Hi reddit! My name is Brad Hayes and I’m a postdoctoral associate at MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab (CSAIL) interested in building autonomous robots that can learn from, communicate with, and collaborate with humans.
My research at MIT CSAIL involves developing and evaluating algorithms that enable robots to become capable teammates, empowering human co-workers to be safer, more proficient, and more efficient at their jobs.
Back in March I also created @DeepDrumpf, a Twitter account that sounds like Donald Trump using an algorithm I trained with dozens of hours of speech transcripts. (The handle has since picked up nearly 28,000 followers)
Some Tweet highlights:
I’m excited to report that this past month DeepDrumpf formally announced its “candidacy” for presidency , with a crowdfunding campaign whose funds go directly to the awesome charity "Girls Who Code".
DeepDrumpf’s algorithm is based around what’s called “deep learning,” which describes a family of techniques within artificial intelligence and machine learning that allows computers to to learn patterns from data on their own.
It creates Tweets one letter at a time, based on what letters are most likely to follow each other. For example, if it randomly began its Tweet with the letter “D,” it is somewhat likely to be followed by an “R,” and then a “A,” and so on until the bot types out Trump’s latest catchphrase, “Drain the Swamp.” It then starts over for the next sentence and repeats that process until it reaches 140 characters.
The basis of my approach is similar to existing work that can simulate Shakespeare.
My inspiration for it was a report that analyzed the presidential candidates’ linguistic patterns to find that Trump speaks at a fourth-grade level.
Here’s a news story that explains more about Deep Drumpf, and a news story written about some of my PhD thesis research. For more background on my work feel free to also check out my research page . I’ll be online from about 4 to 6 pm EST. Ask me anything!
Feel free to ask me anything about
- DeepDrumpf
- Robotics
- Artificial intelligence
- Human-robot collaboration
- How I got into computer science
- What it’s like to be at MIT CSAIL
- Or anything else!
EDIT (11/5 2:30pm ET): I'm here to answer some of your questions a bit early!
EDIT (11/5 3:05pm ET): I have to run out and do some errands, I'll be back at 4pm ET and will stay as long as I can to answer your questions!
EDIT (11/5 8:30pm ET): Taking a break for a little while! I'll be back later tonight/tomorrow to finish answering questions
EDIT (11/6 11:40am ET): Going to take a shot at answering some of the questions I didn't get to yesterday.
EDIT (11/6 2:10pm ET): Thanks for all your great questions, everybody! I skipped a few duplicates, but if I didn't answer something you were really interested in, please feel free to follow up via e-mail.
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