[visionlist] Visual Pattern Recognition Benchmarks / Neural Network ReNNaissance / Jobs

[Juergen Schmidhuber]

Recently our neural computer vision team collected a string of 1st  
ranks in the following visual pattern recognition competitions and  
benchmarks:

1. Online Traffic Sign Recognition Competition, U. Bochum (1st & 2nd  
rank; 1.02% error rate, January 2011).
2. NORB Object Recognition Benchmark, NYU, 2004. New record (2.53%  
error rate) in January 2011 [1].
3. CIFAR-10 Object Recognition Benchmark, U. Toronto, 2009. New record  
(19.51% error rate) in January 2011 [1].
4. MNIST Handwritten Digit Recognition Benchmark, NYU, 1998. New  
record (0.35% error rate) in 2010, tied in January 2011 [1].
5.-7. Three Connected Handwriting Recognition Competitions at ICDAR  
2009, all won by our multi-dimensional LSTM recurrent neural networks.

None of 1-7 requires the traditional sophisticated computer vision  
techniques developed over the past six decades or so. Instead, our  
biologically rather plausible systems are inspired by human brains,  
and learn to recognize objects from numerous training examples. We use  
supervised feedforward or recurrent neural networks with many non- 
linear processing stages. GPUs speed up learning by a factor of up to  
50. No need for unsupervised pre-training, which is a bit depressing,  
as we have developed unsupervised learning algorithms for two  
decades.  Nevertheless, we think our results are contributing to a  
second Neural Network ReNNaissance (the first one happened in the  
1980s and early 90s). Most recent paper:
[1] D. C. Ciresan, U. Meier, J. Masci, L. M. Gambardella, J.  
Schmidhuber. High-Performance Neural Networks for Visual Object  
Classification. Preprint arXiv:1102.0183v1 [cs.AI], 1 Feb 2011.

Overview web sites:
http://www.idsia.ch/~juergen/vision.html
http://www.idsia.ch/~juergen/handwriting.html

We are hiring postdocs and PhD students in neural vision and related  
fields:
Postdoc SFR 72,000/year ~ US$ 75,400/year as of 4/2/2011;
PhD student SFR 40,800/year ~ US$ 42,700/year. Instructions:
http://www.idsia.ch/~juergen/sn2010.html
BTW, Switzerland is the best country for scientists:
http://www.idsia.ch/~juergen/switzerland.html     :-)


Juergen Schmidhuber
Director of the Swiss AI Lab IDSIA, Lugano
Professor of Artificial Intelligence, Univ. Lugano
Professor SUPSI, Manno-Lugano, Switzerland
http://www.idsia.ch/~juergen