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The Man Behind the Google Brain: Andrew Ng and the Quest for the New AI
There’s a theory that human intelligence stems from a single algorithm.
The idea arises from experiments suggesting that the portion of your brain dedicated to processing sound from your ears could also handle sight for your eyes. This is possible only while your brain is in the earliest stages of development, but it implies that the brain is — at its core — a general-purpose machine that can be tuned to specific tasks.
About seven years ago, Stanford computer science professor Andrew Ng stumbled across this theory, and it changed the course of his career, reigniting a passion for artificial intelligence, or AI. “For the first time in my life,” Ng says, “it made me feel like it might be possible to make some progress on a small part of the AI dream within our lifetime.”
In the early days of artificial intelligence, Ng says, the prevailing opinion was that human intelligence derived from thousands of simple agents working in concert, what MIT’s Marvin Minsky called “The Society of Mind.” To achieve AI, engineers believed, they would have to build and combine thousands of individual computing modules. One agent, or algorithm, would mimic language. Another would handle speech. And so on. It seemed an insurmountable feat.
When he was a kid, Andrew Ng dreamed of building machines that could think like people, but when he got to college and came face-to-face with the AI research of the day, he gave up. Later, as a professor, he would actively discourage his students from pursuing the same dream. But then he ran into the “one algorithm” hypothesis, popularized by Jeff Hawkins, an AI entrepreneur who’d dabbled in neuroscience research. And the dream returned.
It was a shift that would change much more than Ng’s career. Ng now leads a new field of computer science research known as Deep Learning, which seeks to build machines that can process data in much the same way the brain does, and this movement has extended well beyond academia, into big-name corporations like Google and Apple. In tandem with other researchers at Google, Ng is building one of the most ambitious artificial-intelligence systems to date, the so-called Google Brain.
This movement seeks to meld computer science with neuroscience — something that never quite happened in the world of artificial intelligence. “I’ve seen a surprisingly large gulf between the engineers and the scientists,” Ng says. Engineers wanted to build AI systems that just worked, he says, but scientists were still struggling to understand the intricacies of the brain. For a long time, neuroscience just didn’t have the information needed to help improve the intelligent machines engineers wanted to build.
What’s more, scientists often felt they “owned” the brain, so there was little collaboration with researchers in other fields, says Bruno Olshausen, a computational neuroscientist and the director of the Redwood Center for Theoretical Neuroscience at the University of California, Berkeley.
The end result is that engineers started building AI systems that didn’t necessarily mimic the way the brain operated. They focused on building pseudo-smart systems that turned out to be more like a Roomba vacuum cleaner than Rosie the robot maid from the Jetsons.
But, now, thanks to Ng and others, this is starting to change. “There is a sense from many places that whoever figures out how the brain computes will come up with the next generation of computers,” says Dr. Thomas Insel, the director of the National Institute of Mental Health.
“I’m 10 and pregnant.” “I’m 17 and a virgin.” “I’m 85 and tired.”
Google auto-complete reveals our deepest fears. Watch.
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YouTube Trends: PSY’s ‘Gentleman’ Raises the Bar (via daily-infographic)
WhatsApp is bigger than Twitter -
According to WhatsApp CEO Jan Koum, the service now has more than 200-million users, making it a larger overall network than Twitter. Moreover, it is being employed heavily by those users, with 8 billion inbound and 12 billion outbound messages every day and no reported drop off since its decision to charge $0.99 a year. With competition growing from Chinese rival WeChat and its 300 million users, of whom 40 million live outside of China, it will be interesting to see how WhatsApp’s growth continues going forward.
(via We Are Social)
Now All Reads Come From Redis at YouPorn -
Speaking of Redis as the primary data store, this post from Andrea reminded me of YouPorn usage of Redis:
Datastore is the most interesting part. Initially they used MySQL but more than 200 million of pageviews and 300K query per second are too much to be handled using only MySQL. First try was to add ActiveMQ to enqueue writes but a separate Java infrastructure is too expensive to be maintained Finally they add Redis in front of MySQL and use it as main datastore.
Now all reads come from Redis. MySQL is used to allow the building new sorted sets as requirements change and it’s highly normalized because it’s not used directly for the site. After the switchover additional Redis nodes were added, not because Redis was overworked, but because the network cards couldn’t keep up with Redis. Lists are stored in a sorted set and MySQL is used as source to rebuild them when needed. Pipelining allows Redis to be faster and Append-only-file (AOF) is an efficient strategy to easily backup data.
Original title and link: Now All Reads Come From Redis at YouPorn (NoSQL database©myNoSQL)
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Forget about checking Facebook on your iPhone or Android app. Or waiting until you get home. The social network introduced its own addition to the Android operating system in a highly-anticipated announcement today, called “Home.”
Home is a series of apps that you can install and that becomes the home of your phone.
“Our phones are designed around apps not people,” Zuckerberg said. “We want to flip that around.”
April 12th. The day Smartphones will turn in Dumbphones again
And now featuring a launcher replacement, but looks like the phone is not so powerful. It’s just another flavoured version of Android.
But has it now sense to produce a phone for Facebook?