Computer Vision News - June 2018

18 Guest: Jeff Clune - UBER Computer Vision News Jeff, can you tell us about your work? I work in machine learning and deep learning. The goal is to try to invent the next generation of machine learning and deep learning algorithms to improve what computers are capable of doing with the ultimate goal of trying to build artificial general intelligence, but also with the near term goal of trying to help all of the various constituents in the world who want to take advantage of machine learning to try to do wonderful things within their organizations. Do you have your eye on autonomous driving in particular? No. I would say I’m generally interested in artificial intelligence, especially in terms of trying to create artificially intelligent robots and software in any form. I am interested in reinforcement learning, deep learning, and neuroevolution. I don’t really focus on one particular domain such as autonomous driving. Has what you have found in your research met your expectations? Yeah, if you had asked me in my late teens what I would want to do more than anything, when I was in college for example, I would have told you that I wanted to be a professor. If you had asked me a few years later as I was leaving college and then while I was in Silicon Valley during the dot-com boom, what I would have wanted to do more than anything, it would have been to work at an impressive, disruptive startup, especially in their R&D labs, inventing the technology that they would use to change the world for the better. So this is off your bucket list now? That's right. Now I have both. I’m a professor, and I’m working at the largest startup in the world, disrupting and improving the world through new artificial intelligence technologies. To some extent, I have satisfied both goals simultaneously, which I would not have originally thought was possible. What do you know about robots that the public doesn’t know? That’s a great question. I think the short answer is that most people are probably going to assume that robots work a lot better than they do because they see YouTube video demos of only the things that work extremely well. Robots have already profoundly changed our economy, but only in very narrow cases such as factory floors, where Jeff Clune is a Senior Research Manager at Uber AI Labs and the Loy and Edith Harris Associate Professor in Computer Science at the University of Wyoming. We talked with him ahead of RE•WORK’s Deep Learning for Robotics Summit in San Francisco, where he will be a speaker. To register for the Summit, see our Upcoming Events page. Read also our interview with Raquel Urtasun . Guest