Hi I’m Marc.
I’m reading for a Ph.D with the Institute of Linguistics.
My field is in Artificial Intelligence, specifically in
Automatic Image Description Generation.
What I am working on is trying to make
computers automatically give visual descriptions of images.
Image descriptions are useful for blind people.
So the computer can read out what the image contains.
The way that I do this is by using Artificial Neural Networks,
which are programs that learn how to do stuff —
without needing a programmer to say how to do it.
So imagine that you have a machine,
and this machine takes in a bunch of photos
and tells you whether or not the photo is of a dog or not.
If it is of a dog, then the photo will have a red border.
Otherwise it will have a blue border.
The neural network doesn’t know how to do it,
but it does have knobs that you can set in order to say
what’s important and what isn’t.
For example,
if we turn the first knob,
— let’s say that it controls how important having a black nose is —
as we turn it up, all the photos that contain a dark nose
will go red and the rest will go blue.
And eventually, after a number of iterations,
we will have a correct classification for all the images.
In practice, you wouldn’t have just 4 knobs.
You’d have millions or even billions of knobs,
in order to make the neural network cable to learn to do anything.
So it’s important that we have computers that are fast enough
to find the right setting in as little time as possible.
Computers such as the University’s supercomputer.
The neural network doesn’t only have to say “yes” or “no”.
It can also say a word, for example “dog” or “cat”.
It can also say several words which form a sentence.
For example: “A dog walking in a field”,
and so that would be a description of an image.
I chose to study at the University of Malta
because I had already worked with my supervisor,
and I was very happy with him so I wanted to continue working for my Ph.D.
My advice is to try to be as helpful to others as possible.
Every time that you learn something, try to find a way to make it easier for others to understand.
Everything that you know is probably because someone has explained it to you.
So try to explain it to someone else.
