On Friday, the 15th of November 2019, we had the pleasure to host Dr. Russ Webb, research director of the newly established Apple AI research lab in Cambridge, UK, who gave a fascinating talk.
In his talk, he presented the recent AI research at Apple, with a focus on the limits of current DNN models and on new methods to advance the field. Specifically, work on learned histogram representations, sequential attention, and augmenting networks with non-traditional functions was covered as a path towards more intentional and reasoning ML systems. Moreover, important research directions of Apple were reviewed including goals of the Cambridge, UK, AI research centre.
Russ Webb had previously hosted at Apple AI research two of our team's members, Jason (twice) and Lionel. This collaboration has been very fruitful, and has offer three publications so far (available here, here and... here). The contributions of these works were presented in the talk, in the frame of the research questions they address which lay inside Apple's research priorities.
This talk has been a great opportunity, for students, researchers, and anyone interested in the field of AI to follow its latest research advancements, by a very knowledgeable and gifted presenter from a world leading company. Moreover, Dr. Webb was kind enough to attend our team's regular meeting, to attentively follow the discussion over the latest research efforts of the team, and to provide spot on remarks and suggestions.
We are looking forward to welcoming him again in the near future!