"Symmetry, as wide or narrow as you may define its meaning, is one idea by which man through the ages has tried to comprehend and create order, beauty, and perfection." and that was a quote from Hermann Weyl, a German mathematician who was born in the late 19th century. Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/mlst Discord: https://discord.gg/ESrGqhf5CB Transcript: https://app.rescript.info/public/share/IxMkkD29XCBgDHvBNChDRWZ7sSwXJgOnfqLkkwdklB4 The last decade has witnessed an experimental revolution in data science and machine learning, epitomised by deep learning methods. Many high-dimensional learning tasks previously thought to be beyond reach -- such as computer vision, playing Go, or protein folding -- are in fact tractable given enough computational horsepower. Remarkably, the essence of deep learning is built from two simple algorithmic principles: first, the notion of representation or feature learning and second, learning by local gradient-descent type methods, typically implemented as backpropagation. While learning generic functions in high dimensions is a cursed estimation problem, many tasks are not uniform and have strong repeating patterns as a result of the low-dimensionality and structure of the physical world. Geometric Deep Learning unifies a broad class of ML problems from the perspectives of symmetry and invariance. These principles not only underlie the breakthrough performance of convolutional neural networks and the recent success of graph neural networks but also provide a principled way to construct new types of problem-specific inductive biases. This week we spoke with Professor Michael Bronstein (head of graph ML at Twitter) and Dr. Petar Veličković and Dr. Taco Cohen and Prof. Joan Bruna about their new proto-book Geometric Deep Learning: Grids, Groups, Graphs, Geodesics, and Gauges https://arxiv.org/abs/2104.13478