Nikhil Buduma

Nikhil Buduma is a computer science student at MIT with deep interests in machine learning and the biomedical sciences. He is a two-time gold medalist at the International Biology Olympiad, a student researcher, and a “hacker.” He was selected as a finalist in the 2012 International BioGENEius Challenge for his research on the pertussis vaccine, and served as the lab manager of the Veregge Lab at San Jose State University at the age of 16. At age 19, he had a first author publication on using protist models for high-throughput drug screening using flow cytometry. Nikhil also has a passion for education, regularly writing technical posts on his blog, teaching machine learning tutorials at hackathons, and recently received the Young Innovator Award from the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation for re-envisioning the traditional chemistry set using augmented reality.

Building intelligent machines

To understand deep learning, let’s start simple.

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Use code DATA50 to get 50% off of the new early release of “Fundamentals of Deep Learning: Designing Next-Generation Artificial Intelligence Algorithms.” Editor’s note: This is an excerpt of “Fundamentals of Deep Learning,” by Nikhil Buduma.

The brain is the most incredible organ in the human body. It dictates the way we perceive every sight, sound, smell, taste, and touch. It enables us to store memories, experience emotions, and even dream. Without it, we would be primitive organisms, incapable of anything other than the simplest of reflexes. The brain is, inherently, what makes us intelligent.

The infant brain only weighs a single pound, but somehow, it solves problems that even our biggest, most powerful supercomputers find impossible. Within a matter of days after birth, infants can recognize the faces of their parents, discern discrete objects from their backgrounds, and even tell apart voices. Within a year, they’ve already developed an intuition for natural physics, can track objects even when they become partially or completely blocked, and can associate sounds with specific meanings. And by early childhood, they have a sophisticated understanding of grammar and thousands of words in their vocabularies.

For decades, we’ve dreamed of building intelligent machines with brains like ours — robotic assistants to clean our homes, cars that drive themselves, microscopes that automatically detect diseases. But building these artificially intelligent machines requires us to solve some of the most complex computational problems we have ever grappled with, problems that our brains can already solve in a manner of microseconds. To tackle these problems, we’ll have to develop a radically different way of programming a computer using techniques largely developed over the past decade. This is an extremely active field of artificial computer intelligence often referred to as deep learning. Read more…