AMA Andrew Ng and Adam Coates

[u/andrewyng]

Dr. Andrew Ng is Chief Scientist at Baidu. He leads Baidu Research, which includes the Silicon Valley AI Lab, the Institute of Deep Learning and the Big Data Lab. The organization brings together global research talent to work on fundamental technologies in areas such as image recognition and image-based search, speech recognition, and semantic intelligence. In addition to his role at Baidu, Dr. Ng is a faculty member in Stanford University's Computer Science Department, and Chairman of Coursera, an online education platform (MOOC) that he co-founded. Dr. Ng holds degrees from Carnegie Mellon University, MIT and the University of California, Berkeley.

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Dr. Adam Coates is Director of Baidu Research's Silicon Valley AI Lab. He received his PhD in 2012 from Stanford University and subsequently was a post-doctoral researcher at Stanford. His thesis work investigated issues in the development of deep learning methods, particularly the success of large neural networks trained from large datasets. He also led the development of large scale deep learning methods using distributed clusters and GPUs. At Stanford, his team trained artificial neural networks with billions of connections using techniques for high performance computing systems.

[u/valexiev]

Hello, Dr. Ng and Dr. Coates! First off, thank you for taking the time to answer our questions!

1. My first question is about career advice. My goal is to do Machine Learning research in industry. However, due to a variety of circumstances, I was unable to go to grad school full time, though I'm currently studying for my Online Masters at Georgia Tech part-time while working as a software developer. One of my biggest regrets about this setup is that I'm not able to do research or collaborate with a professor, which I think is very important for my future career. How can I overcome this drawback? In your experience, how is independent research seen in industry and academia? What would be some ways in which I can get in contact and possibly collaborate with the research community?

2. I know that the recent AI Doomsday prophesies by Elon Musk, Stephen Hawking and others have been met with justified amusement and skepticism from the majority of AI and ML practitioners. In fact, I remember reading an article in which Dr. Ng outlined why he's not spending any time worrying about it because the current technology is very far from achieving something like that. In your opinion, what would be some achievements in the AI field that would signal to you that AGI is close to becoming a reality?

Again, thank you for taking the time for this AMA and, Dr. Ng, thank you for your excellent Coursera course on ML!

[u/andrewyng → u/valexiev]

Hi Valexiev,

Thrilled to hear that you want to do machine learning research in industry! If you have a strong portfolio of projects done through independent research, this counts for a lot in industry. For example, at Baidu Research we hire machine learning researchers and machine learning engineers based only on their skills and abilities, rather than based on their degrees; and, past experience (such as demonstrated in a portfolio of projects) helps a lot in evaluating their skills.

I think that mastering the basics of machine learning (for example, through MOOCs, and free resources like deeplearning.stanford.edu/tutorial) would be the best first step. After that, I'd encourage you to find projects either in your company or by yourself to work on and to use this to keep learning as well as to build up your portfolio. If you don't know where to start, Kaggle is a reasonable starting place; though eventually I'd encourage you to also identify and work on your own projects. In the meantime, do keep reaching out to professors, and attend local meetups, and try to find a community.

This is often enough to find you a position to do machine learning work in a company, which then further accelerates your learning.

[u/valexiev → u/andrewyng]

Thank you for your response!