Andrew Gordon Wilson: belief

Transcript context

…Absolutely beautiful. Andrew, we haven't even introduced you yet. Can you can you can you tell the audience about yourself? So I'm Andrew Wilson. I'm a professor at the Crown Institute of Mathematical Sciences and Center for Data Science at New York University. My work focuses on having a prescription for how to build intelligent systems, what are the key principles involved in model construction. I think although the field has made an extraordinary amount of empirical progress towards building more performant machine learning systems, We're still at early stages of understanding, you know, what principles should we broadly embrace when we're approaching our own problems. And so this involves work on understanding inductive biases, so what assumptions we should be making. And so this relates to symmetries like equivariances, maybe we're modeling molecules or rotation variant images could be translation variant. How do we represent those invariances? How do we learn them automatically? How do we discover interpretable scientific structure in our data that tells us something maybe surprising that we didn't know before that will go beyond a particular application. How do we represent uncertainty towards decision making? Arguably, a prediction that's just a point estimate without any kind of error bars associated with it isn't really actionable in the real world. You know, if you have a autonomous car and I it says there's a stop sign 5 feet ahead plus or minus 10,000 feet, you can't really do anything with that information. But if it's plus or minus 1 foot, then you can really act on that information. And, you know, observing that almost makes you paranoid, like, Okay, now I really need to represent uncertainty. Because if I don't have that uncertainty, then machine learning can't meaningfully engage with the real world. And Bayesian methods, I think, are a really great way of reasoning about uncertainty. And so that also forms a big part of my research program. Well, welcome to MLST. We have doctor Duggar in the house. The first time we've met in person for we've been doing this for 8 years. Yeah. 5 years on this channel, but we had the previous channel as well. Yeah. And Keith came to my to my wedding on on Friday. It's good to have you here, man.…

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