We’ve trained a human-like robot hand to manipulate physical objects with unprecedented dexterity.
On behalf of the Vector Institute, I am delighted to extend our sincere congratulations to TD’s Layer 6 on winning the prestigious Recsys challenge for the second year in a […] The post Congratulations to TD’s Layer 6 on Winning Spotify RecSys Challenge 2018 appeared first on Vector Institute for Artificial Intelligence .
Official technical announcement and publication from OpenAI covering Variational option discovery algorithms.
Our first class of OpenAI Scholars is underway, and you can now follow along as this group of experienced software developers becomes machine learning practitioners.
The OpenAI Five Benchmark match is now over!
Professor Daniel Kroening from Oxford’s Department of Computer Science was among the winners of the CAV 2018 Award for SAT-based and Bounded Model Checking.
Oxford is the highest placed UK university in ShanghaiRanking's Global Ranking of Academic Subjects 2018 for Computer Science & Engineering.
Senior Research Fellow Philippa Hopcroft and Senior Researcher Thomas Gibson-Robinson won an award for the Coco Platform plugin for MagicDraw at this year’s No Magic World Symposium in Dallas.
A department team has begun work on a project which aims to enhance large-scale probabilistic databases (and so unlock their full data modelling potential) by including more realistic data models, while preserving their computational properties.
Professor Sir Nigel Shadbolt has been awarded an honorary doctorate by the University of Wales Trinity Saint David. He received the honorary doctorate in science at a graduation ceremony on 6 July from Jeremy Smith, Dean for the Faculty of Humanities and Performing Arts.
We introduce Glow, a reversible generative model which uses invertible 1x1 convolutions. It extends previous work on reversible generative models and simplifies the architecture. Our model can generate realistic high resolution images, supports efficient sampling, and discovers features that can be used to manipulate attributes of data. We’re releasing code for the model and an online visualizatio
Whitfield Diffie, preeminent cryptographer and co-creator of public key encryption, is giving a talk on 9 July at 2pm at Said Business School.
We’ve trained an agent to achieve a high score of 74,500 on Montezuma’s Revenge from a single human demonstration, better than any previously published result. Our algorithm is simple: the agent plays a sequence of games starting from carefully chosen states from the demonstration, and learns from them by optimizing the game score using PPO, the same reinforcement learning algorithm that underpins
In the lead up to the Federated Logic Conference (FloC 2018), 98 researchers and students will be taking part in the (sold out) 2nd School on Foundations of Programming and Software Systems (FoPSS) on 1-6 July.
The next Strachey Lecture will be delivered on 10 July by Professor Stuart Russell from the University of California during July’s Federated Logic Conference (FLoC).
A ‘FakeNewsRank’ system that could show the likelihood of facts, articles, authors and websites being fake is to be developed with funding from the University of Oxford's EPSRC Impact Acceleration Account (IAA).
Our team of five neural networks, OpenAI Five, has started to defeat amateur human teams at Dota 2.
The first run of our Retro Contest—exploring the development of algorithms that can generalize from previous experience—is now complete.
The twelfth edition of the 'Inspired Research' newsletter has been published, showcasing the department's cutting-edge research
This year’s Group Design Practical culminated in an exhibition and formal presentation held in the department on 9 May. Teams of five to six second year undergraduates had worked on their chosen projects since January, battling it out for four £500 prizes.
Official technical announcement and publication from OpenAI covering Learning policy representations in multiagent systems.
The results of a public dialogue on Quantum Technologies, commissioned by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC), have just been published. The department’s Professor Marina Jirotka is on the oversight board for this public dialogue project.
The 2018 Oxford Computer Science conference took place on 1 June at the Department of Computer Science, University of Oxford.
We’ve obtained state-of-the-art results on a suite of diverse language tasks with a scalable, task-agnostic system, which we’re also releasing. Our approach is a combination of two existing ideas: transformers and unsupervised pre-training. These results provide a convincing example that pairing supervised learning methods with unsupervised pre-training works very well; this is an idea that many h
Three professors from the department have launched a spin-out, Oxford Semantic Technologies, with the aim of applying this technology to data integration and analysis
In a world where technological advances can create undesirable futures, there is an ever stronger need for more research into the ethical and societal consequences of technology
DPhil student Matt Smith describes how the computer scientist team is using it to evaluate flight crew response to cyber-attacks
The first ever expo on artificial intelligence (AI) at the University of Oxford showcased the tremendous advances being made in the field, and looked at where Oxford’s research is likely to lead
It may feel like chatting with Alexa and Siri is fairly innocuous, but it can be disconcerting to know that your conversations are stored somewhere beyond your control
Systems that crawl the web encountering new sources and adding facts to their databases have a huge amount of potential uses
apps track a notable amount of information, prompting an Oxford team to work on increasing parents' and children's awareness of privacy issues, as Senior Researcher Jun Zhao explains
New ways of understanding and building basic structures in statistics and machine learning is the research area of Professor Sam Staton, a Royal Society University Research Fellow
DPhil students Jakob N Foerster and Gregory Farquhar describe a method developed by computer scientists and engineers which could make it possible to deploy learning multi-agent systems in the real world
Quantum computing has the potential to transform a whole host of technologies, from cryptography to artificial intelligence
The department's Medical Imaging Group led by Irina Voiculescu has been developing software to improve support for early diagnosis and intervention, and to print 3D models to guide surgeons when preparing for hip replacement surgery
Maria Vanina Martinez, a former researcher in the department, has been included in IEEE Intelligent Systems' 'AI's 10 to Watch’ list for 2018.
Despoina works as a software engineer with Facebook’s Account Integrity team. The fundamentals of Computer Science and core skills that she learned during her MSc and DPhil at the University of Oxford have stood her in good stead in her career
Official technical announcement and publication from OpenAI covering GamePad: A learning environment for theorem proving.
We’re now accepting applications for the next cohort of OpenAI Fellows, a program which offers a compensated 6-month apprenticeship in AI research at OpenAI.
The department’s Professor Sadie Creese and Ana Mincholé will be at the Cheltenham Science Festival in June, discussing cyber security for critical infrastructure, and a project to build a virtual human respectively.
We’re releasing the full version of Gym Retro, a platform for reinforcement learning research on games. This brings our publicly-released game count from around 70 Atari games and 30 Sega games to over 1,000 games across a variety of backing emulators. We’re also releasing the tool we use to add new games to the platform.
Members of Oxford’s Department of Computer Science have co-authored 11 papers that have been accepted for this year's International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML) 2018.
Undergraduates from the department showcased their project work at the House of Lords yesterday, as part of a launch event for a tool that predicts the cleanliness of the electricity supply.
The programme, including session timings and abstracts, has been released for the major Federated Logic Conference (FLoC) 2018 to be held in Oxford this summer.
We’re releasing an analysis showing that since 2012, the amount of compute used in the largest AI training runs has been increasing exponentially with a 3.4-month doubling time (by comparison, Moore’s Law had a 2-year doubling period)[^footnote-correction]. Since 2012, this metric has grown by more than 300,000x (a 2-year doubling period would yield only a 7x increase). Improvements in compute hav
In order to gain the public’s trust in artificial intelligence (AI) online systems, Oxford will be leading a project to develop a tool that allows users to evaluate and critique algorithms.
The quality of the department’s teaching and support staff was recognised at the Student-Led Teaching Awards on 10 May.
The department’s Professor Samson Abramsky is to receive the LICS Test-of-Time Award for a paper that he wrote in 1998 with Kohei Honda and Guy McCusker. The paper is entitled ‘A fully abstract game semantics for general references’.
The Digital Ape, co-authored by the department’s Professor Nigel Shadbolt, has been published today. The book looks at how smart machines are transforming our lives and societies, and what should be done about it.
We’re proposing an AI safety technique which trains agents to debate topics with one another, using a human to judge who wins.
Members of the Department of Computer Science, University of Oxford, with great sadness, share the news of the death of Joel Lewis, a third year student from Croydon, who attended St Anne’s College.
Professor Bob Coecke and Dr Niel de Beaudrap have received funding from the EPSRC Impact Acceleration Account for a project developing a quantum computing compiler.
Students have shortlisted seven of our department’s teaching and support staff in four categories in the University of Oxford’s Student-Led Teaching Awards 2018.
Emeritus Professor Joan Eileen Walsh, the department’s first DPhil student, has passed away.
Members of the department’s Human-Centred Computer theme are out in force in Montreal this week. They and their collaborators are presenting four full papers, three DPhil student entries and one concept paper at The ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI 2018).
April 23, 2018 In a week, Vector faculty and researchers will head to International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR) to showcase their latest research. Here is the full list of […] The post Vector Institute Heads to ICLR appeared first on Vector Institute for Artificial Intelligence .
Three of the department’s academics - Irina Voiculescu, Andrew Ker and Andreas Galanis - have been shortlisted for the Outstanding Tutor Award in the Student-Led Teaching Awards 2018.
We’re releasing an experimental metalearning approach called Evolved Policy Gradients, a method that evolves the loss function of learning agents, which can enable fast training on novel tasks. Agents trained with EPG can succeed at basic tasks at test time that were outside their training regime, like learning to navigate to an object on a different side of the room from where it was placed durin
The annual Oxford Computer Science Conference will take place on Friday 1st June
Academics from the Department of Computer Science will be participating in the 2018 Hay Festival. Visitors to the festival will be able to take part in workshops to programme robots, build their own quantum computer, or attend talks on smart machines, the history of Computer Science and computational biology.
Official technical announcement and publication from OpenAI covering Gotta Learn Fast: A new benchmark for generalization in RL.
We’re launching a transfer learning contest that measures a reinforcement learning algorithm’s ability to generalize from previous experience.
Official technical announcement and publication from Oxford (AIDC) covering Researchers in Computer Science looking for creative Zimbabwean students!.
Official technical announcement and publication from Oxford (AIDC) covering Paper accepted at IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy 2018.
The Ethical hackathon, a novel twist on the hackathon that highlights ethical issues alongside design features, made its debut in February.
Official technical announcement and publication from Oxford (AIDC) covering Mike Wooldridge wins the 2018 IFAAMAS Influential Paper Award.
Official technical announcement and publication from Oxford (AIDC) covering Oxford team makes semi-finals at Cyber 9/12 policy competition.
Alán Aspuru-Guzik has spent the last twelve years as a Professor at Harvard University, where his research group has been working at the intersection of computer science, chemistry and physics. […] The post Mission to Revolutionize Modern-Day Chemistry Labs Leads Vector’s Newest Faculty Member to Canada appeared first on Vector Institute for Artificial Intelligence .
Dr. Garth Gibson, President & CEO Today marks the one-year anniversary of the Vector Institute. But what we’re really celebrating is the continuing growth of the Canadian artificial intelligence (AI) […] The post Garth Gibson: Celebrating Vector’s First Year in the AI Ecosystem appeared first on Vector Institute for Artificial Intelligence .
Official technical announcement and publication from Oxford (AIDC) covering Artificial intelligence prowess shown at expo.
Artificial Intelligence (AI) is the latest subject to be added to the iconic Ladybird series, in a book written by the Department of Computer Science’s Professor Mike Wooldridge.
Dr. Amir-massoud Farahmand’s career in reinforcement learning has led him across Canada to work with some of the world’s top researchers in the field in Edmonton and Montreal. Now, after […] The post Cross-Country Career in Reinforcement Learning Leads Amir-massoud Farahmand to Vector Institute in Toronto appeared first on Vector Institute for Artificial Intelligence .
The department’s Professor Marina Jirotka has been elected to the UK Computing Research Community (UKCRC), a highly selective grouping of the UK’s leading computing academics.
Official technical announcement and publication from OpenAI covering Variance reduction for policy gradient with action-dependent factorized baselines.
Dame Wendy Hall, Regius Professor of Computer Science at the University of Southampton, is to deliver the annual Ada Lovelace Lecture today as part of the Oxford Literary Festival
On March 3rd, we hosted our first hackathon with 100 members of the artificial intelligence community.
Official technical announcement and publication from OpenAI covering Improving GANs using optimal transport.
Department alumna Anne-Marie Imafidon won the Role Model of the Year prize at Booking.com’s inaugural Technology Playmaker Awards on 8 March.
The department’s Professor Tom Melham has been appointed to The Alan Turing Institute’s Board as the non-executive Director and Trustee for the University of Oxford.
The National Centre for the 3Rs (NC3Rs) – an organisation dedicated to replacing, refining and reducing the use of animals in research and testing – has awarded its top prize for a research paper by a team from the Department of Computer of Science.
A short film about future virtual humans incorporating material from research by Professor Blanca Rodriguez and her group has been released onto YouTube today.
The department has added a women’s web page to its website to celebrate their achievements and highlight activities that support them.
Marius Gavrilescu, a 3rd year undergraduate student in Computer Science, has won a WCIT Outstanding Information Technology Student Prize 2018.
Official technical announcement and publication from OpenAI covering On first-order meta-learning algorithms.
We’ve developed a simple meta-learning algorithm called Reptile which works by repeatedly sampling a task, performing stochastic gradient descent on it, and updating the initial parameters towards the final parameters learned on that task. Reptile is the application of the Shortest Descent algorithm to the meta-learning setting, and is mathematically similar to first-order MAML (which is a version
We’re providing 6–10 stipends and mentorship to individuals from underrepresented groups to study deep learning full-time for 3 months and open-source a project.
Official technical announcement and publication from OpenAI covering Some considerations on learning to explore via meta-reinforcement learning.
The 2018 QS world university rankings for Computer Science and Information Systems put the University of Oxford in second place in Europe. It ranked seventh in the world.
Two of the department’s professors will be speaking at the Oxford Literary Festival on Monday 19 March, ahead of the publication of their books.
Oxford computer scientists have been awarded best paper at the 2018 International Workshop on Usable Security (USEC), which is a part of the prestigious 24th Network and Distributed System Security Symposium (NDSS).
We’re releasing eight simulated robotics environments and a Baselines implementation of Hindsight Experience Replay, all developed for our research over the past year. We’ve used these environments to train models which work on physical robots. We’re also releasing a set of requests for robotics research.
Official technical announcement and publication from OpenAI covering Multi-Goal Reinforcement Learning: Challenging robotics environments and request for research.
Come to OpenAI’s office in San Francisco’s Mission District for talks and a hackathon on Saturday, March 3rd.
We’ve co-authored a paper that forecasts how malicious actors could misuse AI technology, and potential ways we can prevent and mitigate these threats. This paper is the outcome of almost a year of sustained work with our colleagues at the Future of Humanity Institute, the Centre for the Study of Existential Risk, the Center for a New American Security, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and othe
We’re excited to welcome new donors to OpenAI.
We’ve designed a method that encourages AIs to teach each other with examples that also make sense to humans. Our approach automatically selects the most informative examples to teach a concept—for instance, the best images to describe the concept of dogs—and experimentally we found our approach to be effective at teaching both AIs
Around 200 talented young people arrived at the University over two weekends in January and February to take part in the finals of a computational challenge held in the department.
We’ve built a system for automatically figuring out which object is meant by a word by having a neural network decide if the word belongs to each of about 100 automatically-discovered “types” (non-exclusive categories).
A new 3-minute video celebrating 60 years of impressive Computer Science by our department has been put together by the University.
To many, the Internet of Things (IoT) represents a new advancement in technology meant to streamline our lives even further but are there significant new security and privacy risks to using these forms of new technology?
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