#86 - Prof. YANN LECUN and Dr. RANDALL BALESTRIERO - SSL, Data Augmentation, Reward isn't enough [NEURIPS2022]

Yann LeCun is a French computer scientist known for his pioneering work on convolutional neural networks, optical character recognition and computer vision. He is a Silver Professor at New York University and Vice President, Chief AI Scientist at Meta. Along with Yoshua Bengio and Geoffrey Hinton, he was awarded the 2018 Turing Award for their work on deep learning, earning them the nickname of the "Godfathers of Deep Learning".

Dr. Randall Balestriero has been researching learnable signal processing since 2013, with a focus on learnable parametrized wavelets and deep wavelet transforms. His research has been used by NASA, leading to applications such as Marsquake detection. During his PhD at Rice University, Randall explored deep networks from a theoretical perspective and improved state-of-the-art methods such as batch-normalization and generative networks. Later, when joining Meta AI Research (FAIR) as a postdoc with Prof. Yann LeCun, Randall further broadened his research interests to include self-supervised learning and the biases emerging from data-augmentation and regularization, resulting in numerous publications.

Episode recorded live at NeurIPS.

YT: https://youtu.be/9dLd6n9yT8U (references are there)

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Host: Dr. Tim Scarfe

TOC:

[00:00:00] LeCun interview

[00:18:25] Randall Balestriero interview (mostly on spectral SSL paper, first ref)