
Apple hires CMU professor as director of AI research to smarten up Siri - doppp
https://techcrunch.com/2016/10/17/apple-hires-cmu-professor-as-director-of-ai-research-to-smarten-up-siri/
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vonnik
This headline doesn't include the most important information. Russ was part of
the big bang in deep learning about 10 years ago when he was Geoff Hinton's
student. His name is on the 2006 papers about RBMs.[0] CMU is a great school,
but Russ is not a random guy from CMU. He's a deep learning veteran who's done
a _lot_ of important work, which makes this a huge hire for Apple. They were
lacking a marquee name for their AI team, and now they have it, and that's
probably going to accelerate their recruiting and product development.

[https://www.cs.toronto.edu/~hinton/science.pdf](https://www.cs.toronto.edu/~hinton/science.pdf)

~~~
joe_the_user
A marque name may be useful for Wall Street or the media but it seems unlikely
it will help them recruit, for two reasons.

1) Machine Learning is one of the most quickly advancing fields of learning
today, maybe ever. Having discovered a lot ten years ago likely isn't as
important as what you have done now. The importance of the machine learning
people that do AMAs on reddit (Lacune etc) is that they lead teams of people
now who are working with streams of big data now, publishing state of the art
results now. Which brings the second point...

2) Machine learning has advanced to its situation by being an incredibly
_open_ field, with arxive being the default repository for publications. Just
doing this hire doesn't give any indication that Apple has relaxed its posture
of restricting all information coming out of its research. This closed-to-
publication position makes them much more unattractive to cutting-edge machine
learning researchers than the presence of a single big name researcher could
make them attractive.

(and I'm no cutting edge researcher myself, just an observer but I think you
can find similar comments from real researchers in places)

~~~
system16
This is fair, but as we've seen with their recent approach to Swift, Apple's
shown it's at least possible for them to pursue a more open approach.

I'd like to think Maps and Siri have been a huge wake-up call to them that you
can't apply the same closed-door approach to product development when your
product require mountains of data to provide a good user experience. Then
again, time will tell.

~~~
caycep
I wonder if they are thing the same thing along the lines of the Stratechery
article pointing out the differing cultures required for services vs. devices.
It may signal some sort of pivot, at least for their icloud based things,
especially w/ the recent news of a reorg putting their services people all
under a single roof/organization...

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grandalf
I'd never used Siri in the 5+ years I've been using an iPhone. Then I switched
to Android for a month while awaiting the iPhone 7 (my previous phone screen
cracked and could not be repaired a month before the new release).

After being impressed with "OK Google" I decided to try out Siri on my iPhone
7. I have been shocked how much better "OK Google" works than Siri. I think
Apple has a fair bit of catching up to do in this area.

With OK Google you can basically just tell it what app to open, what to do,
etc., and it works. With Siri, something as simple as asking her to play a
song doesn't actually start playing the song, it forces you to interact with a
clunky UI on the siri screen first, then it doesn't even open the correct song
in Apple Music.

~~~
IBM
I'm not sure what "clunky UI" you need to interact with, you can play music
without touching your phone. You literally just say "Hey Siri, play Two Weeks
by FKA Twigs" and it will begin playing. It shows your request being
transcribed when its made but that screen goes away on its own shortly after.

Most people's complaints about Siri as far as I can tell (via Twitter mostly,
so it's a tech crowd) is that it's basically not Google Now. That is, Apple
doesn't have a search engine so it can't answer general interest/trivia
questions unless it's specifically related to a domain Apple has included
(such as Wolfram Alpha or MLB for baseball).

Now many people think it should be able to do that, but that's certainly not
what it was designed for. Siri is a "personal assistant" to help you do things
on your device via voice. They've recently begun to expand these integrations
by creating a Siri API which will probably expand to cover more domains over
time.

~~~
grandalf
Hmm, I'll try that. Edit. Ahh, Siri seems not to know how to play albums, only
songs. It also mis-parsed an album name of a song I have hearted in Apple
Music. The mis-parse was for a more obscure title, but the incorrect behavior
for playing an album was for a more mainstream one.

~~~
eastWestMath
Did you say you wanted an album specifically? I've never had any trouble with
saying "play the album X".

~~~
grandalf
I'll try saying "play the album", I've just asked her to play <album name>...

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shas3
Just mull the power and influence of deep learning: Yann LeCun is in FB,
Geoffrey Hinton and part of his lab are affiliated with Google, Ruslan
Salakhutdinov is now with Apple. In addition to this, there are other alumni
of LeCun, Hinton, and Bengio dispersed across different notable companies like
OpenAI, etc. Aside from the post-WW2 semiconductors-spurt, I can't think of a
'technology' that has become so suddenly so important as deep learning. You
have a few scientists who spawned the fields of neural networks and deep
learning in charge of what appear to be significant research efforts at the
top tech companies (by market cap). Like silicon semiconductors and integrated
circuits, deep learning approaches are likely to be the primary set of
algorithms underlying many future 'intelligent' products and services. You
will likely see a similar thing in biology/biotechnology with CRISPR in the
near future.

~~~
bogomipz
I don't know who any of these people are. I am assuming they are all at the
top of their field. Can you recommend some blogs or new sites geared
specifically to AI news that you follow. Its a subject I am interested in.
Thanks.

~~~
fspacef
If you are really new to AI and want a broad understanding of the topic, I
really recommend this book as a quick read: "Artificial Intelligence: What
Everyone Needs to Know" by Jerry Kaplan

[https://books.google.com/books?id=5fvmDAAAQBAJ&printsec=fron...](https://books.google.com/books?id=5fvmDAAAQBAJ&printsec=frontcover&dq=what+everyone+needs+to+know+about+AI&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwj-
rqe0hOPPAhWFth4KHcFfCokQ6AEINTAB#v=onepage&q=what%20everyone%20needs%20to%20know%20about%20AI&f=false)

~~~
Osmium
How about a book for a more technical, practical introduction?

I'm (hopefully) just starting a new position where some of the team is using
machine learning techniques in an applied sense (i.e. it's not a CS position,
they're not researching new methods, just applying existing ones). I'd like to
get a good overview of common mistakes, pitfalls, etc. to look out for from a
newcomer's perspective. I have used neural networks naively and briefly in a
project about 6 years ago, but I know a lot(!) has changed since then.

~~~
tnecniv
How much math do you know?

~~~
Osmium
A fair amount. I had a lot of math courses in university, quite a bit more
than I needed for quantum mechanics and that sort of thing. But I'm also by no
means a mathematician, and I'm definitely out of practice.

~~~
tnecniv
If your comfortable with calculus and linear algebra, then that is plenty to
get started. Bonus points if you know probability.

Plenty of top universities put their ML material online, so I would pick your
favorite and check it out. My school teaches roughly based on the Bishop book
(I think he keeps a free pdf online). It's dense reading but has information
on a huge array of topics. Someone else may be able to suggest other books
that are a little more focused.

Really though, I would just pick a school, look at their course website, get
their textbook, and work through the posted material at whatever pace you feel
provides the value you are looking for.

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spike021
Sounds like a major concern of him being hired by Apple is whether or not
he'll be able to publish research.

I wonder how that'll work.

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robinhouston
When I open this link on my iphone, I am forcibly redirected to a spammy ad at
[http://adsfoundation.xyz/861/YTozOntzOjEwOiJyZXF1ZXN0X2lkIjt...](http://adsfoundation.xyz/861/YTozOntzOjEwOiJyZXF1ZXN0X2lkIjtzOjIyOiI1ODA2MTg1YzI0ZGYxNjcyNjc1Njc0IjtzOjEzOiJ0cmFja2luZ19saW5rIjtzOjE1MToiaHR0cDovL2c5aS5zZXZtb2IuY29tL3RyYWNrZXIvY3JlYXRpdmVfYz9jYW1wYWlnbl9pZD0xMTk5JnB1Ymxpc2hlcl9pZD01NDUmc3ViX2lkMT01ODA2MTg1YzI0ZGYxNjcyNjc1Njc0JnN1Yl9pZDM9VUtfVERDRU5UaHR0cCUzQSUyRiUyRmRhaWx5c3Rhci5jby51ayI7czo5OiJ0aW1lc3RhbXAiO2k6MTQ3Njc5NDQ3MDt9)

Is this happening to anyone else?

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rileymat2
Beyond AI they have lots of basics to get right.

Hey Siri turn on flash light...

I cannot do that.

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fnbr
Smart move by Apple. I'll be following their moves to improve Siri closely.
The fact that they're hiring researchers as strong as Ruslan makes me feel
that they've got real potential to drastically improve Siri going forward.

I think that Siri has the potential to improve non-linearly. If they can get
Siri to be slightly more useful, the millions of iPhone owners will instantly
use it more, creating a virtuous feedback loop.

~~~
IBM
It's not clear if the acquisitions they've made in the past have been
integrated into any of their products yet. It's certainly within the realm of
possibility to wake up one day and use a new and better Siri.

[http://www.businessinsider.com/apple-vocaliq-
siri-2016-9](http://www.businessinsider.com/apple-vocaliq-siri-2016-9)

~~~
fnbr
Do you have any idea why that is? Are they all acquihires?

~~~
IBM
I would say almost all of Apple's acquisitions are acquihires and for
intellectual property but I don't see how that has any relation to how long it
takes to integrate the people/tech into existing products. My guess is as good
as the quotes in the article.

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arcanus
His expertise is in deep learning, not that this is a surprise.

Was Siri already based on neural nets?

~~~
guptaneil
Yup
[https://www.wired.com/2014/06/siri_ai/](https://www.wired.com/2014/06/siri_ai/)

~~~
hiddencost
That's actually really misleading. A system like siri is split up into
different parts:

\-- speech to text

\-- natural language understanding ( entity recognition, intent
classification, entity resolution)

\-- language generation and speech to text

It sounds like what they're saying is that DNNs are used for their speech
recognition (speech is split into acoustic and language modeling, and DNN
speech models have been state-of-the-art for about 4 years). It's kinda a "so
what?" that they were using DNNs for their acoustic models, and nothing to do
with the interesting parts of the system.

If they were using DNNs for their NLU system back then I'd be kinda surprised.

~~~
future1979
Can you point at a good survey article, blog post, course or book that goes
into the NLU aspect? I've watched a bunch of courses on DNN but feel that
stuff doesn't apply well to NLU aspects. The speech rec stuff used to be done
with HMMs until recently but as you said, DNN is now the way to go for it.

~~~
hiddencost
(also, sorry, the speech stuff was using HMM+GMM models, and now mostly use
HMM+DNN models [so, we replaced the gaussian mixture model with a DNN, but
kept the HMM], although some people are moving over to RNN models which
doesn't use HMMs (connectionist temporal classification))

This is a great course, about NLP generally:

[http://cs224d.stanford.edu/syllabus.html](http://cs224d.stanford.edu/syllabus.html)

A typical NLU system might be:

an intent classifier to predict intent (e.g., "play music"). This can be
pretty much anything (SVM, logistic regression, RNN, I don't care, try stuff
and see what works for you)

a segmentation model or slot-filling model (so label every word as either junk
or "album name" or "song name" or whatever). This requires a sequence model,
e.g., HMMs, CRFs, LSTM-RNNs.

Here's a nice example:

[https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/wp-
content/uploads/...](https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/wp-
content/uploads/2016/02/TASLP_RNN_SLU_2015.pdf)

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boraturan
A bit late? Things started to move slowly at Apple, Siri, Apple Pay...
becoming more of a hardware company

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IgorPartola
Yeah but I heard NucleusOS was a bust and Belson is on his way out.

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gnipgnip
Hmm. Is Turi going to be separate from Apple AI division ?

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jheriko
I got spam trying to sell me uber when I visit on my phone.

No thank you TechCrunch... shame on you

~~~
jheriko
I guess we must all love getting abusive ads with our content then... lesson
learned

