Very pleased to announce I'm going to be starting work at @Cambridge_CL on October 1st!
I will be the inaugural DeepMind Professor of Machine Learning.
cam.ac.uk/research/news/…
Thanks so much to @DeepMindAI for funding this Professorship!
Neil Lawrence
8,155 posts
Neil Lawrence
@lawrennd
Professor of machine learning at the University of Cambridge. Opinions are my own. Author of "The Atomic Human"
Mainly found on @lawrennd.bsky.social
- Close call at 39,000 ft. On the perils of 'vibe coding' through BA WiFi while flying to Nairobi ...
- Dear Graduate Students in Machine Learning, Only a few genuinely new ideas that have emerged over the last 5-10 years, so please be suspicious about your literature reviews that only contain citations from the last decade. Regards, PhD Examiners
- My favourite irony of AI is that playing chess turns out to be fairly easy ... It's kicking a football or having a chat with your neighbour that turns out to be very hard.
- I've reached that stage as a supervisor where the students have the idea, do the math, write the code, run experiments, draft the paper and I contribute by fixing the formatting errors in their bibliography files.
- Can we all agree to stop doing this? I'm sure the research is great, but let's not have press releases about advances until *after* clinical trials. It's making a mockery of the challenges of translating machine learning into practice.
- Academic historians have periods of expertise. Perhaps we should do the same for machine learning. I'd define my period as 2000-2013. When people ask me about BERT or GPT-3, I'll just explain that it's not my period and start talking about support vector machines instead.
- "Have you run PCA on it?" is the data scientist's equivalent of "Have you switched it off and on again?"
- Replying to @lawrennd @roydanroy and @delipraoI just did a retrospective analysis of 2014 NeurIPS ... There was no correlation between reviewer quality scores and paper's eventual impact. inverseprobability.com/talks/notes/th…
- Conversely, it is also amazing what academics achieve with scarce resource and a day job of educating the next generation. For me, the secret is people, not process. Remember, the deep learning revolution emerged from academia, not industry.
- Dear Machine Learning Community, Stop reading medium posts on machine learning and read @nhigham 's blog instead. nhigham.com Neil
- Last night I dreamt I was in a meeting where Jeff Bezos was explaining Gaussian processes on the board ...
- "Inconsistency in Conference Peer Review: Revisiting the 2014 NeurIPS Experiment" We logged the publication/citation status of over 1000 papers that were originally submitted to the 2014 conference. Write up on ArXiv here: arxiv.org/abs/2109.09774
- "Art of Statistics" by @d_spiegel should be required reading for *all* in machine learning. amazon.co.uk/Art-Statistics… Great as a first step for newcomers to getting the 'knack of data'. But as with all great writing, there's new insights for experts too!
