Posts
View in full here.
Jade Boyd, Science Editor and Associate Director of News and Media Relations says, Deep learning is an increasingly popular form of artificial intelligence that’s routinely used in products and services that impact hundreds of millions of lives, despite the fact that no one quite understands how it works.
 |
| Richard Baraniuk (left) and Moshe Vardi are members of an interdisciplinary, six-university team that the Office of Naval Research has tapped to develop a theory of deep learning using a $7.5 million grant from the Department of Defense’s Multidisciplinary University Research Initiative. Photo: Jade Boyd/Rice University |
The Office of Naval Research has awarded a five-year, $7.5 million grant to a group of engineers, computer scientists, mathematicians and statisticians who think they can unravel the mystery. Their task: develop a theory of deep learning based on rigorous mathematical principles.
The grant to researchers from Rice University, Johns Hopkins University, Texas A&M University, the University of Maryland, the University of Wisconsin, UCLA and Carnegie Mellon University, was made through the Department of Defense’s Multidisciplinary University Research Initiative (MURI)...
Baraniuk said they will attack the problem from three different perspectives.
“One is mathematical,” he said. “It turns out that deep networks are very easy to describe locally. If you look at what’s going on in a specific neuron, it’s actually easy to describe. But we don’t understand how those pieces – literally millions of them – fit together into a global whole. We call that local to global understanding.”
A second perspective is statistical. “What happens when the input signals, the knobs in the networks, have randomness?” Baraniuk asked. “We’d like to be able to predict how well a network will perform when we turn the knobs. That’s a statistical question and will offer another perspective.”
The third perspective is formal methods, or formal verification, a field that deals with the problem of verifying whether systems are functioning as intended, especially when they are so large or complex that it is impossible to check each line of code or individual component. This component of the MURI research will be led by Vardi, a leading expert in the field.
Read more...
Source: Mirage News
