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Machine Learning Expert Michael Jordan On the Delusions of Big Data
First time accepted submitter agent elevator writes In a wide-ranging interview at IEEE Spectrum, Michael I. Jordan skewers a bunch of sacred cows, basically saying that: The overeager adoption of big data is likely to result in catastrophes of analysis comparable to a national epidemic of collapsing bridges. Hardware designers creating chips based on the human brain are engaged in a faith-based undertaking likely to prove a fool's errand; and despite recent claims to the contrary, we are no further along with computer vision than we were with physics when Isaac Newton sat under his apple tree.
The google car doesn't posses the kind of general visual intelligence he was describing. It solves very specific problems (follow the road; if something is in the way, then stop; match speed with the vehicle ahead).
As it happens, I am a computer vision expert.
I do wonder how much useful stuff was done with the results from physics back then as opposed to emperical hand-hacking of everything. I suspect not much.
Computer vision has a long way to go. On the other hand, there are plenty of things which it does do, some of which are more or less impossible otherwise.
OCR is very useful. It runs the mail system of many countries and has plenty of use when it comes to digitising old documents. This would be possible, but deeply tedious by hand.
Structure from motion is used heavily in the film industry to work out 3D structure and motion for placing virtual objects. Almost impossible to do well without computer vision.
Photo stitching for automatic panoramas. Classic CV system, and my phone comes with it built in.
Number plate recognition. Apart from the rather unpleasant big brother potential, London's congestion charging system runs off this and it does very good things for London.
Those cameras/phones with face detection built in. Not sure how useful it is but it works.
Lego Fusion is a recently released game which appears to rely on computer vision.
Oh those phone based barcode and QR scanners. Very useful.
The pick and place machines which use vision for accurate placement.
This machine which is really awesome: https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
Lots of other industrial things are controlled by CV.
Certain types of super resolution microscopy are based on computer vision.
And that's just a few off the top of my head.
So yeah computer vision has a long way to go. On the other hand, it's out there doing real things right now. It might not be very advanced CV (the industrial stuff often is not because it needs to be reliable), but it's still CV and it's still being used.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
I am doing a postdoc in applied statistics/machine learning and I was very surprised by this interview since it is contradictory to what Michael Jordan has himself expressed as an invited speaker at conferences as well as what his most recent research projects are focused at. It appears that, according to Michael Jordan himself as expressed on his webpage, the article is a hack-job where the journalist is completely misrepresenting his view on big data. To quote:
I’ve found myself engaged with the Media recently (...) for an interview that has been published in the IEEE Spectrum.
That latter process was disillusioning. Well, perhaps a better way to say it is that I didn’t harbor that many illusions about science and technology journalism going in, and the process left me with even fewer.
The interview is here: http://spectrum.ieee.org/robotics/artificial-intelligence/machinelearning-maestro-michael-jordan-on-the-delusions-of-big-data-and-other-huge-engineering-efforts
Read the title and the first paragraph and attempt to infer what’s in the body of the interview. Now go read the interview and see what you think about the choice of title.
The title contains the phrase “The Delusions of Big Data and Other Huge Engineering Efforts”. It took me a moment to realize that this was the title that had been placed (without my knowledge) on the interview I did a couple of weeks ago. Anyway who knows me, or who’s attended any of my recent talks knows that I don’t feel that Big Data is a delusion at all; rather, it’s a transformative topic, one that is changing academia (e.g., for the first time in my 25-year career, a topic has emerged that almost everyone in academia feels is on the critical path for their sub-discipline), and is changing society (most notably, the micro-economies made possible by learning about individual preferences and then connecting suppliers and consumers directly are transformative). But most of all, from my point of view, it’s a *major engineering and mathematical challenge*, one that will not be solved by just gluing together a few existing ideas from statistics, optimization, databases and computer systems.
Source: https://amplab.cs.berkeley.edu/2014/10/22/big-data-hype-the-media-and-other-provocative-words-to-put-in-a-title/
No, seriously. Here are some choice quotes:
"I read all the time about engineers describing their new chip designs in what seems to me to be an incredible abuse of language. They talk about the “neurons” or the “synapses” on their chips. But that can’t possibly be the case; a neuron is a living, breathing cell of unbelievable complexity."
"It’s always been my impression that when people in computer science describe how the brain works, they are making horribly reductionist statements that you would never hear from neuroscientists."
"Lately there seems to be an epidemic of stories about how computers have tackled the vision problem, and that computers have become just as good as people at vision."
"Even in facial recognition, my impression is that it still only works if you’ve got pretty clean images to begin with."
"I have a hobby of searching for information about silly Kickstarter projects, mostly to see how preposterous they are, and I end up getting served ads from the same companies for many months."
Here's the catch: all of these quotes are from the interviewer. Jordan has a lot of really nuanced claims here, but it's clear that the interviewer has an agenda of his own.