Graham Taylor is having a busy year. He’s Associate Professor and Canada Research Chair in Machine Learning at University of Guelph, Academic Director at NextAI, a fellow at Vector, and he recently announced he’d be joining Google Brain Montreal as visiting faculty in 2019.

We took Prof. Taylor for coffee near his old east-end Toronto stomping grounds to hear his thoughts on how deep learning has evolved, whether any pre-2012 techniques still yield promising results, where Software 2.0 fits into the future and how much of a deep-domain expert you have to be in order to give truly valuable advice to businesses.