Escolar Documentos
Profissional Documentos
Cultura Documentos
Sergiy Zarubin
CST300
01/13/2018
Research Engineer, Applied Machine Learning
It would be hard to find a person who never heard about Artificial Intelligence. Isaac
Asimov's “I, Robot,” Terminator series, or iconic “2001: Space Odyssey” are few prominent
examples of possible features of Artificial Intelligence (AI). Although we did not come close to
developing anything as sophisticated as AI’s described in the works of fiction above, we came
close enough for people to start taking advancements in Artificial Intelligence and Machine
Learning seriously.
Crises?” points out that advancements in technology could lead to the unemployment crises. He
points to the success of the IBM’s Watson in the television game “Jeopardy” as one of the
examples how computers could succeed and overshadow humans in seemingly untrivial tasks
(pp. 37-39). Adam Daniel (2017) describes web application “DoNotPay” developed by Joshua
Browder to provide legal aid in fighting parking tickets. Adam implies that AI could replace the
tedious and repetitive tasks “such as legal research, due diligence, and contract review” (para 1-
3). Tasks that performed by the team of paralegals and interns could be easily automated.
“Slaugterbots” YouTube video by Stop Autonomous Weapons (2017) depicts the dystopian
future in which AI controlled killer drones rain terror in Washington D.C. and London. This
video shows us that even mass-murder could be outsourced to the machines. Artificial
Intelligence and Machine Learning are in our future. It will be up to us to determine what future
it will be.
Zarubin 2
One of the most prominent Artificial Intelligence projects is IBM’s Watson. Just a year
after Watson debuted on Jeopardy in 2011, the team behind the project published an article
“Watson: Beyond Jeopardy!” David Ferrucci et al.(2012) and his team describe how DeepQA
[official project name at that time] operates. It uses machine learning to analyze natural language
sources and compile the list of possible answers. DeepQA than evaluates possible answers based
on the evidence profile (p. 94). David proposes that we could use DeepQA in diagnostic medicine.
He reasons that use of natural language processing and the evidence evaluation algorithms of
Six years later, if we believe the IBM “Watson Health Perspectives”(2018) webpage, IBM
achieved stunning success in implementing its technology in the healthcare industry. Which is
contrasted by Ronald Schilling (2017) in the editorial “What hospitals can learn from IBM Watson
Health's challenges.” Schilling believes that Watson program failed its first real-life filed test at
Texas’ MD Anderson Cancer Center. He says that although Watson proved to be indispensable in
other industries, it failed to compete with doctors intuition. He postulates that IBM has a long way
Allison Linn (2015) announced in “The AI Blog” lunch of the Microsoft Project Oxford
in May 2015. Project Oxford provided developers with a set of Application Programming
Interfaces (APIs) which allowed third-party developers access to facial recognition services,
speech processing, image manipulation services (para 1). Today Project Oxford is a part of
Microsoft Azure Cognitive Services package (”Microsoft Azure” 2018). Set of APIs offered
expanded to include Emotion API, that attempts to recognize people emotions, Speaker
Recognition API, that could be used to identify speaker based on the stored voice sample,
Zarubin 3
Linguistic Analysis API, Custom Decision Service and even the API that allows the developer to
In March 2016 in Seoul, South Korea, Lee Sedol one of the top player in the game Go
faced AlphaGo, AI system built by the Google DeepMind division, reports Tanguy Chouard
(2016). China’s game Go is considered one of the most complicated board games in the world
which required lots of experience and human intuition to win. As a result, no computer system
could defeat human player until March 2016. AlphaGo was able to triumph over Lee three games
in a row, winning a one-million-dollar prize for its creators. Tanguy proposes that AlphaGo
developed the digital equivalent of the human intuition and could display unconventional style of
playing Go. He also suggests that DeepMinds creation could be the best Go player humanity
According to the DeepMind official website, the company was founded in 2010 and
acquired by Google four years later in 2014. DeepMind’s headquarters located in London UK,
with several research centers in Canada and DeepMind Applied Team in California. DeepMind’s
founders still running the company: Dr. Demis Hassabi (CEO), Mustafa Suleyman (Head of
Applied AI), and Dr. Shane Legg (Chief Scientist). Dr. Hassabis, “a former child chess
prodigy,” earned his Computer Science degree from Cambridge University with honors. He
received his Ph.D. at University College London in a field of cognitive neuroscience. Mustafa
Suleyman, on the other hand, dropped out from Oxford University at the age of 19. Dr. Shane
Legg completed his Ph.D. at Dalle Molle Institute for Artificial Intelligence Research under the
guidance of professor Marcus Hutter, “the leading authority on theoretical models of super
DeepMind’s award panel is impressive consisting of several “Best Paper Awards” from
Demis Hassabis awarded the title “pioneer of 2017” by Time magazine (“About Us” 2018).
DeepMind developed Streams application for the United Kingdom National Health
Services (NHS) which alerts medical staff if the patient develops acute kidney injury or sepsis
based on patients test results and previously recorded health conditions (“DeepMind Health”
2018). Streams applications serve a public good by saving peoples lives. On the other hand,
DeepMind was able to reduce Googles electrical bill by 40% using its AI to manage Google
datacenters cooling systems, saving Google hundreds of millions of dollars (Evans, Gao 2018).
DeepMind also played a vital role in improving Google Assistant voice. WaveNet technology
significantly reduced the time it takes to generate natural sounding voice ( Oord et al. 2017).
Not only DeepMind applies its research in the real world to solve outstanding technical
and social issues with the help of AI. They also emphasize the importance of the social impact
AI could have on the modern world. Working closely with partners around the globe DeepMind
makes its goal to preemptively solve the ethical issues AI could create in the future (“DeepMind
know as a company that is “Solving intelligence through research.” David Silver et al.(2016)
and his team describes how they use “deep neural networks” to create a self-learning AI that
could compete and win against best human players (pp. 488-489). Volodymyr Mnih et al. (2015)
and DeepMind team writes about DQN (deep Q-Network) that uses the “deep neural network” in
combination with reinforced learning to play classic Atari games using only screen capture as its
Zarubin 5
inputs and a joystick as its output (pp. 529-532). Alex Graves et al. (2016) introduces
Differential Neural Computer (DNC) which combines neural networks with long-term storage to
extend the scope of problems that neural network could solve (p. 471). Moreover, DNC is an
When we look at DeepMind’s Careers page, we confronted with the following message
“Our extraordinary mission requires extraordinary people.” That statement is followed by the
long list of opportunities available. First is a long list of Research position trailed by the
engineering and operations. Among many openings, one gives us an idea of what kind of talent
1. “ Masters degree
7. Multi-threaded design,
8. A passion for AI
Considering that one could get an internship position with DeepMind only in last, or
second to last, years of the Ph.D. studies with an emphasis on machine learning or neuroscience,
we could surmise that it would take much effort to get a job at DeepMind.
Zarubin 6
potential DeepMind Research Engineer to meet bare minimum requirements. CSUMB Computer
Science program seems to have some of the classes specifically tailored for the Research
Engineer position. According to “Info Tech & Communication design courses” page of the
online catalog, CST 325 Graphics Programming develops GPU programming skills. CST370
Design and analysis of Algorithms will provide a solid foundation for designing algorithms
(“Catalog 2017-2018” 2018). Moreover, if the students choose their Capstone project to be in
deep neural networks with reinforced learning using DeepMind’s differentiable neural computer
to solve a real-world problem, it might look good in the cover letter. Also, CSUMB has a fully
online Masters program. Students could increase their chances of being hired by participating in
Outside of the CSUMB program, we would need to familiarize ourselves with few of the
DeepNet and Google Open Source projects: TenserFlow, Sonnet, DeepMind Lab, StarCraft II
API. Let's look at each of them intimately. TenserFlow is a brainchild of Google Brain Team. It
is a tool designed to facilitate research into machine learning and deep neural networks (“Tenser
Flow” 2018). Sonnet is an open source neural network framework designed by DeepMind
(Reynolds et al. 2017). DeepMind Lab is a game platform based on Quake III Arena engine and
is design to train AI in a 3D environment.For the fans of Real Time Strategies (RTS), StarCraft
II API allows the game to be used as AI research environment (Vinyals O.& Gaffney S.&
Ewalds T 2017).
DeepMind’s About Us page award section could give us an idea of what conferences we
have to attend to meet with DeepMind decision makers (“About Us” 2018). International
Conference on Machine Learning will take place from June 10 to June 15, 2019, in Long Beach
Zarubin 7
Learning Representations will take place from April 30th to May 3rd, 2018, in Vancouver, Canada
(“ICLR” 2018). The Association for Uncertainty in Artificial Intelligence will be hosted in
Monterey California in the second week of August (“AUAI” 2018). Unfortunately, most of the
conferences are exclusive, and only ICLR has an option for students to volunteer. Therefore the
With the advanced of Open Data platforms and explosion of the Internet of Things
technologies humanity begins to generate more and more data. That data needs to be processed,
analyzed and presented to the decision maker in a digestible format. No human has the capability
corporations to small retailers, want to become more efficient, save money and maximize profits.
They can do that by analyzing seemingly unrelated data, petabytes of data in fact. There is only
one way to achieve peak efficiency – employ AI. So, specialization in artificial intelligence is a
sure way to gain job security. Moreover, if we start on that path, we might as well shoot for the
stars, making our goal to work with the best. Working at DeepMind.
Zarubin 8
References
Chouard, Tanguy. (2016). The Go Files: AI computer clinches victory against Go champion.
Daniels, Adam. (2017, August 07). Artificial Intelligence Legal Revolution - It Began with
2017.
https://deepmind.com/applied/deepmind-ethics-society/
health/
Evans R., Gao J. “DeepMind AI Reduces Google Data Centre Cooling Bill by 40%” Retrieved
centre-cooling-bill-40/
Ferrucci D., Levas A., Bagchi S., Gondek D., & Mueller E. (2013). Watson: Beyond Jeopardy!
Graves A., Wayne G., Reynolds M., Harley T., Danihelka I., Grabska-Barwińska A., . . .
Hassabis D. (2016). Hybrid computing using a neural network with dynamic external
https://deepmind.com/applied/deepmind-health/working-nhs/how-were-helping-today/.
Linn, Allison, “Microsoft’s Project Oxford helps developers build more intelligent apps.” The AI
developers-build-more-intelligent-apps/.
us/try/cognitive-services/.
Mnih V., Kavukcuoglu K., Silver D., Rusu A., Veness J., Bellemare M., . . . Hassabis D. (2015).
Oord, A., Li, Y., Babuschkin, I., Simonyan, K., Vinyals, O., Kavukcuoglu, K., . . . Hassabis, D.
Schilling, Ronald B. (2017). What hospitals can learn from IBM Watson Health's challenges.
Silver D., Huang A., Maddison J, Guez A., Sifre L., Van Den Driessche G., . . . Hassabis D.
(2016). Mastering the game of Go with deep neural networks and tree search. Nature,
529(7587), 484-9.
Zarubin 10
https://deepmind.com/research/
[Stop Autonomous Weapons]. (2017 November 12). Slaughterbots[Video File]. Retrieved from
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9CO6M2HsoIA.
Reynolds M.,Barth-Maron G.Besse F.,Casas D, Fidjeland A,...Viola F., “Open sourcing Sonnet -
a new library for constructing neural networks,” DeepMind Blog, February 7, 2017,
https://deepmind.com/blog/open-sourcing-sonnet/
Vinyals O., Gaffney S., Ewalds T.,” DeepMind and Blizzard open StarCraft II as an AI research
and-blizzard-open-starcraft-ii-ai-research-environment/
https://www.ibm.com/blogs/watson-health/.
WaveNet launches in the Google Assistant, Retrieved January 09, 2018, from
https://deepmind.com/blog/wavenet-launches-google-assistant/