Education -> Medium, Github, Youtube, Fast.ai (American) 5. Cloud -> AWS, Google, Azure (American) China has some equivalent for all of them, ie. PaddlePaddle by Baidu, AliCloud, etc. but none of them have the reach, influence or domination of the American counterparts. Suffice to say that my points weren't taken too well and have been disinvited since then.
- briga 8y agoDo you really think China has done anything on the level of these three? Basically every new neural network architecture in recent memory is underpinned by Hinton's work on back-propagation. China has done some fantastic work in ML, but I think the award was a long time coming for these three.
- scarejunba 8y agoIt's obvious he doesn't think China has done anything on the level of these three. Literally everything about his comment says that.
- hokumguru 8y agoDid you zero-index your list on purpose, or just out of habit?
- lainga 8y agoIt's an HN custom for, at least, references ([0], [1], ...)
- 8y ago
- Jach 8y agoWell deserved. I was thinking maybe it's a bit too soon (the Turing Award isn't exactly timely awarded) but remembered it's 2019... If you wanted a first-rate CS education, you could do a lot worse than to go through the winners of the Turing Award[0] and review their seminal works. I've only sampled maybe half of them but every time I pick one I learn something interesting. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turing_Award#Recipients https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turing_Award#Recipients
- scienceyang 8y agothey are great, but deep learning is not AI, is not science. I doubt independence of Turing Award committee.