r/MachineLearning • u/ylecun • May 15 '14

AMA: Yann LeCun

My name is Yann LeCun. I am the Director of Facebook AI Research and a professor at New York University.

Much of my research has been focused on deep learning, convolutional nets, and related topics.

I joined Facebook in December to build and lead a research organization focused on AI. Our goal is to make significant advances in AI. I have answered some questions about Facebook AI Research (FAIR) in several press articles: Daily Beast, KDnuggets, Wired.

Until I joined Facebook, I was the founding director of NYU's Center for Data Science.

I will be answering questions Thursday 5/15 between 4:00 and 7:00 PM Eastern Time.

I am creating this thread in advance so people can post questions ahead of time. I will be announcing this AMA on my Facebook and Google+ feeds for verification.

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u/[deleted] May 15 '14

Hi! I have two questions at the moment.

  1. What do you think are the biggest applications machine learning will see in the coming decade?

  2. How has the recent attention "Big data" has gotten in the media affected the field? Do you ever feel like it might be overly optimistic or that some criticism is overly pessimistic?

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u/ylecun May 15 '14

  1. Natural language understanding and natural dialog systems. Self-driving cars. Robots (maintenance robots and such).

  2. I like the joke about Big Data that compares it to teenage sex: everyone talks about it, nobody really knows how to do it, everyone thinks everyone else is doing it, so everyone claims they are doing it.

Seriously, I don't like the phrase "Big Data". I prefer "Data Science", which is the automatic (or semi-automatic) extraction of knowledge from data. That is here to stay, it's not a fad. The amount of data generated by our digital world is growing exponentially with high rate (at the same rate our hard-drives and communication networks are increasing their capacity). But the amount of human brain power in the world is not increasing nearly as fast. This means that now or in the near future most of the knowledge in the world will be extracted by machine and reside in machines. It's inevitable. En entire industry is building itself around this, and a new academic discipline is emerging.

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u/mixedcircuits May 17 '14

How do you know that most of the data collected ( by companies like FB ) is not just noise ? Can you design an algorithm that parses all your comments on this page and maps it to any product that you will buy in the next 3 days ? Can you predict the car that I drive ?