Media
The First Principles of Deep Learning and Compression
The deep learning revolution incited by the 2012 Alexnet paper has been transformative for the field of computer vision. Many problems which were severely limited using classical solutions are now seeing unprecedented success. The rapid proliferation of deep learning methods has led to a sharp increase in their use in consumer and embedded applications. One consequence of consumer and embedded applications is lossy multimedia compression which is required to engineer the efficient storage and transmission of data in these real-world scenarios. As such, there has been increased interest in a deep learning solution for multimedia compression which would allow for higher compression ratios and increased visual quality. The deep learning approach to multimedia compression, so called Learned Multimedia Compression, involves computing a compressed representation of an image or video using a deep network for the encoder and the decoder. While these techniques have enjoyed impressive academic success, their industry adoption has been essentially non-existent. Classical compression techniques like JPEG and MPEG are too entrenched in modern computing to be easily replaced. This dissertation takes an orthogonal approach and leverages deep learning to improve the compression fidelity of these classical algorithms. This allows the incredible advances in deep learning to be used for multimedia compression without threatening the ubiquity of the classical methods. The key insight of this work is that methods which are motivated by first principles, i.e., the underlying engineering decisions that were made when the compression algorithms were developed, are more effective than general methods. By encoding prior knowledge into the design of the algorithm, the flexibility, performance, and/or accuracy are improved at the cost of generality...
AI algorithms could disrupt our ability to think
We are excited to bring Transform 2022 back in-person July 19 and virtually July 20 - August 3. Join AI and data leaders for insightful talks and exciting networking opportunities. Last year, the U.S. National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence concluded in a report to Congress that AI is "world altering." AI is also mind altering as the AI-powered machine is now becoming the mind. This is an emerging reality of the 2020s. As a society, we are learning to lean on AI for so many things that we could become less inquisitive and more trusting of the information we are provided by AI-powered machines.
Reinforcement Learning: from trial & error to deep Q-learning
My objective with this article is to demystify a few foundational Reinforcement Learning (RL) concepts with hands-on examples. We are going to apply RL to the infamous Glass Bridge challenge from the Netflix series Squid Game episode 7. Although no previous RL knowledge is required, solid Python coding skills and basic machine learning understanding are necessary to follow the content of this article. The code can be found here. In simple words, RL is a computational approach used to achieve a pre-defined goal, which can be winning a chess game, optimizing a medical treatment, or improving a financial trading strategy.