Meet The Researcher Behind Cortana, Project Adam And Other Microsoft's Machine Learning Related Works

As part of the Channel 9’s Microsoft Research Luminaries series, this week’s video features John Platt, a Microsoft distinguished scientist and deputy managing director of Microsoft Research Redmond who has been working in AI now for 32 years. In the video, they talk about his work in the resurgent research area of artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning, and the impact of deep learning on those fields.

Platt, a Microsoft distinguished scientist and deputy managing director of Microsoft Research Redmond, tells interviewer Larry Larsen that he has been with Microsoft for 17 years, but that he has spent no fewer than 32 years in the AI domain. At Larsen’s prompting, Platt then attempts to define and differentiate what is meant by the terms “AI” and “machine learning.”

“They’re very intertwined,” he begins. “I would define artificial intelligence as software that’s trying to emulate the human mind. That’s often specific to a domain, like computers that can see—that’s computer vision—or computers than can listen, which is speech recognition, or computers that can read text, which would be natural language processing or text mining. So that’s AI: emulating the human mind.

Read more about him here.