Going deep on deep learning with Dr. Jianfeng Gao - Microsoft Research

Dr. Jianfeng Gao is a veteran computer scientist, an IEEE Fellow and the current head of the Deep Learning Group at Microsoft Research. He and his team are exploring novel approaches to advancing the state-of-the-art on deep learning in areas like NLP, computer vision, multi-modal intelligence and conversational AI. Today, Dr. Gao gives us an overview of the deep learning landscape and talks about his latest work on Multi-task Deep Neural Networks, Unified Language Modeling and vision-language pre-training. He also unpacks the science behind task-oriented dialog systems as well as social chatbots like Microsoft Xiaoice, and gives us some great book recommendations along the way! Jianfeng Gao: Historically, there are two approaches to achieve the goal. One is to use large data. The idea is that if I can collect all the data in the world, then I believe the representation learned from this data is universal. Because I see all of them. The other approach is that, since the goal of this representation is to serve different applications, how about I train the model using application-specific objective functions across many, many different applications? Host: You're listening to the Microsoft Research Podcast, a show that brings you closer to the cutting-edge of technology research and the scientists behind it. Host: Dr. Jianfeng Gao is a veteran computer scientist, an IEEE Fellow and the current head of the Deep Learning Group at Microsoft Research. He and his team are exploring novel approaches to advancing the state-of-the-art on deep learning in areas like NLP, computer vision, multi-modal intelligence and conversational AI. Today, Dr. Gao gives us an overview of the deep learning landscape and talks about his latest work on Multi-task Deep Neural Networks, Unified Language Modeling and vision-language pre-training. He also unpacks the science behind task-oriented dialog systems as well as social chatbots like Microsoft Xiaoice, and gives us some great book recommendations along the way! What gets you up in the morning? Jianfeng Gao: It's like all the world-class research teams, our goal, ultimate goal, is to advance the state-of-the-art and we want to push the AI frontiers by using deep learning technology or developing new deep learning technologies.