Oxford and Cambridge

After visiting Google DeepMind, I continued on to visit the University of Oxford. I gave a talk at the <Computational Linguistics Seminars> series about neural machine translation and met many awesome people there. I had interesting discussions with Prof. Nando de Freitas, Prof. Phil Blunsom and their student (Misha Denil, Ziyu Yang and many others).  The next stop was the University of Cambridge thank to Felix Hill and his supervisor, Anna Korhonen. I again presented our neural translation model and my (Felix’s) view/take on syntax to both machine learning researchers and NLP researchers. There were some mixed response, and the

Visit to Google DeepMind

I visited Google DeepMind on Friday (17 Oct). I gave a talk on neural machine translation and met many researchers, including some of my former colleagues such as Razvan Pascanu and Guillaume Desjardins.  As can be expected, I signed NDA before my visit and cannot discuss much about any interesting things that I have heard and discussed at DeepMind. But, I can tell one thing: despite my constant attempt, none of the researchers there was able to tell me a single downside (even when they were quite drunk!). Incredible! Anyways, it was a very interesting and exciting day.