In today’s episode, Dr. Robert J. Marks continues his conversation with Dr. Paul Werbos, the inventor of the most commonly used technique to train artificial neural networks. Listen in as they turn to the National Science Foundation, its role in steering research in artificial intelligence, and the major turning points in machine intelligence that Dr. Werbos witnessed as a program director at NSF for 30 years.

Show Notes

• 00:42 | Introducing Dr. Paul Werbos
• 01:27 | Overcoming NSF disinterest in neural networks
• 07:30 | Convolutional neural networks
• 10:54 | Deep learning
• 15:08 | How is the NSF doing?
• 21:53 | Recent major advances in machine intelligence

Additional Resources

• Dr. Paul Werbos at IEEE.org
• Paul Werbos’s website
• Paul Werbos’s PhD dissertation introducing error backpropagation used today to train artificial neural networks
• Talking Nets: An Oral History of Neural Networks at Amazon.com
• Paul Werbos’s 1972 Proposal to Harvard for Backpropagation and Intelligent Reinforcement System
• Perceptrons: An Introduction to Computational Geometry by Marvin Minsky and Seymour A. Papert on Amazon.com
• The National Science Foundation’s website
• Geoffrey Hinton, British-Canadian cognitive psychologist and computer scientist
• DDDAS: Dynamic Data Driven Application Systems at NSF.gov