Greg Ver Steeg thinks there's less difference between supervised and unsupervised machine learning than might appear to be the case. At his early November seminar on unsupervised learning, Ver Steeg made that point through a series of creative analogies - and described the concrete ways in which his work appears to have contributed to a California Institute of Technology researcher's cancer remission.
At the seminar, part of ISI's "What's Going On" research breakfast series, Ver Steeg walked an audience of about 30 ISI colleagues through the distinction between supervised and unsupervised learning, beginning with photos that could qualify for adorable-cat YouTube videos.
Supervised learning, said Ver Steeg, involves "cute" data that is recognizable and has training labels, meaning data is designated as either "cat" or "not cat." While such data can be trained to millions of parameters, it's difficult to learn anything new, since the data already is known to be or not be a cat.
Conversely, "Unsupervised learning is the dark matter of artificial intelligence," he said. As in the universe, which is known to be mostly dark matter about which little is understood, most learning by humans and animals actually is unsupervised. In other words, how we learn is rarely as simple as dividing the world into cats and not-cats. We instead work with a vast range of information from which we unconsciously manage to identify elements, predict outcomes and discern vital relationships.Read More
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Building Correct Industrial Cyber-Physical Systems: Methodology, Formal Foundations, and Tools
11:00am - 12:00pm PSTReflections on Code-Reuse Attacks and Defenses
10:30am - 12:00pm PSTGreg Ver Steeg thinks there's less difference between supervised and unsupervised machine learning than might appear to be the case. At his early November seminar on unsupervised learning, Ver Steeg made that point through a series of creative analogies - and described the concrete ways in which his work appears to have contributed to a California Institute of Technology researcher's cancer remission.
At the seminar, part of ISI's "What's Going On" research breakfast series, Ver Steeg walked an audience of about 30 ISI colleagues through the distinction between supervised and unsupervised learning, beginning with photos that could qualify for adorable-cat YouTube videos.
Supervised learning, said Ver Steeg, involves "cute" data that is recognizable and has training labels, meaning data is designated as either "cat" or "not cat." While such data can be trained to millions of parameters, it's difficult to learn anything new, since the data already is known to be or not be a cat.
Conversely, "Unsupervised learning is the dark matter of artificial intelligence," he said. As in the universe, which is known to be mostly dark matter about which little is understood, most learning by humans and animals actually is unsupervised. In other words, how we learn is rarely as simple as dividing the world into cats and not-cats. We instead work with a vast range of information from which we unconsciously manage to identify elements, predict outcomes and discern vital relationships.Read More
