Joe Marino

Joe Marino

Senior Research Scientist @ Google DeepMind

Blog

2019

Building Machines in our Image

5 minute read

Published:

How do you define intelligence? We each have our own notions of what it means to be intelligent: perhaps someone who is skilled in math or adept in social situations. But providing a general definition is surprisingly difficult. Herein lies the challenge for artificial intelligence (AI): how do we structure scientific study around a term that is typically reserved for humans? While progress has been made in mimicking aspects of human intelligence, the human-focused origins of the field of AI may be limiting the scope of our scientific pursuit. As we move forward, perhaps drawing from areas like biology and engineering will provide a more comprehensive definition of intelligence, or a new concept altogether.

2018

Evaluating Probabilities

13 minute read

Published:

This blog post covers the evaluation of probabilities and probability densities for continuous variables. The motivation for this discussion came from seeing the disparity in various modeling approaches. My hope is that this blog post serves as a resource, particularly for those entering the field, on the different approaches that exist.

2017

Statistical Whitening

14 minute read

Published:

Normalization is a fundamental component of machine learning. Take any introductory machine learning course, and you’ll learn about the importance of normalizing the inputs to your model. The justification goes something like this: the important patterns in the data often correspond to the relative relationships between the different input dimensions. Therefore, you can make the task of learning and recognizing these patterns easier by removing the constant offset and standardizing the scales.

2016

Thoughts on Generative Models

22 minute read

Published:

Deep learning has exploded in recent years. Researchers are continually coming up with new and exciting ways to compose deep networks to perform new tasks and learn new things. If I can borrow Nando de Freitas’ analogy, we’re like kids playing with lego blocks, stacking these blocks together, trying to develop novel creations. When we stack these blocks into towers so tall that they become unstable, someone develops a new technique for stacking blocks, allowing us to continue constructing even bigger towers. Occasionally someone invents a new block, and if it’s useful, the rest of us scramble to incorporate this block into our towers.