Ideas: Community building, machine learning, and the future of AI
HANNA WALLACH: Yeah, so I was a PhD student at the University of Cambridge, and I was working with the late David MacKay. I was focusing on machine learning for analyzing text, and at that point in time, I’d actually just begun working on Bayesian latent variable models for text analysis, and my research was really focusing on trying to combine ideas from n-gram language modeling with statistical topic modeling in order to come up with models that just did a better job at modeling text.
I was also doing this super-weird two-country thing. So I was doing my PhD at Cambridge, but at the end of the first year of my PhD, I spent three months as a visiting graduate student at the University of Pennsylvania, and I