108 - Neural architecture search, imitation learning and other ML “defense against the dark arts” techniques with Dr. Debadeepta Dey

Dr. Debadeepta Dey is a Principal Researcher in the Adaptive Systems and Interaction group at MSR and he’s currently exploring several lines of research that may help bridge the gap between perception and planning for autonomous agents, teaching them make decisions under uncertainty and even to stop and ask for directions when they get lost! On today’s podcast, Dr. Dey talks about how his latest work in meta-reasoning helps improve modular system pipelines and how imitation learning hits the ML sweet spot between supervised and reinforcement learning. He also explains how neural architecture search helps enlighten the “dark arts” of neural network training and reveals how boredom, an old robot and a several “book runs” between India and the US led to a rewarding career in research. https://www.microsoft.com/research