
A new neural network design could overcome challenges in AI - nmstoker
https://www.technologyreview.com/s/612561/a-radical-new-neural-network-design-could-overcome-big-challenges-in-ai/
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jessebett
I'm one of the authors. There's more discussion on this other recent HN thread
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18676986](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18676986)
where David Duvenaud (Senior Author) answers some questions.

~~~
ma2rten
Does this article do a good job of representing your work?

~~~
jessebett
As with all science communication, it is highly specific to the audience.

I would say if you are completely unfamiliar with machine learning then this
article accomplishes the job of informing you that we've proposed something
exciting and a bit different, and gives some flavour for what kind of problems
we're interested in (like continuous time medical data).

However, this article assumes essentially zero technical background. So if
you're comfortable with concepts either from machine learning (at the level of
vaguely knowing some details about a neural network) or mathematics (taken
some calculus or know about differential equations) then you will probably
find this article lacking in details. Again, this is just that you're not in
the target audience.

If you don't know where you fall on that spectrum of prerequisite background I
highly recommend taking a look at some of David's responses in the thread I
linked where he gives a pretty good quick primer with a bit more technical
detail.

~~~
alimw
Presumably the target audience then is people who got there by accident.

> If your brain hurts (trust me, mine does too), ...

This brings to mind something Ben Goldacre said (sorry can't quote) about the
average science journalist being less qualified than the average science
article reader.

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nmstoker
The paper the article is based on is here:
[https://arxiv.org/abs/1806.07366](https://arxiv.org/abs/1806.07366)

And there was mention on HN about a month ago of a PyTorch implementation for
ODEs (the name for this new NN design) here:
[https://github.com/rtqichen/torchdiffeq/blob/master/README.m...](https://github.com/rtqichen/torchdiffeq/blob/master/README.md)

------
eb0la
Is it me, or the picture opening the article looks like a Lorenz attractor
([http://mathworld.wolfram.com/LorenzAttractor.html](http://mathworld.wolfram.com/LorenzAttractor.html))...
Which is a set of 3 differential equations.

~~~
duvenaud
It does, but that's just a coincidence. That's a visualization of the latent
space for the toy time-series problem in our paper that has to learn to model
spirals of different sizes and orientations.

