RL Specialization; Tesla acquires DeepScale; OpenAI at TC DisruptSF
Vision Week Issue #1
RL Specialization from UAlberta on Coursera
University of Alberta and Alberta Machine Intelligence Institute (AMII) have come together to launch a specialization (4 courses) on Reinforcement Learning on Coursera. If you have been trying to learn RL, you might already know that there are not a lot of well structured go-to courses out there. There are some really good resources like Sutton & Barto’s text book, David Silver’s course lectures and UC Berkeley RL course lectures on YouTube, OpenAI’s spinning up in deep RL. But they lack well structured assignments or proper beginner-friendly MOOC setup.
Why this matters:
The reason this course looks promising is, it’s from the people who work directly with the great minds in RL like Prof. Sutton. In fact Sutton himself is involved in the creation of this course. I kind of feel like these courses might be the video version of Sutton’s text book. But it’s definitely worth checking out. Give it a try and let me know your thoughts if you manage to finish any of the courses in the specialization.
OpenAI at TechCrunch Disrupt SF
Sam Altman (CEO) and Greg Brockman (CTO) from OpenAI were at TechCrunch Disrupt San Francisco and discussed some of the company’s earlier decisions (forming capped for profit OpenAI LP, partnership with Microsoft, GPT-2 etc) and future roadmap for OpenAI. Greg also showed a demo of their recent experiment with multi-agent RL and how the agents discovered tool usage.
Tesla acquires DeepScale
Tesla has acquired DeepScale (the company behind SqueezeNet paper). SqueezeNet was one of the first attempts in creating smaller models without losing too much accuracy. This acquisition clearly shows the need for efficient models that can run on edge devices with smaller footprint. AI on edge is definitely booming.
Introduction to TensorFlow Lite on Udacity
TensorFlow Lite team has launched a course on Udacity covering deploying TFLite models to mobile and edge devices. Google also released their Coral Edge TPU earlier this year to advance AI applications on the edge. The course may not be advanced in-depth course. But it can definitely serve as a good comprehensive introduction to TensorFlow Lite.
PyTorch Mobile
Until now, if you want to deploy a model to mobile, your best bet was TensorFlow Lite. PyTorch has added support for mobile (Android and iOS) with their 1.3 release. (PyTorch is upping it’s game!)
DeepMind Podcast
DeepMind has completely restructured the organization recently. They have released a limited series podcast with mathematician Hanna Fry hosting the show and giving us an insider look. All the eight episodes are out. You can find it on Spotify, Google Podcasts or wherever you consume your podcasts.
PyTorch official YouTube channel
PyTorch gets it official YouTube Channel (finally!). I have been waiting for this. Earlier the videos were scattered among Facebook Developers YouTube channel and facebook pages. Now we can watch all the content in one place. Go ahead and watch the videos (PyTorch Developer Conference, Summer Hackathon etc) when you are free.
