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Showing posts from April, 2018

Is too much emphasis in Artificial Intelligence given to Deep Learning?

Deep learning has revolutionized the way we do Natural Language Processing, image recognition, translation, and other very specific tasks. I have used deep learning most days at work for about four years. Currently, I do no work in image recognition but I still use convolutional networks for NLP, and in the last year mostly use RNNs and GANs. While I agree that deep learning is important in many practical use cases, a lot of data science still revolves around simpler models. I feel that other important techniques like probabilistic graph models (PGM) and discrete optimization models (the  MiniZinc language  is a good place to start) don't get the attention in universities and industry that they deserve. On a scale of 1 to 10, I estimate the hype level of deep learning to be approximately 15. I started working in the AI field in 1982 (back then, mostly "symbolic AI" and neural networks) and to me artificial intelligence has always meant a very long term goal of build

Java JDK 10

Java 10 was released for general availability a week ago.  I just installed it on macOS from  http://jdk.java.net/10/  I un-tar'ed the distribution, set JAVA_HOME to the Home directory in the distribution and put Home/bin first on my PATH. I used Java 10 with the latest version of IntelliJ with no problems: opened an existing Java project and switched the JDK to the newly installed JDK 10. There are several nice features but the only ones I am likely to use are: Local variable type inference Better Docker container awareness in Linux Improved repl support I have mixed feelings about the rapid new 6 month release cycles, but I understand the desire to compete with other JVM languages like Kotlin, Scala, Clojure, etc. I have updating both of my Java books ( Power Java  and Practical Artificial Intelligence Programming With Java ) on my schedule for the next 18 months. Java 11 is slated for release September 2018 and I will probably use Java 11 (whatever it will be!) for t