In March the company bought a startup cofounded by Geoffrey Hinton, a University of Toronto computer science professor who was part of the team that won the Merck contest. Extending deep learning into applications beyond speech and image recognition will require more conceptual and software breakthroughs, not to mention many more advances in processing power. Programmers would train a neural network to detect an object or phoneme by blitzing the network with digitized versions of images containing those objects or sound waves containing those phonemes. A team led by Stanford computer science professor Andrew Ng and Google Fellow Jeff Dean showed the system images from 10 million randomly selected YouTube videos.

Everyone is buzzing about the impact of AI on work, and many leaders feel insecure about what it will mean in terms of their own career development and roles. Deep learning, machine learning, automation and robotics are creating a seismic shift across organizations. "We're now living in an age where [deep learning is] going to be mandatory for people building sophisticated software applications," according to Frank Chen, a partner at venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, who was quoted in a recent Fortune article. Soon, he notes, people will demand, "'Where's your natural-language processing version?' 'How do I talk to your app? Because I don't want to have to click through menus.'"

Deep learning is the state-of-the-art in fields such as visual object recognition and speech recognition. This learning uses a large number of layers, huge number of units, and connections. Therefore, overfitting is a serious problem. To avoid this problem, dropout learning is proposed. Dropout learning neglects some inputs and hidden units in the learning process with a probability, p, and then, the neglected inputs and hidden units are combined with the learned network to express the final output. We find that the process of combining the neglected hidden units with the learned network can be regarded as ensemble learning, so we analyze dropout learning from this point of view.

In the last few years, we have seen the transformative impact of deep learning in many applications, particularly in speech recognition and computer vision. Inspired by Google's Inception-ResNet deep convolutional neural network (CNN) for image classification, we have developed "Chemception", a deep CNN for the prediction of chemical properties, using just the images of 2D drawings of molecules. We develop Chemception without providing any additional explicit chemistry knowledge, such as basic concepts like periodicity, or advanced features like molecular descriptors and fingerprints. We then show how Chemception can serve as a general-purpose neural network architecture for predicting toxicity, activity, and solvation properties when trained on a modest database of 600 to 40,000 compounds. When compared to multi-layer perceptron (MLP) deep neural networks trained with ECFP fingerprints, Chemception slightly outperforms in activity and solvation prediction and slightly underperforms in toxicity prediction. Having matched the performance of expert-developed QSAR/QSPR deep learning models, our work demonstrates the plausibility of using deep neural networks to assist in computational chemistry research, where the feature engineering process is performed primarily by a deep learning algorithm.

Deep generative networks provide a powerful tool for modeling complex data in a wide range of applications. In inverse problems that use these networks as generative priors on data, one must often perform inference of the inputs of the networks from the outputs. Inference is also required for sampling during stochastic training on these generative models. This paper considers inference in a deep stochastic neural network where the parameters (e.g., weights, biases and activation functions) are known and the problem is to estimate the values of the input and hidden units from the output. While several approximate algorithms have been proposed for this task, there are few analytic tools that can provide rigorous guarantees in the reconstruction error. This work presents a novel and computationally tractable output-to-input inference method called Multi-Layer Vector Approximate Message Passing (ML-VAMP). The proposed algorithm, derived from expectation propagation, extends earlier AMP methods that are known to achieve the replica predictions for optimality in simple linear inverse problems. Our main contribution shows that the mean-squared error (MSE) of ML-VAMP can be exactly predicted in a certain large system limit (LSL) where the numbers of layers is fixed and weight matrices are random and orthogonally-invariant with dimensions that grow to infinity. ML-VAMP is thus a principled method for output-to-input inference in deep networks with a rigorous and precise performance achievability result in high dimensions.

We build deep RL agents that execute declarative programs expressed in formal language. The agents learn to ground the terms in this language in their environment, and can generalize their behavior at test time to execute new programs that refer to objects that were not referenced during training. The agents develop disentangled interpretable representations that allow them to generalize to a wide variety of zero-shot semantic tasks.

Dance Dance Revolution (DDR) is a popular rhythm-based video game. Players perform steps on a dance platform in synchronization with music as directed by on-screen step charts. While many step charts are available in standardized packs, players may grow tired of existing charts, or wish to dance to a song for which no chart exists. We introduce the task of learning to choreograph. Given a raw audio track, the goal is to produce a new step chart. This task decomposes naturally into two subtasks: deciding when to place steps and deciding which steps to select. For the step placement task, we combine recurrent and convolutional neural networks to ingest spectrograms of low-level audio features to predict steps, conditioned on chart difficulty. For step selection, we present a conditional LSTM generative model that substantially outperforms n-gram and fixed-window approaches.

Great White North is on the top of that list. Because of its powerful academic research labs, Toronto has supplied a lot of talent in the field but has been experiencing a brain drain. As an effort to retain talent and make Toronto a global supplier of AI capability, the University of Toronto gathered a team of globally renowned researchers and founded the Vector Institute. The independent, non-profit AI research institution has created a lot of buzz and attracted a great deal of funding to its ongoing projects. With a combination of research and commercial goals, according to The Toronto Star, It will be backed by more than $150 million in public and corporate funding.

The progression of natural language processing, deep learning algorithms and significantly improved microphones means we are beginning to see interfaces that can understand and accommodate the rigid structure of human conversation. Companies are developing personalities for their virtual assistants, which have mostly arrived as a set of female characters – embodied in phones, home assistants and navigation systems – personifying AI via voice. However, it's important to note that applying this gendered identity has ramifications, especially because the resulting impulse is to then add a "her" to every product we can. Instead, we should pay attention to the unexamined decisions we're making to avoid digitizing existing power structures under the guise of a "default" identity.