Maluuba Microsoft: Towards Artificial General Intelligence

Ever since we were classmates in our AI course (CS 486) at the University of Waterloo, way back in the summer of 2010, our vision has been to solve artificial general intelligence by creating literate machines that could think, reason and communicate like humans. Understanding human language is an extremely complex task and, ultimately, the holy grail in the field of AI. In early 2014, we observed great leaps in the fields of computer vision and speech recognition and pondered the potential of Deep Learning and Reinforcement Learning to enable our mission of creating literate machines. We realized that a great opportunity lay ahead, where machines could learn to model the intelligence and decision-making capabilities of the human brain. This meant more than simple pattern matching on text, but building systems that can actually comprehend, synthesize, infer and make logical decisions like humans. So far, our team has focused on the areas of machine reading comprehension, dialogue understanding, and general (human) intelligence capabilities such as memory, common-sense reasoning, and information seeking behavior.