AI Heroes

Dawn Song is well-known for her research on the intersection of deep learning and security. Aside from her research, Song is also a Professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at UC Berkeley and CEO of Oasis Labs, a blockchain startup that is creating a privacy-first cloud computing platform on blockchain.

  “One way that you could get a lot of attention is to write good code and put it on Github. If you have an interesting project that solves a problem that someone working at…

“Read enough to develop your intuitions, then trust your intuitions.” Geoffrey Hinton is known by many to be the godfather of deep learning. Aside from his seminal 1986 paper on backpropagation, Hinton has invented several…

“If you want to get into [AI], make yourself useful. So make a contribution to an open-source project for example, or make an implementation of some standard algorithm that you couldn’t find the code of…

  “Make sure you try things yourself. So not just reading things or watching videos but try things out with frameworks like TensorFlow, Chainer, Theano, Pytorch, and so forth.” Deep Reinforcement Learning is one of…

  “When I started studying deep learning, there weren’t many open-source resources. I think now in AI, and especially deep learning, there is a very good community and good deep learning frameworks to start with.”…

  “In academia, I feel like you have more freedom to work on long-term problems. At the same time, the research you do in industry is also very exciting because, in many cases, you can…

  “Don’t be afraid of the math. Just develop the intuitions and then the math becomes easier to understand once you get the hang of what’s going on at the intuitive level.” Along with Geoffrey…

“It’s really important to not abstract away things. You need to have a full understanding of the whole stack.” Andrej Karpathy was first exposed to AI as a student in Geoffrey Hinton’s class at the…