From Benchmarks to Problems - A Perspective on Problem Finding in AI

During the past 15 years or so, I have worked on a series of seemingly distinct but eventually related problems, including machine learning algorithms, generative modeling with neural networks, machine translation, language modeling, medical imaging, a bit of healthcare, protein modeling and a bit of drug discovery. I chose to work on some of these problems intentionally, while it was pure serendipity that I worked on some others. It was only in hindsight that these seemingly different problems turned out to be closely related to each other from both technical, social and personal perspectives. In this talk, I plan to do my own retrospective on my own choices, be them intentional or not, on these problems and share with you my thoughts what our own discipline, which is sometimes called computer science, data science, machine learning or artificial intelligence, is.