NIPS 2010 - My favourite quotes [updated]

Here are some of the quotes of this conference that were more on the lighter side and that made me at least chuckle:
Josh Tenenbaum about 1970s linguists: "They didn't have any computers these days. At least none that we would now recognize as computer."
Geoff Hinton on Josh Tenenbaums talk about "How to grow a mind":
"You made the right generalization of Deep Learning from one example."
(Hinting at Josh Tenenbaums interest in one-shot-learning)
Some more of Geoff Hinton:
On optimizing a non-convex likelihood function:
"In good neural network fashion we add noise and momentum and hope for the best."
On the same topic:
"Now we allow the propabilities to add up to 4. I accidentally forgot to normalize them and they were 2. When I normalized them to one, the result got worse. So I went in the other direction."
David W. Hogg in the Sam Roweis symposium:
"In astronomy, we work at the photon level. We don't have big bright letters with number written with black markers."
"Sam told me to be careful about what you optimize. And so I was. You don't want to maximize the likelihood. You want to optimize your long-term cash flow."

Yann LeCun to Jitendra Malik after his (Maliks) talk on poselets:
"You 'solved' deep learning my Mechanical Turk."

Oh and how could I forget, Jitendra Malik himself on object recognition:
"Learning object recognition from bounding boxes is like learning language from a list of sentences."

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