RRP #1: Tomáš Mikolov on word2vec and AI research at Microsoft, Google, Facebook

Episode Summary: Today I sat down with Tomáš Mikolov, my fellow Czech countryman whom most of you will know through his work on word2vec. But Tomáš has many more interesting things to say beside word2vec (although we cover word2vec too!): his beginnings with 8bit graphics and games, living in NY compared to California, AI research at Microsoft vs Google vs Facebook, the importance of focusing on the right thing and Tomáš' vision for the "roadmap towards machine intelligence".

Links & resources:

1. Tomáš' current affiliation: Facebook AI Research (FAIR); FAIR profile, Google Scholar profile

2. Mikolov, Joulin, Baroni: A Roadmap towards Machine Intelligence [PDF]

3. A shorter version of that paper that Tomáš mentioned: Baroni &al: CommAI: Evaluating the first steps towards a useful general AI [PDF + github]

4. original word2vec tool; tutorial for our Python port in gensim

5. original fasttext tool; our gensim wrapper for Python

This was the first time podcasting, both for me and for Tomáš, so please take it easy on us! Still learning the ropes.

The podcast lives on SoundCloud for now. I'll upload it to iTunes once I figure out how that works.