EECS Seminars

Abstract

Many pressing questions in science are macroscopic, as they require scientists to integrate information from numerous data sources, often expressed in natural languages or in graphics; these forms of media are fraught with imprecision and ambiguity and so are difficult for machines to understand. Here I describe DeepDive, which is a new type of system designed to cope with these problems. It combines extraction, integration and prediction into one system. For some paleobiology and materials science tasks, DeepDive-based systems have surpassed human volunteers in data quantity and quality (recall and precision). DeepDive is also used by scientists in areas including genomics and drug repurposing, by a number of companies involved in various forms of search, and by law enforcement in the fight against human trafficking. DeepDive does not allow users to write algorithms; instead, it asks them to write only features. A key technical challenge is scaling up the resulting inference and learning engine, and I will des