Computer Vision News - October 2016

Prof. Jürgen Schmidhuber is Scientific Director of the Swiss AI Lab IDSIA and Professor of Artificial Intelligence at the University of Lugano (USI) . He has pioneered Deep Learning Neural Networks since 1991 and his research group is a serial winner of international contests. His Recurrent Neural Networks (RNNs) are now available to billions of users through Google, Apple and others. For example, since 2015, Google’s speech recognition on smartphones is based on his team’s "Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM)” RNNs. Google DeepMind is also heavily influenced by his former students. Computer Vision News was very lucky to have a fascinating discussion with Prof. Schmidhuber: his views on the future of the human kind cannot leave anybody indifferent… Computer Vision News: The field of Deep Learning has seen during the last 25 years (as your impressive research page testifies) a long list of successful technology breakthroughs. Isn’t there anything which disappointed you, like a finding or an innovation which you expected but never arrived? Professor Schmidhuber: That’s an interesting question. I often thought that some breakthrough would come earlier than it actually did and I was sometimes surprised by a development arriving faster than I thought. But I cannot say that anything I thought was going to happen, suddenly does not have a chance to happen anymore. It is a question of predicting the speed of technological evolution . Details of my predictions have been wrong, but the predictions were generally in line with what has happened during recent decades. CVN: What area of study would you suggest to a young engineer entering now the field? Prof. Schmidhuber: Machine Learning and Artificial Neural Networks. CVN: Would it be the same answer if that engineer wanted to turn those studies into a business? Prof. Schmidhuber: Sure. That’s the technology used by many big and small companies to make people happier and healthier and even more addicted to their smartphones. CVN: You have used techniques of computer vision to solve problems in so many fields: scientific, financial and even in the artistic domain. Where would you see its main contribution to improving our society at large? Prof. Schmidhuber: First, let me point out that computer vision is just one special area where artificial Neural 4 Computer Vision News Guest Professor Jürgen Schmidhuber Guest “ I am living at a time when the universe wants to make its next step towards greater complexity ” Image: Tomás Donoso on Vimeo