A Google interview candidate recently asked me: “What are three big science questions that keep you up at night?” This was a great question because one’s answer reveals so much about one’s intellectual interests — here are mine:

Q1: Can we imitate “thinking” from only observing behavior?

Suppose you have a large fleet of autonomous vehicles with human operators driving them around diverse road conditions. We can observe the decisions made by the human, and attempt to use imitation learning algorithms to map robot observations to the steering decisions that the human would take.