It wasn’t that way back when browsing the web concerned bleeps and bloops whereas customers hoped others in the home didn’t decide up the telephone.
The world of connectivity and know-how has modified dramatically during the last 20 years, with machine studying and synthetic intelligence turning into greater than only a science-fiction story.
Dr. Yani Ioannou, PhD, has devoted his analysis to understanding and bettering these applied sciences to make them extra accessible, cheap and, consider it or not, smarter.
His work on creating more-efficient deep neural networks (DNNs) — the know-how that enables us to look the images on our cellular units, ask questions of good assistants or use machine translation to grasp a overseas language — has captured the eye of many within the technological world and has been broadly utilized in enabling synthetic intelligence (AI) purposes like facial recognition on smartphones.
Ioannou was considered one of solely 20 researchers in Canada to be awarded a DND/NSERC Discovery Grant Complement, a joint initiative between the Division of Nationwide Defence (DND) and the Pure Sciences and Engineering Analysis Council of Canada (NSERC), and, most lately, he was amongst 51 researchers from around the globe acknowledged with an Amazon Analysis Award.
Exponential progress
Successful the awards got here as an enormous shock to Ioannou, who joined the College of Calgary’s Schulich College of Engineering as an assistant professor within the Division of Electrical and Software program Engineering in September 2021.
“These awards were the first two research proposals I wrote,” he says. “Writing proposals for grants and awards such as these isn’t something I ever had the experience of doing before, and I wasn’t sure I’d be successful, especially in a highly competitive field of candidates.”
With reference to the Amazon award, Ioannou says it’s an honour to be included amongst a few of the world’s main researchers.
Yani Ioannou works at his desk in January 2023.
Fritz Tolentino
He says it wasn’t that way back that he was a highschool pupil participating in a pc science summer season outreach program from the College of Toronto.
After listening to a chat from deep studying pioneer Dr. Geoffrey Hinton, PhD, Ioannou was hooked on pc imaginative and prescient and neural networks, resulting in a post-secondary journey that concluded with finishing his PhD on the College of Cambridge in 2018.
“As someone who was the first in my family to attend university, never mind graduate school, research wasn’t even on my radar before that talk,” he says. “This really goes to show the impact that university outreach programs can have.”
An train in networking
The Amazon award was given to Ioannou for his work on machine studying algorithms and idea, concerning what is known as “catastrophic forgetting.”
He says DNNs can’t be taught like people do, like studying totally different duties simply, and don’t simply be taught or adapt to new knowledge whereas interacting with the actual world.
“It means we typically have to use multiple models for different tasks, even when those tasks are very related,” Ioannou says. “We can’t put a neural network in some application and expect it to be able to adapt to new data or conditions that it encounters.”
These basic issues, together with the rising prices related to bettering the know-how, has led to the event of sparse neural networks (SNNs).
“These networks present potential solutions to several of these problems, and addressing any one of these problems could have a large real-world impact on the increasingly large number of applications of DNNs,” Ioannou says.
Centered on the longer term
Because the know-how continues to evolve, Ioannou has no scarcity of focuses for his analysis sooner or later.
He says it’s very costly to be taught and apply a DNN to new duties, so he want to discover methods to make it extra accessible.
Ioannou says the help he has acquired permits him to suppose larger about his tasks and speed up his analysis program.
“Perhaps most importantly, it allows me to increase the number of graduate and undergraduate students I can train in what is a very in-demand field of expertise that will drive Alberta and Canada’s future,” he says.
0 Comments