Thread by @arapaho415

@D2onTop @DonnaSteffy @itssuzann @kelly2277 @loonyberg @modernhomesla @lovetogive2 @Presidunce1 @j2dumfounded @dianesbaker1 @WendyBugliari @Tentoads4truth @TheAngelOrsini @mizzunky @barbetta1 @KamalaMueller @markmetz @Cre8NoH8 @rigel2020 @ellyn_gesell @ThomasS4217 @SaysDana <Thread>:
1/ Mercer is pretty tight-lipped... can find zero interviews with him since he emerged into the public spotlight, but did stumble across this, a transcript of an Oct 2013 Q&A session (more...)
cs.jhu.edu/~post/bitext/

@D2onTop @DonnaSteffy @itssuzann @kelly2277 @loonyberg @modernhomesla @lovetogive2 @Presidunce1 @j2dumfounded @dianesbaker1 @WendyBugliari @Tentoads4truth @TheAngelOrsini @mizzunky @barbetta1 @KamalaMueller @markmetz @Cre8NoH8 @rigel2020 @ellyn_gesell @ThomasS4217 @SaysDana 2/ EmCee:
"In the late eighties and early nineties, Robert Mercer, Peter Brown, and their research colleagues at IBM applied statistical approaches from speech recognition to the problem of machine translation (MT)... (con't)

@D2onTop @DonnaSteffy @itssuzann @kelly2277 @loonyberg @modernhomesla @lovetogive2 @Presidunce1 @j2dumfounded @dianesbaker1 @WendyBugliari @Tentoads4truth @TheAngelOrsini @mizzunky @barbetta1 @KamalaMueller @markmetz @Cre8NoH8 @rigel2020 @ellyn_gesell @ThomasS4217 @SaysDana 3/ ...which is the task of getting computers to automatically translate human languages. Their work launched an entire field of research that has culminated today in good quality commercial automatic translation services like Microsoft Translator and Google Translate. (con't)

@D2onTop @DonnaSteffy @itssuzann @kelly2277 @loonyberg @modernhomesla @lovetogive2 @Presidunce1 @j2dumfounded @dianesbaker1 @WendyBugliari @Tentoads4truth @TheAngelOrsini @mizzunky @barbetta1 @KamalaMueller @markmetz @Cre8NoH8 @rigel2020 @ellyn_gesell @ThomasS4217 @SaysDana 4/ ...Soon after this early work, they left the field for Wall Street, where they helped build one of the world’s most successful hedge funds, Renaissance Technologies, which they now run. In October of 2013, Bob and Peter gave an invited talk and Q&A session... (con't)

@D2onTop @DonnaSteffy @itssuzann @kelly2277 @loonyberg @modernhomesla @lovetogive2 @Presidunce1 @j2dumfounded @dianesbaker1 @WendyBugliari @Tentoads4truth @TheAngelOrsini @mizzunky @barbetta1 @KamalaMueller @markmetz @Cre8NoH8 @rigel2020 @ellyn_gesell @ThomasS4217 @SaysDana 5/ ... at the EMNLP workshop Twenty Years of Bitext, which celebrated their pioneering scientific work and took stock of the progress that had been made in the meantime."
"Also in attendance were Stephen and Vincent Della Pietra." (con't)

@D2onTop @DonnaSteffy @itssuzann @kelly2277 @loonyberg @modernhomesla @lovetogive2 @Presidunce1 @j2dumfounded @dianesbaker1 @WendyBugliari @Tentoads4truth @TheAngelOrsini @mizzunky @barbetta1 @KamalaMueller @markmetz @Cre8NoH8 @rigel2020 @ellyn_gesell @ThomasS4217 @SaysDana 6/ Mercer and Brown left IBM in 1993, so all references to DARPA/IBM happened earlier.
Mercer: "even when they were running, these machines were really slow. It used to take us 10 minutes to decode a 10-word sentence. Back then, IBM was not doing particularly well.. (con't)

@D2onTop @DonnaSteffy @itssuzann @kelly2277 @loonyberg @modernhomesla @lovetogive2 @Presidunce1 @j2dumfounded @dianesbaker1 @WendyBugliari @Tentoads4truth @TheAngelOrsini @mizzunky @barbetta1 @KamalaMueller @markmetz @Cre8NoH8 @rigel2020 @ellyn_gesell @ThomasS4217 @SaysDana 7/ ...and Abe Peled, the head of computer science, told us that he viewed the translation effort as a luxury, a luxury that we feared would be next on the chopping block; that is, unless we could bring in some outside money. (con't)

@D2onTop @DonnaSteffy @itssuzann @kelly2277 @loonyberg @modernhomesla @lovetogive2 @Presidunce1 @j2dumfounded @dianesbaker1 @WendyBugliari @Tentoads4truth @TheAngelOrsini @mizzunky @barbetta1 @KamalaMueller @markmetz @Cre8NoH8 @rigel2020 @ellyn_gesell @ThomasS4217 @SaysDana 8/ ...So we were very excited to learn that DARPA was requesting proposals to work on language translation. Luckily for us, we had already developed a basic statistical model and were even beginning to obtain translation results. (con't)

@D2onTop @DonnaSteffy @itssuzann @kelly2277 @loonyberg @modernhomesla @lovetogive2 @Presidunce1 @j2dumfounded @dianesbaker1 @WendyBugliari @Tentoads4truth @TheAngelOrsini @mizzunky @barbetta1 @KamalaMueller @markmetz @Cre8NoH8 @rigel2020 @ellyn_gesell @ThomasS4217 @SaysDana 9/ ...We submitted a proposal to DARPA, and along with Dragon Systems and Carnegie, were awarded a three year contract. We give a lot of credit to 👉Charles Wayne at DARPA👈, who funded us, 👉even though none of us could speak French👈 (con't)

@D2onTop @DonnaSteffy @itssuzann @kelly2277 @loonyberg @modernhomesla @lovetogive2 @Presidunce1 @j2dumfounded @dianesbaker1 @WendyBugliari @Tentoads4truth @TheAngelOrsini @mizzunky @barbetta1 @KamalaMueller @markmetz @Cre8NoH8 @rigel2020 @ellyn_gesell @ThomasS4217 @SaysDana 10/ Most of this Q&A will fascinate older nerds who actually understand what they're discussing (unlike me😕). The RenTech stuff is mostly at the end of this transcript (search for "complexity" in tweet #1 link to arrive here⤵️): (more...)

@D2onTop @DonnaSteffy @itssuzann @kelly2277 @loonyberg @modernhomesla @lovetogive2 @Presidunce1 @j2dumfounded @dianesbaker1 @WendyBugliari @Tentoads4truth @TheAngelOrsini @mizzunky @barbetta1 @KamalaMueller @markmetz @Cre8NoH8 @rigel2020 @ellyn_gesell @ThomasS4217 @SaysDana 11/ Mercer doesn't answer this question, but his buddy Peter Brown does (more...)

@D2onTop @DonnaSteffy @itssuzann @kelly2277 @loonyberg @modernhomesla @lovetogive2 @Presidunce1 @j2dumfounded @dianesbaker1 @WendyBugliari @Tentoads4truth @TheAngelOrsini @mizzunky @barbetta1 @KamalaMueller @markmetz @Cre8NoH8 @rigel2020 @ellyn_gesell @ThomasS4217 @SaysDana 12/ Peter Brown's reply (which is the example most journalists use when describing RenTech's opaque methods): ...more