This Week In Machine Learning & Artificial Intelligence (ai) Podcast

In the inaugural TWiML Live, Sam Charrington is joined by Amanda Askell (OpenAI), Anima Anandkumar (NVIDIA/CalTech), Miles Brundage (OpenAI), Robert Munro (Lilt), and Stephen Merity to discuss the controversial recent release of the OpenAI GPT-2 Language Model. We cover the basics like what language models are and why they’re important, and why this announcement caused such a stir, and dig deep into why the lack of a full release of the model raised concerns for so many.

Today we present the final episode in our AI for the Benefit of Society series, in which we’re joined by Mira Lane, Partner Director for Ethics and Society at Microsoft. Mira and I focus our conversation on the role of culture and human-centered design in AI. We discuss how Mira defines human-centered design, its connections to culture and responsible innovation, and how these ideas can be scalably implemented across large engineering organizations.

Today we’re joined by Hanna Wallach, a Principal Researcher at Microsoft Research. Hanna and I really dig into how bias and a lack of interpretability and transparency show up across ML. We discuss the role that human biases, even those that are inadvertent, play in tainting data, and whether deployment of “fair” ML models can actually be achieved in practice, and much more. Hanna points us to a TON of resources to further explore the topic of fairness in ML, which you’ll find at twimlai.com/talk

In this episode, we’re joined by Peter Lee, Corporate Vice President at Microsoft Research responsible for the company’s healthcare initiatives. Peter and I met back at Microsoft Ignite, where he gave me some really interesting takes on AI development in China, which is linked in the show notes. This conversation centers around impact areas Peter sees for AI in healthcare, namely diagnostics and therapeutics, tools, and the future of precision medicine.

Today, we're joined by Justice Amoh Jr., a Ph.D. student at Dartmouth’s Thayer School of Engineering. Justice presented his work on “An Optimized Recurrent Unit for Ultra-Low Power Acoustic Event Detection.” In our conversation, we discuss his goal of bringing low cost, high-efficiency wearables to market for monitoring asthma. We explore the challenges of using classical machine learning models on microcontrollers, and how he went about developing models optimized for constrained hardware environm

Today, we continue our Black in AI series with Alvin Grissom II, Assistant Professor of Computer Science at Ursinus College. In our conversation, we dive into the paper he presented at the workshop, “Pathologies of Neural Models Make Interpretations Difficult.” We talk through some of the “pathological behaviors” he identified in the paper, how we can better understand the overconfidence of trained deep learning models in certain settings, and how we can improve model training with entropy regulariz

Today we’re joined by Lucas Joppa, Chief Environmental Officer at Microsoft and Zach Parisa, Co-founder and president of Silvia Terra, a Microsoft AI for Earth grantee. In our conversation, we explore the ways that ML & AI can be used to advance our understanding of forests and other ecosystems, supporting conservation efforts. We discuss how Silvia Terra uses computer vision and data from a wide array of sensors, combined with AI, to yield more detailed estimates of the various species in our forests.

Today we’re joined by Wendy Chisholm, a principal accessibility architect at Microsoft, and one of the chief proponents of the AI for Accessibility program, which extends grants to AI-powered accessibility projects the areas of Employment, Daily Life, and Communication & Connection. In our conversation, we discuss the intersection of AI and accessibility, the lasting impact that innovation in AI can have for people with disabilities and society as a whole, and the importance of projects in this area.

Today we're joined by Justin Spelhaug, General Manager of Technology for Social Impact at Microsoft. In our conversation, we discuss the company’s efforts in AI for Humanitarian Action, covering Microsoft’s overall approach to technology for social impact, how his group helps mission-driven organizations best leverage technologies like AI, and how AI is being used at places like the World Bank, Operation Smile, and Mission Measurement to create greater impact.

Today, in the first episode of our Black in AI series, we’re joined by Randi Williams, PhD student at the MIT Media Lab. At the Black in AI workshop Randi presented her research on Popbots: A Early Childhood AI Curriculum, which is geared towards teaching preschoolers the fundamentals of artificial intelligence. In our conversation, we discuss the origins of the project, the three AI concepts that are taught in the program, and the goals that Randi hopes to accomplish with her work.

Today we’re joined by Tim Jurka, Head of Feed AI at LinkedIn. In our conversation, Tim describes the holistic optimization of the feed and we discuss some of the interesting technical and business challenges associated with trying to do this. We talk through some of the specific techniques used at LinkedIn like Multi-arm Bandits and Content Embeddings, and also jump into a really interesting discussion about organizing for machine learning at scale.

Today we’re joined by Gary Brotman, Senior Director of Product Management at Qualcomm Technologies, Inc. Gary, who got his start in AI through music, now leads strategy and product planning for the company’s AI and ML technologies, including those that make up the Qualcomm Snapdragon mobile platforms. In our conversation, we discuss AI on mobile devices and at the edge, including popular use cases, and explore some of the various acceleration technologies offered by Qualcomm and others that enable th

A few weeks ago, I made the trek to Las Vegas for the world’s biggest electronics conference, CES. In this special visual only episode, we’re going to check out some of the interesting examples of machine learning and AI that I found at the event. Check out the video at https://twimlai.com/ces2019, and be sure to hit the like and subscribe buttons and let us know how you like the show via a comment! For the show notes, visit https://twimlai.com/talk/222.

Today we’re joined by Vladimir Bychkovsky, Engineering Manager at Facebook, to discuss Spiral, a system they’ve developed for self-tuning high-performance infrastructure services at scale, using real-time machine learning. In our conversation, we explore how the system works, how it was developed, and how infrastructure teams at Facebook can use it to replace hand-tuned parameters set using heuristics with services that automatically optimize themselves in minutes rather than in weeks.

Today we’re joined by JJ Espinoza, former Director of Data Science at 20th Century Fox. In this talk we dig into JJ and his team’s experience building and deploying a content recommendation system from the ground up. In our conversation, we explore the design of a couple of key components of their system, the first of which processes movie scripts to make recommendations about which movies the studio should make, and the second processes trailers to determine which should be recommended to users.

Today we’re joined by Solon Barocas, Assistant Professor of Information Science at Cornell University. Solon and I caught up to discuss his work on model interpretability and the legal and policy implications of the use of machine learning models. In our conversation, we explore the gap between law, policy, and ML, and how to build the bridge between them, including formalizing ethical frameworks for machine learning. We also look at his paper ”The Intuitive Appeal of Explainable Machines.”

In the final episode of our AI Rewind series, we’re excited to have Siddha Ganju back on the show. Siddha, who is now an autonomous vehicles solutions architect at Nvidia shares her thoughts on trends in Computer Vision in 2018 and beyond. We cover her favorite CV papers of the year in areas such as neural architecture search, learning from simulation, application of CV to augmented reality, and more, as well as a bevy of tools and open source projects.

In this episode of our AI Rewind series, we introduce a new friend of the show, Simon Osindero, Staff Research Scientist at DeepMind. We discuss trends in Deep Reinforcement Learning in 2018 and beyond. We’ve packed a bunch into this show, as Simon walks us through many of the important papers and developments seen this year in areas like Imitation Learning, Unsupervised RL, Meta-learning, and more. The complete show notes for this episode can be found at https://twimlai.com/talk/217.

In this episode of our AI Rewind series, we’ve brought back recent guest Sebastian Ruder, PhD Student at the National University of Ireland and Research Scientist at Aylien, to discuss trends in Natural Language Processing in 2018 and beyond. In our conversation we cover a bunch of interesting papers spanning topics such as pre-trained language models, common sense inference datasets and large document reasoning and more, and talk through Sebastian’s predictions for the new year.

In this episode of our AI Rewind series, we’re back with Anima Anandkumar, Bren Professor at Caltech and now Director of Machine Learning Research at NVIDIA. Anima joins us to discuss her take on trends in the broader Machine Learning field in 2018 and beyond. In our conversation, we cover not only technical breakthroughs in the field but also those around inclusivity and diversity. For this episode's complete show notes, visit twimlai.com/talk/215.