Dumitru Erhan is a Research Scientist at Google Brain. His research focuses on understanding the world with neural networks. Dumitru's PhD thesis is titled "Understanding Deep Architectures and the Effect of Unsupervised Pretraining", which he completed in 2010 at the University of Montreal. We discuss his work in the thesis on understanding deep networks and unsupervised pretraining, his perspective on deep learning's development, and the path of ideas to his recent research. Episode notes: https://cs.nyu.edu/~welleck/episode19.html Follow the Thesis Review (@thesisreview) and Sean Welleck (@wellecks) on Twitter, and find out more info about the show at https://cs.nyu.edu/~welleck/podcast.html Support The Thesis Review at www.patreon.com/thesisreview or www.buymeacoffee.com/thesisreview