Preamble: A natural progression beyond artificial intelligence is artificial creativity. I've been interested in AC for awhile and started learning of the various criteria that the scholarly community has devised to test AC in art, music, writing, etc. (I think crosswords might present an interesting Turing-like test for AC). In music, a machine-generated score which is deemed interesting, challenging, and unique (and indistinguishable from the real work of a great master), would be a major accomplishment. Machine-generated music has a long history (cf. "Computer Models of Musical Creativity" by D. Cope; Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006).
Deep Learning at the character level: With the resurgence of interest in Recurrent Neural Networks (RNNs) with Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM), I thought it would be interesting to see how far we could go in autogenerating music. RNNs have actually been around in music generation for awhile (even with LSTM; see this site and this 2014 paper from Liu & Ramakrishnan and references therein), but we're now getting into an era where we can train on a big corpus and thus train a big, complex model. Andrej Karpathy's recent blog showed how training a character-level model on Shakespeare and Paul Graham essays could yield interesting, albeit fairly garbled, text that seems to mimic the flow and usage of
Thoughts following the 2015 “Text By The Bay” Conference
The first "Text By the Bay” conference, a new natural language processing (NLP) event from the “Scala bythebay” organizers, just wrapped up tonight. In bringing together practitioners and theorists from academia and industry I’d call it a success, save one significant and glaring problem.
On hiring those with deep knowledge and specialized talents
By construction and definition, a full technology stack must exist for any company that relies upon hardware and software to interface with their customers. That is, every modern company has a full stack of some sort. When we construct buildings–complex and interwoven hardware and software edifices in their own right–we might have a general contractor but it would be silly to have one person responsible for personally building all the sub-systems.