20 min listen
075r - Reinforcement learning for the real world with Dr. John Langford and Rafah Hosn
075r - Reinforcement learning for the real world with Dr. John Langford and Rafah Hosn
ratings:
Length:
20 minutes
Released:
Jan 1, 2020
Format:
Podcast episode
Description
This episode originally aired in May, 2019.Dr. John Langford, a partner researcher in the Machine Learning group at Microsoft Research New York City, is a reinforcement learning expert who is working, in his own words, to solve machine learning. Rafah Hosn, also of MSR New York, is a principal program manager who’s working to take that work to the world. If that sounds like big thinking in the Big Apple, well, New York City has always been a “go big, or go home” kind of town, and MSR NYC is a “go big, or go home” kind of lab.
Today, Dr. Langford explains why online reinforcement learning is critical to solving machine learning and how moving from the current foundation of a Markov decision process toward a contextual bandit future might be part of the solution. Rafah Hosn talks about why it’s important, from a business perspective, to move RL agents out of simulated environments and into the open world, and gives us an under-the-hood look at the product side of MSR’s “research, incubate, transfer” process, focusing on real world reinforcement learning which, at Microsoft, is now called Azure Cognitive Services Personalizer.
Today, Dr. Langford explains why online reinforcement learning is critical to solving machine learning and how moving from the current foundation of a Markov decision process toward a contextual bandit future might be part of the solution. Rafah Hosn talks about why it’s important, from a business perspective, to move RL agents out of simulated environments and into the open world, and gives us an under-the-hood look at the product side of MSR’s “research, incubate, transfer” process, focusing on real world reinforcement learning which, at Microsoft, is now called Azure Cognitive Services Personalizer.
Released:
Jan 1, 2020
Format:
Podcast episode
Titles in the series (100)
002 - AI and Our Future with Machines with Dr. Eric Horvitz by Microsoft Research Podcast