Is There a Future for Machine Learning?

We invited Yonatan Bisk to talk about grounded language understanding. We started off by discussing an overview of the topic, its research goals, and the the challenges involved. In the latter half of the conversation, we talked about ALFRED (Shridhar et al., 2019), a grounded instruction following benchmark that simulates training a robot butler. The current best models built for this benchmark perform very poorly compared to humans. We discussed why that might be, and what could be done to improve their performance. Yonatan Bisk is currently an assistant professor at Language Technologies Institute at Carnegie Mellon University. The data and the leaderboard for ALFRED can be accessed here: https://askforalfred.com/.