Rockwood Memorial Lecture

2025

INC sponsors the H. Paul Rockwood Memorial Lectureship held annually. The Rockwood Memorial Lectureship Fund was gifted to the Institute by Mr. and Mrs. Jerome Rockwood in memory of their late son's interest, studies, and work in the neural computation field. The Rockwood Memorial Lectures are endowed by Mr. and Mrs. Jerome Rockwood in memory of their late son, Paul, who received a B.S. in Computer Science from UCSD in 1980 and then obtained a second degree B.A. in Psychology in 1981. In 1983 he started a company, Integral Solutions, to develop a universal language translation, but died tragically in a mountaineering accident before he could fulfill his promise.

Abstract: The amazing achievements of Artificial Intelligence over the past decade have their roots in the revival of the field in the 1980s with the advent of neural networks. Looking back at the ideas of the time, we can see the insights that stood the test of time and the missing ingredients that were needed to bring the field to fruition. I will reflect on the trajectory of this unique journey, and draw hints about how it may unfold in the future. With no pun intended, I will also talk about the method of learning from hints in neural networks, and how a missing ingredient was needed to realize its potential.

Bio: Dr. Yaser S. Abu-Mostafa is Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the California Institute of Technology, and Chairman of Machine Learning Consultants LLC. His main fields of expertise are Artificial Intelligence (AI), Machine Learning (ML) and Computational Finance (CF). Over the past decade, he has focused on medical applications of AI, leading to two completed clinical trials of innovations from his lab.

Dr. Abu-Mostafa is the author of Amazon's ML bestseller "Learning from Data". His ML online course (MOOC) has attracted more than 8 million views. He is the co-founder of the annual conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS), the top international ML conference. He has served as a scientific adviser for numerous companies, including Citibank for 9 years.

Dr. Abu-Mostafa received the Clauser Prize for the most original doctoral thesis at Caltech. He received the Caltech undergraduate and graduate teaching awards 5 times, and the Richard P. Feynman prize. In 2005, the Hertz Foundation established a perpetual graduate fellowship named the Abu-Mostafa Fellowship in his honor, which has supported distinguished doctoral students for the past 20 years.

Previous Rockwood Lectures

Hosted by: Terry Sejnowski, Ph.D. and Gert Cauwenberghs, Ph.D.
Organized by: Institute for Neural Computation, https://inc.ucsd.edu