Unsupervised Learning: The Next Frontier in AI

The rapid progress of AI in the last few years are largely the result of advances in deep learning and neural nets, combined with the availability of large datasets and fast GPUs. We now have systems that can recognize images with an accuracy that rivals that of humans. This will lead to revolutions in several domains such as autonomous transportation and medical image analysis. But all of these systems currently use supervised learning in which the machine is trained with inputs labeled by humans. The challenge of the next several years is to let machines learn from raw, unlabeled data, such as video or text. This is known as unsupervised learning. AI systems today do not possess "common sense", which humans and animals acquire by observing the world and acting in it, allowing them to understand how the world works. Some of us see unsupervised learning as the key towards machines with common sense. New approaches to, and recent progress in unsupervised learning will be reviewed.

Yann LeCun is the Director of AI Research at Facebook and the Silver Professor of Data Science, Computer Science, Neural Science, and Electrical Engineering at New York University. He received the Electrical Engineer Diploma from Ecole Superieure d'Ingenieurs en Electrotechnique et Electronique (ESIEE), Paris in 1983, and a PhD in Computer Science from Universite Pierre et Marie Curie (Paris) in 1987. His current interests include AI, machine learning, computer perception, mobile robotics, and computational neuroscience. He has published over 180 technical papers and book chapters on these topics as well as on neural networks, handwriting recognition, image processing and compression, and on dedicated circuits and architectures for computer perception.