Intelligent computers |RoBin PieDeleu (2013)
‘I believe we have the capacity to build systems that get closer and closer to how we think.’ Ed Grefenstette (2008), co-founder of Dark Blue Labs, aims to do just that. Dark Blue Labs was an artificial intelligence (AI) start-up acquired by Google at the end of last year, only a few months after its creation. Along with his fellow Oxford academics and co-founders, Ed has since joined Google DeepMind, another British high-tech company recently bought by the internet giant, whose mission statement is to ‘solve intelligence’ by combining so-called machine learning techniques and neuroscience. Aimed not just at heavy-hitting researchers but also the teamwork that they already had in place, this type of acquisition is symptomatic of the growing interest of Silicon Valley’s largest firms in the relatively untapped talent at Oxbridge. In this context, where a lot of the best and most mature academic groups are being bought up by industry, there is only a small pool of players for companies interested in developing their research on AI. So how do I get on Google’s radar? The answer is simple: ‘publish’. But why leave academia? Apart from the promise of financial incentives, a company like Google guarantees access to
engineering resources beyond the wildest dreams of any Oxford department: ‘In academia, you have a lot of freedom, but it is hard to get people to implement all your ideas and to manage a team until you are fairly senior, which we were not,’ says Ed. ‘We could have waited ten years and missed the boat on research problems, or we could get money and hire interns, engineers and other researchers to speed things up.’ Rest assured: academia still has a role in training the researchers of tomorrow. A lot of the speculative, long-term thinking has to come from academia, as it is often the starting point of innovation. But, according to Ed, ‘Academia needs to rethink how it structures its relations with industry, especially in Computer Science.’ Currently, academia is bleeding a lot of good researchers into industry because it is not competitive economically. Ed and his colleagues constituted one of the leading research groups in machine learning and natural language processing, which you could think of as training computer programs to learn, recognise and react to patterns in language (such as English, Mandarin, Xhosa, etc., as opposed to formal programming languages). Often inspired by how information flows through neural pathways in our brains, ‘We build very small
Ed Grefenstette
istockphoto.com/Henrik5000
and simple virtual brains and train them to solve tasks,’ explains Ed. ‘Our objective is to solve natural language understanding’: that is, develop and sell technologies that allow computers to interact with us in a way that is much closer to how we interact with other humans. This work attempts to capture the ‘fluidity of our dialogue, how we collaboratively solve problems and how we react to each other’s actions and intentions’. In practice, the technologies that result mean better search or product recommendation engines and better interaction within a computerised household. With the improvement of natural language processing techniques such as those developed by Dark Blue Labs, it is possible that one day far into the future everyone’s work will become a target for automation. We may see first an intermediary stage during which intelligent systems will assist us in collaboratively solving problems. According to Ed, these may enhance, speed up and streamline the way we work, but not replace us. One of the reasons that machine learning is so successful today is that it bridges different areas at multiple levels, such as vision and language, mathematics and physics. Similarly, Ed’s research qualifies as strongly interdisciplinary: ‘Not only did the Oxford Department of Computer Science provide an environment in which I could do this research, but interdisciplinarity is also something that is fostered and encouraged within the graduate community at Balliol. Living at Holywell Manor for two years and making friends with philosophers and English literature scholars, historians and economists, kept my desire to connect different areas alive.’ i s s u e n o. 2 1 m aY 2 0 1 5
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