Pre-West Prep: Melanie Mitchell

March 17, 2015

Talk: Visual Situation Recognition: An Integration of Deep Networks and Analogy-Making

Melanie Mitchell's keynote at Clojure/West is about building computer systems that recognize visual situations.

Background

Melanie Mitchell is a researcher in Artificial Intelligence, complex systems, and machine learning. She did her PhD with Douglas Hofstadter, which resulted in Copycat, which was featured prominently in Hofstadter's book Fluid Concepts and Creative Analogies. Perhaps coincidentally, Copycat was written in Lisp. The branch of Artificial Intelligence that she works in is probably different from what you would read in most texbooks or learn in college courses.

As an introduction to her work, I would recommend Complexity a Guided Tour (Youtube) for a good introduction to Complexity in general. And Using analogy to discover the meaning of images (Youtube) as an introduction to her work with analogies.

Why it matters

Alex Miller (the conference organizer) is a fan of Hofstadter's. He invited Hofstadter to keynote at Strange Loop in 2013. He also had Jeff Hawkins talk about modeling the neocortex at Strange Loop 2012.

About Melanie Mitchell

Homepage - Twitter - Author page on Amazon

This post is one of a series called Pre-West Prep, which is also published by email. It's all about getting ready for the upcoming Clojure/West, organized by Cognitect. Conferences are ongoing conversations and explorations. Speakers discuss trends, best practices, and the future by drawing on the rich context built up in past conferences and other media.

That rich context is what Pre-West Prep is about. I want to enhance everyone's experience at the conference by surfacing that context. With just a little homework, we can be better prepared to understand and enjoy the talks and the hallway conversations.

Clojure/West is a conference organized and hosted by Cognitect. This information is in no way official. It is not sponsored by nor affiliated with Clojure/West or Cognitect. It is simply me (and helpers) curating and organizing public information about the conference.