Connectionists: Visual Pattern Recognition / Neural Network ReNNaissance / Jobs

[Schmidhuber Juergen]

Recently our neural computer vision team collected a string of 1st  
ranks in the following visual pattern recognition competitions and  
benchmarks:

1. Online Traffic Sign Recognition Competition, U. Bochum (1st & 2nd  
rank; 1.02% error rate, January 2011).
2. NORB Object Recognition Benchmark, NYU, 2004. New record (2.53%  
error rate) in January 2011 [1].
3. CIFAR-10 Object Recognition Benchmark, U. Toronto, 2009. New record  
(19.51% error rate) in January 2011 [1].
4. MNIST Handwritten Digit Recognition Benchmark, NYU, 1998. New  
record (0.35% error rate) in 2010, tied in January 2011 [1].
5.-7. Old news: Three Connected Handwriting Recognition Competitions  
at ICDAR 2009, all won by multi-dimensional LSTM recurrent neural  
networks.

We use supervised feedforward or recurrent neural networks with many  
non-linear processing stages, somewhat inspired by early hierarchical  
neural architectures such as the Neocognitron (1980), sometimes (but  
not always) profiting from weight sharing & convolution, contrast  
enhancement, max-pooling, and sparse network connectivity. GPUs speed  
up learning by a factor of up to 50. No need for unsupervised pre- 
training, which is a bit depressing, as we have developed unsupervised  
learning algorithms for two decades.  Nevertheless, we think our  
results are contributing to a second Neural Network ReNNaissance (the  
first one happened in the 1980s and early 90s).

Most recent paper: [1] D. C. Ciresan, U. Meier, J. Masci, L. M.  
Gambardella, J. Schmidhuber. High-Performance Neural Networks for  
Visual Object Classification. Preprint arXiv:1102.0183v1 [cs.AI], 1  
Feb 2011.

Overview web site with additional papers:
http://www.idsia.ch/~juergen/vision.html


We are also hiring postdocs and PhD students:
Postdoc SFR 72,000/year ~ US$ 75,400/year as of 4/2/2011;
PhD student SFR 40,800/year ~ US$ 42,700/year:
http://www.idsia.ch/~juergen/sn2010.html
BTW, Switzerland is the best country for scientists:
http://www.idsia.ch/~juergen/switzerland.html     :-)


Jürgen Schmidhuber
Director of the Swiss AI Lab IDSIA, Lugano
Professor of Artificial Intelligence, Univ. Lugano
Professor SUPSI, Manno-Lugano, Switzerland
http://www.idsia.ch/~juergen/whatsnew.html







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