2020 year in review by McKinsey

McKinsey, 2020 year in review, 2020/12/28.

動態規劃 (dynamic programming)

考慮多階段決策的問題，例如下方的最短路徑問題，需要從起點 A、經過中間站的 BCDE、走到終點 F；A 到 B 的距離為 1，D 到 F 的距離為 100 等等。

現在的問題很小，可以使用窮舉法 (method of enumeration) 找出所有的可能。走 ABDF 總距離 102、ABEF 總距離 8、ACDF 總距離 106、ACEF 總距離 9，所以最短路徑為 ABEF。

如何解決一般化的問題？首先考慮短視的策略  (myopic policy)，站在 A 點時，在 B 和  C 兩條路中選擇 B (AB = 1 < 4 = AC)；站在 B 點時，選擇 D；站在 D 點時，只能選擇 F。總成本為 102，路徑為 ABDF。

You Can’t Escape Hyperparameters and Latent Variables

Charles Isbell, You Can’t Escape Hyperparameters and Latent Variables: Machine Learning as a Software Engineering Enterprise, keynote speech at NeuIPS, Dec 8th, 2020. (slide 70: What have we learned?)

Successful technological fields have a moment when they become pervasive, important, and noticed. They are deployed into the world and, inevitably, something goes wrong. A badly designed interface leads to an aircraft disaster. A buggy controller delivers a lethal dose of radiation to a cancer patient. The field must then choose to mature and take responsibility for avoiding the harms associated with what it is producing. Machine learning has reached this moment. In this talk, I will argue that the community needs to adopt systematic approaches for creating robust artifacts that contribute to larger systems that impact the real human world. I will share perspectives from multiple researchers in machine learning, theory, computer perception, and education; discuss with them approaches that might help us to develop more robust machine-learning systems; and explore scientifically interesting problems that result from moving beyond narrow machine-learning algorithms to complete machine-learning systems.

Mathematics for Machine Learning

Marc Peter Deisenroth, A. Aldo Faisal, and Cheng Soon Ong, Mathematics for Machine Learning, Cambridge University Press, 2020. (pdf)

The book assumes the reader to have mathematical knowledge commonly covered in high school mathematics and physics. For example, the reader should have seen derivatives and integrals before, and geometric vectors in two or three dimensions. Starting from there, we generalize these concepts. Therefore, the target audience of the book includes undergraduate university students, evening learners and learners participating in online machine learning courses.

台灣軟體業的發展

 科技島讀，Ep.126 難產的台灣獨角獸｜特別來賓 XREX 創辦人黃耀文，2020/12/20

台灣獨角獸遲遲難產，讓人擔憂輝煌的半導體與電子製造業後繼無人。相較於以色列、芬蘭、烏克蘭、新加坡等在軟體領域各據地盤，台灣軟體業至今無法破繭而出，更啟人疑竇。島讀邀請成功創業家黃耀文，一起從產品定位、資本、人才等面向，分析台灣新創的錯過與值得。