The scholarship

The MRES course reflects Alvin's academic and real-world scientific interests.

The fields of artificial intelligence and machine learning have seen tremendous progress in the past few years, followed by an exponential increase in the investments and creation of new jobs. Today we have conversations with AI bots, our phones can recognise objects and people in our photos, and our cars drive by themselves. This progress has been driven mostly by the growth in data, computing resources and, to a smaller extent, new theoretical ideas. A large number of machine learning algorithms show excellent performance, but they are neither very robust nor predictable. More theoretical work is necessary to understand those algorithms, improve them and allow further progress.

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Machine learning researchers have usually a background in information engineering, computer science and statistics/math. The contribution of theoretical physicists is still negligible, but we think that a field growing at such a fast pace would benefit from interdisciplinary work. This effort is necessary not only to stimulate research at the academic level, but also to meet the increasing demand of companies for diverse expertise. We believe that theoretical physicists have a lot to offer to machine learning given their knowledge of advanced applied techniques such as statistical mechanics, quantum mechanics, dynamical systems, stochastic processes. They have also a lot to gain, in terms of new jobs and novel problems to study.