The Quest for The Ultimate Learning Machine

Abstract

Traditionally, there has been a division of labor between computers and humans where all forms of number crunching and bit manipulations are left to computers; whereas, intelligent decision-making is left to us humans. We are now at the cusp of a major transformation that can disrupt this balance. There are two triggers for this: firstly, trillions of connected devices (the "Internet of Things") that have begun to sense and transform the large untapped analog world around us to a digital world, and secondly, (thanks to Moore's Law) beyond-exaflop levels of compute, making a large class of structure learning and decision-making problems now computationally tractable. In this talk, I plan to discuss real challenges and amazing opportunities ahead of us for enabling a new class of applications and services, "Machine Intelligence Led Services". These services are distinguished by machines being in the 'lead' for tasks that were traditionally human-led, simply because computer-led implementations are about to reach and even surpass the quality metrics of current human-led offerings.