I'm back

By
After many years on hold, I've been spending the past couple months getting back into to my AI research saddle. For now, I'm able to devote a lot more time to it.

One of the most significant things I've noticed is that in recent years, a lot more AI-related research papers have become freely available to read online. This has dramatically accelerated my learning. A lot of smart people have been spending the past few decades advancing inductive learning techniques to apply to ever larger volumes of training data. And developing various algorithmic approaches to machine learning, writ large.

I've been focused almost exclusively on the area of natural language processing (NLP). Linguists and AI researchers seem to have done each other great service in advancing what we know about how humans deal with natural languages. I'm hoping to capitalize on a lot of their good work. And hopefully contribute some novel research of my own soon.

It's an exciting time to be diving back into AI research.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Coherence and ambiguities in problem solving

By
Natural Language Processing (NLP) is a big topic. One I come back to again and again when I have time to explore it. Work has kept me very busy. So has moving. In recent months I've returned to the topic. I made some interesting progress constructing an "NLP pipeline". But as anyone who has done NLP work will tell you, English is full of ambiguities. They may tell you about the approaches they take to reduce the ambiguity and be decisive in the end. But the ambiguities persist and can't simply be guessed away. The problem More importantly though. The ambiguities often require us as humans to look across levels of interpretation to resolve. I generally have not found AI researchers offering a good way of doing this though. To illustrate my problem, consider this sentence: Some guys' shoes' laces are red. As someone literate in English you have no problem interpreting it. But odds are good you can guess where the ambiguity lies. Looked at in isolation, each of t
Read more

Neural network in C# with multicore parallelization / MNIST digits demo

By
Image
I've been working for a couple weeks on building my first fully functional artificial neural network (ANN). I'm not blazing any news trails here by doing so. I'm a software engineer. I can barely follow the mathematical explanations of how ANNs work. For the most part I have turned to the source code others have shared online for inspiration. In most cases I've struggled to understand even that, despite programming for a living. Part of the challenge is that more than a few of those demos have surprised me by being nonfunctional. They did something for sure. They just didn't learn anything or perform significantly better than random chance making correct predictions, no matter how many iterations they went through. Or they had bugs that prevented them from working according to the well-worn basic backpropagation algorithm. I mostly worked from C# examples when I could find them. One thing that was a genuine struggle for me to deal with is my sense that they all
Read more

Back in the saddle / C# neural network demo

By
I felt like I was making good progress back in 2016 in my AI research. But I realized it was not going to turn into an income-yielding venture anytime soon. So I moved on to other ventures. This was during a sabbatical from "real work". I eventually gave up and got a real job again. While that job pays reasonably well, it's also fairly boring. Kira and I moved from Madison to Miami this year. For various reasons I decided to do a YouTube channel for a while to give my impressions of life here. That was fun for a while Recently I got somewhat bored with that and put it on hold. I was in a bit of a funk about what I should do with my free time when I'm not doing my regular work. I decided to resume my AI research. I've been dipping my toes in this week. Reading back on my own blog to reconnect with my most recent project. I decided to start into the subject of artificial neural networks (ANNs) again. I'm a little embarrassed to admit that I never wrote a traditi
Read more