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AI Winter. How Canadians contributed to end it?

Aug 16, 2016

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What is AI Winter ?

  • A period where the promise of AI theory failed to meet practical applications

  • Financial support dried up

  • Researchers lost interest

Topics:

  • 1

    What trigerred AI Winter?

  • 2

    What/Who ended AI winter?

Let’s go back in time to 1960’s

Just a fyi. Most of the video clips below are 30 to 50 seconds in duration

Early 1960’s: Invention of Perceptron

Section1: What trigerred AI Winter?

1969: Marvin Minsky and Seymour Pappert published a book - "Perceptron", which cited some limitations in Rosenblatt’s technique. This book triggered a long AI Winter

If you haven’t heard of Marvin Minsky, google him for lasting wisdom

Seymour Papert has been my hero for teaching me 'How to learn'

1970’s: AI funding dried up

General feeling within AI was that Neural networks was non sense. Minsky and Pappert had just shown that could not do all things. They couldn’t do everything from learning .This limitation was over generalized.

Reference Hinton’s Lectures

1971: Tragedy struck: Rosenblatt died in car accident

Who were leading AI researchers during this time?

Section2: Who ended AI Winter?

CIFAR & Canadian Researchers (Geoffery Hinton, Yann Lecun, Yoshua Bengio) and others

1982: CIFAR was found to fund advanced research

These are Canadian researchers who really kept the torch burning

Geoffery Hinton - Inventor of Backpropogation

Yann Lecun - Founding father of convolutional nets

Yoshua Bengio

Late 1990’s: AI Winter ended with renewed interest in AI, remarkable increase in computing power and bigdata

Could there be another AI Winter in near future?

Probably not

Rodney Brooks in 2002 said - 'AI is around you every second of the day'. Suggesting end of AI Winter

End of post

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