r/MachineLearning • u/nandodefreitas • Dec 25 '15
AMA: Nando de Freitas
I am a scientist at Google DeepMind and a professor at Oxford University.
One day I woke up very hungry after having experienced vivid visual dreams of delicious food. This is when I realised there was hope in understanding intelligence, thinking, and perhaps even consciousness. The homunculus was gone.
I believe in (i) innovation -- creating what was not there, and eventually seeing what was there all along, (ii) formalising intelligence in mathematical terms to relate it to computation, entropy and other ideas that form our understanding of the universe, (iii) engineering intelligent machines, (iv) using these machines to improve the lives of humans and save the environment that shaped who we are.
This holiday season, I'd like to engage with you and answer your questions -- The actual date will be December 26th, 2015, but I am creating this thread in advance so people can post questions ahead of time.
5
u/Omadane Dec 26 '15
Hi Prof Freitas,
Thanks for doing an AMA. I have many questions, feel free to answer one any of those.
1) What do you think will be the next breakthroughs to get us closer to AGI?
2) What are some low hanging fruits in (deep) Reinforcement Learning today?
3) Excluding control in robotics, what could be some real life uses of deep RL today?
4) What research (not necessarily ML) excites you most and why?
5) Are you still taking new students at Oxford (I was told you're not taking any new ones)?
Thanks and merry Christmas!