In this post we continue our summaries of the NeurIPS invited talks from the 2020 meeting. Here, we cover the talks by Chris Bishop (Microsoft Research) and Saiph Savage (Carnegie Mellon University). Chris began his talk by suggesting that now is a particularly exciting time to be involved in AI. What he termed "the real AI revolution" has nothing to do with artificial general intelligence (AGI), but is driven by the way we create software, and hence new technology. Machine learning is becoming ubiquitous and can be used to solve many problems that cannot, yet, be solved using other methods.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) hits the headlines a lot. Whether it's threatening to take your job or offering to be your virtual assistant, this latest development often promises to improve your life in some way. But how will AI impact us? Do we really need AI to be more efficient or happier? The amount of information out there can be confusing, and it doesn't help when a lot of it is conflicting or debatable.

Yes, Microsoft has an artificial intelligence research lab, and the BBC gives us a rare look inside. AI refers to machines or computer systems that behave in a way simulating human intelligence, and a Microsoft project that makes use of this technology is "Seeing AI", an app designed to help people with a visual impairment get information about their world through the camera of a smartphone. "Science fiction has made an indelible impression on what people understand artificial intelligence (AI) to be. There is much anxiety that AI will take jobs, and fear that intelligent robots may harm us and one day take over the world. This causes us at Microsoft great concern because if AI is to truly benefit society, we must gain the trust of the people whose lives it will transform," said Chris Bishop, Lab Director of Microsoft Research Cambridge and Microsoft Technical Fellow.

Chris Bishop, a world-renowned expert in artificial intelligence and machine learning, was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society, the oldest scientific academy in continuous existence, on Friday. It's a pinnacle of my career," said Bishop, distinguished scientist and director of Microsoft Research Cambridge, the European arm of Microsoft's research organization. Bishop is among 50 other scientists from across the United Kingdom and Commonwealth and 10 Foreign Members elected to the Royal Society, including pioneers in understanding the chemical origins of life, and discovering how humans operate on a 24-hour cycle. "Science is a great triumph of human achievement and has contributed hugely to the prosperity and health of our world. In the coming decades it will play an increasingly crucial role in tackling the great challenges of our time including food, energy, health and the environment. The new Fellows of the Royal Society have already contributed much to science and it gives me great pleasure to welcome them into our ranks," said Venki Ramakrishnan, President of the Royal Society, in announcing the news earlier today.

The last five years have witnessed a dramatic resurgence of excitement in the goal of creating intelligent machines. Technology companies are now investing billions of dollars in this field, new research laboratories are springing up around the globe, and competition for talent has become intense. In this Discourse Chris Bishop describes some of the recent technology breakthroughs which underpin this enthusiasm, and explores some of the many exciting opportunities which artificial intelligence offers. Chris Bishop is the Laboratory Director at Microsoft Research Cambridge and is a professor of computer science at the University of Edinburgh. He has extensive expertise in artificial intelligence and machine learning.

Microsoft has set up an internal "AI University" in a bid to help it overcome the skills shortage in the booming field of artificial intelligence (AI). Chris Bishop, the director of a Microsoft Research lab in Cambridge, UK, told Business Insider that the Microsoft AI University is one of several schemes Microsoft has implemented to address the lack of talent in the field of AI, where there's fierce competition between tech firms to hire the best people. "We have a thing called AI University, which is an internal education programme so that people who are incredibly smart and capable but trained in a different domain can quickly learn about machine learning both in a foundational sense but also in a practical sense of how to use it," said Bishop. When it comes to AI talent, Microsoft is competing with the likes of Amazon and Apple, who also have research offices in Cambridge, as well as DeepMind (owned by Google), Facebook, Twitter, and many others. Chris Bishop is the head of a Microsoft Research lab in Cambridge.Microsoft The global battle for talent is raging because of the potential AI breakthroughs that bright minds stand to make in the next few years thanks to recent advances in computation power and the availability of vast data sets.

Chris Bishop is the director of Microsoft Research Cambridge. The global war for artificial intelligence (AI) talent is raging, with tech giants fighting it out to hire the brightest minds in the field and use them to take their platforms into unchartered waters. There's currently a shortage of people with the skills and experience needed to make breakthroughs in machine learning, a field of computer science that gives machines the ability to learn without being explicitly programmed. Fortunately, many of the top minds in the field are going to be concentrated in one place this week when they descend on a conference in Long Beach, California, called NIPS, which stands for neural information processing systems. Google, Microsoft, DeepMind, Facebook, Intel, Nvidia, Amazon, Apple, and Open AI (Elon Musk's AI research lab) will all be at NIPS presenting their latest research and looking to hire people from rival firms, as well as PhD students fresh out of universities like Stanford, MIT, Oxford, Cambridge, and Imperial.

What was your path toward learning ML? What books did you enjoy most while learning ML? What were the blind alleys? In high school, I had a lot of different interests, most of which weren't related to math or science. I made up my own language with a phonetic alphabet, I took a lot of creative writing and literature classes, etc.