Bell Labs
In plain wordsA famous American industrial research laboratory, long owned by the telephone company AT&T, where the transistor, information theory and key early machine-learning methods were invented.
The research and development laboratory of the Bell telephone system, for decades the world's most productive industrial research lab, whose work shaped computing and AI. Claude Shannon's information theoryinformation theory, n.: A branch of mathematics that treats information as surprise — the less predictable a message, the more it tells you — and works out how far data can be compressed and how reliably it can be sent. (1948), the transistor (1947), the Unix operating system and the C programming language all came from it. Its Holmdel laboratory became a center of machine learning from the late 1980s: Yann LeCun and colleagues developed convolutional neural networksconvolutional neural network, n.: A kind of neural network built for images and other grid-like data. It slides small pattern detectors across the input, finding edges first, then shapes, then whole objects. for reading handwritten digits (from 1989), the line that led to LeNetLeNet, prop. n.: A family of early image-recognition neural networks built at Bell Labs from 1989 that learned to read handwritten digits. A version read huge numbers of bank checks, and its design underlies today's image models. and to systems that read bank checks, and Corinna Cortes and Vladimir Vapnik introduced the soft-margin support vector machinesupport vector machine, n.: A classic method that separates two groups of examples with the widest possible gap — like laying the broadest possible road between them. A mathematical shortcut lets it draw curved boundaries too. (1995). Bell Labs researchers also built early speech recognizers, beginning with the Audrey digit recognizer (1952). It is now part of Nokia.
Origin
Founded in 1925 in New York City as Bell Telephone Laboratories, jointly owned by AT&T and Western Electric; its headquarters later moved to Murray Hill, New Jersey. After AT&T's restructuring it passed to Lucent Technologies in 1996, which became Alcatel-Lucent, and to Nokia in 2016.
Related
- Claude ShannonClaude Shannon, prop. n.: An American engineer and mathematician who invented information theory, the mathematics of bits and communication, and wrote one of the first plans for a chess-playing computer.
- LeNetLeNet, prop. n.: A family of early image-recognition neural networks built at Bell Labs from 1989 that learned to read handwritten digits. A version read huge numbers of bank checks, and its design underlies today's image models.
- convolutional neural networkconvolutional neural network, n.: A kind of neural network built for images and other grid-like data. It slides small pattern detectors across the input, finding edges first, then shapes, then whole objects.
- support vector machinesupport vector machine, n.: A classic method that separates two groups of examples with the widest possible gap — like laying the broadest possible road between them. A mathematical shortcut lets it draw curved boundaries too.
- Yann LeCunYann LeCun, prop. n.: A French-American computer scientist who pioneered the neural networks that recognize images, led Meta's AI research for over a decade, and argues that chatbots alone will not reach human-level AI.
- Vladimir VapnikVladimir Vapnik, prop. n.: A Soviet-born American mathematician who built the statistical theory of how machines learn from examples and co-invented support vector machines, a leading method before deep learning.
- MNISTMNIST, prop. n.: A famous collection of 70,000 small images of handwritten digits used to test image-recognition programs. Getting a model to read MNIST digits is the 'hello world' of machine learning.