AI researcher offers insight on promise, pitfalls of machine learning

These days, the latest developments in artificial intelligence (AI) research always get plenty of attention, but an AI researcher at the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory believes one AI technique might be getting a little too much. Ranjeev Mittu heads NRL's Information Management and Decision Architectures Branch and has been working in the AI field for more than two decades. "I think people have focused on an area of machine learning--deep learning (aka deep networks)--and less so on the variety of other artificial intelligence techniques," Mittu said. "The biggest limitation of deep networks is that a complete understanding of how these networks arrive at a solution is still far from reality." Deep learning is a machine learning technique that can be used to recognize patterns, such as identifying a collection of pixels as an image of a dog.