Blog

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.

Today, I gave a talk about our latest result in neural machine translation at the NLP PIC Seminar organised at IBM Watson Research Centre. After the talk, I enjoyed discussions with the researchers working at the NLP group.  The slides I used today can be found here.

Prof. Kee-Eung Kim invited me to give a tutorial on deep learning at KAIST. Although I realize everyday how mush I *don’t* know enough about the field, I couldn’t resist *preaching* deep learning.  The slides I used at the tutorial are available here.

I am moving this month to University of Montreal as a postdoctoral researcher at the Machine Learning Lab led by Prof. Yoshua Bengio.

On 21 March 2014, I have defended my thesis against (?) the opponent, Prof. Nando de Freitas from the University of Oxford. Thanks to all those who have attended the defense as well as the after-party (I haven’t had time nor energy to send a separate thank-you note, but will do soon at least by email!)  The defense in Finland is, from the beginning to the end, public, meaning anyone is welcome to the defense. It starts with a candidate (on Friday, it was me) giving a 20-min introductory lecture on the subject on which the candidate conducted research. The