Yoshua Bengio

So, of course, you have to adapt your beliefs when your experiments contradict those beliefs.

But you have to stick to your beliefs.

Otherwise, it's what allowed me to go through those years.

It's what allowed me to persist in directions that took time

whatever other people think, took time to mature and bring fruits.

What do you think the next such moment might be?

Okay, so first of all, I think that these so-called seminal events are overrated.

As I said, science really moves by small steps.

Now, what happens is you make one more small step and it's like,

The drop that fills the bucket and then you have drastic consequences because now you're able to do something you were not able to do before.

Or now, say, the cost of building some device or solving a problem becomes cheaper than what existed and you have a new market that opens up.

So especially in the world of commerce and applications, the impact of a small scientific progress could be huge.

But in the science itself, I think it's very, very gradual.

And- Where are these steps being taken now?

So there's unsupervised learning.

So if I look at one trend that I like in my community, so for example, at Mila and my institute, what are the two hottest topics?

GANs and reinforcement learning.

Even though in Montreal in particular, reinforcement learning was something pretty much absent just two or three years ago.

So there's really a big interest from students and there's a big interest from people like me.

So I would say this is something where we're going to see more progress, even though it hasn't yet provided much in terms of actual industrial fallout.