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

Today we’re joined by Nasrin Mostafazadeh, Senior AI Research Scientist at New York-based Elemental Cognition. Our conversation focuses on Nasrin’s work in event-centric contextual modeling in language and vision including her work on the Story Cloze Test, a reasoning framework for evaluating story understanding and generation. We explore the details of this task, some of the challenges it presents and approaches for solving it.

Today we’re joined by Kyle Story, computer vision engineer at Descartes Labs. Kyle and I caught up after his recent talk at the Google Cloud Next Conference titled “How Computers See the Earth: A Machine Learning Approach to Understanding Satellite Imagery at Scale.” We discuss some of the interesting computer vision problems he’s worked on at Descartes, and the key challenges they’ve had to overcome in scaling them.

Today we’re joined by Yi Zhu, a PhD candidate at UC Merced focused on geospatial image analysis. In our conversation, Yi and I take a look at his recent paper “What Is It Like Down There? Generating Dense Ground-Level Views and Image Features From Overhead Imagery Using Conditional Generative Adversarial Networks.” We discuss the goal of this research and how he uses conditional GANs to generate artificial ground-level images.

Today we’re joined by Larry Matthies, Sr. Research Scientist and head of computer vision in the mobility and robotics division at JPL. In our conversation, we discuss two talks he gave at CVPR a few weeks back, his work on vision systems for the first iteration of Mars rovers in 2004 and the future of planetary landing projects. For the complete show notes, visit https://twimlai.com/talk/171.

In this episode i'm joined by Ashutosh Saxena, a veteran of Andrew Ng’s Stanford Machine Learning Group, and co-founder and CEO of Caspar.ai. Ashutosh and I discuss his RoboBrain project, a computational system that creates semantically meaningful and actionable representations of the objects, actions and observations that a robot experiences in its environment, and allows these to be shared and queried by other robots to learn new actions. For complete show notes, visit https://twimlai.com/talk/170.

In this episode I speak with Joe Connor, Founder of Experto Crede. In our conversation, we explore his experiences bringing AI powered healthcare projects to market in collaboration with the UK National Health Service and its clinicians, some of the various challenges he’s run into when applying ML and AI in healthcare, as well as some of his successes. We also discuss data protections, especially GDPR, potential ways to include clinicians in the building of applications.

In this episode I'm joined by Laura Leal-Taixé, Professor at the Technical University of Munich where she leads the Dynamic Vision and Learning Group. In our conversation, we discuss several of her recent projects including work on image-based localization techniques that fuse traditional model-based computer vision approaches with a data-driven approach based on deep learning, her paper on one-shot video object segmentation and the broader vision for her research.

In this episode I'm joined by Gillian McCann, Head of Cloud Engineering and AI at Workgrid Software. In our conversation, which focuses on Workgrid’s use of cloud-based AI services, Gillian details some of the underlying systems that make Workgrid tick, their engineering pipeline & how they build high quality systems that incorporate external APIs and her view on factors that contribute to misunderstandings and impatience on the part of users of AI-based products.

In this episode, I'm joined by Jason Holmberg, Executive Director and Director of Engineering at WildMe. Jason and I discuss Wildme's pair of open source computer vision based conservation projects, Wildbook and Whaleshark.org, Jason kicks us off with the interesting story of how Wildbook came to be, the eventual expansion of the project and the evolution of these projects’ use of computer vision and deep learning. For the complete show notes, visit twimlai.com/talk/166

In this episode I'm joined by Prashant Warier, CEO and Co-Founder of Qure.ai. We discuss the company’s work building products for interpreting head CT scans and chest x-rays. We look at knowledge gained in bringing a commercial product to market, including what the gap between academic research papers and commercially viable software, the challenge of data acquisition and more. We also touch on the application of transfer learning. For the complete show notes, visit https://twimlai.com/talk/165.

In this episode I'm joined by Amir Zamir, Postdoctoral researcher at both Stanford & UC Berkeley, who joins us fresh off of winning the 2018 CVPR Best Paper Award for co-authoring "Taskonomy: Disentangling Task Transfer Learning." In our conversation, we discuss the nature and consequences of the relationships that Amir and his team discovered, and how they can be used to build more effective visual systems with machine learning. https://twimlai.com/talk/164

In today’s episode I’m joined by Zak Costello, post-doctoral fellow at the Joint BioEnergy Institute to discuss his recent paper, “A machine learning approach to predict metabolic pathway dynamics from time-series multiomics data.” Zak gives us an overview of synthetic biology and the use of ML techniques to optimize metabolic reactions for engineering biofuels at scale. Visit twimlai.com/talk/163 for the complete show notes.

In this episode, I’m joined by Nathan Kutz, Professor of applied mathematics, electrical engineering and physics at the University of Washington to discuss his research into the use of machine learning to help discover the fundamental governing equations for physical and engineering systems from time series measurements. For complete show notes visit twimlai.com/talk/162

In this episode, I'm joined by Alexander Chukovski, Director of Data Services at Munich, Germany based career platform, Experteer. In our conversation, we explore Alex’s journey to implement machine learning at Experteer, the Experteer NLP pipeline and how it’s evolved, Alex’s work with deep learning based ML models, including models like VDCNN and Facebook’s FastText offering and a few recent papers that look at transfer learning for NLP. Check out the complete show notes at twimlai.com/talk/161

In this episode, I'm joined by Adji Bousso Dieng, PhD Student in the Department of Statistics at Columbia University to discuss two of her recent papers, “Noisin: Unbiased Regularization for Recurrent Neural Networks” and “TopicRNN: A Recurrent Neural Network with Long-Range Semantic Dependency.” We dive into the details behind both of these papers and learn a ton along the way.

In the final show in our AI in Sports series, I’m joined by Stephanie Kovalchik, Research Fellow at Victoria University and Senior Sports Scientist at Tennis Australia. In our conversation we discuss Tennis Australia's use of data to develop a player rating system based on ability and probability, some of the interesting products her Game Insight Group is developing, including a win forecasting algorithm, and a statistic that measures a given player’s workload during a match.

In this episode of our AI in Sports series I'm joined by Noah Gift, Founder and Consulting CTO at Pragmatic Labs and professor at UC Davis. Noah and I discuss some of his recent work in using social media to predict which players hold the most on-court value, and how this work could lead to more complete approaches to player valuation. Check out the show notes at twimlai.com/talk/158

In this episode of our AI in Sports series, I'm joined by Jennifer Hobbs, Senior Data Scientist at STATS, a collector and distributor of sports data, to discuss the STATS data pipeline and how they collect and store different types of data for easy consumption and application. We also look into a paper she co-authored, Mythbusting Set-Pieces in Soccer, which was presented at the MIT Sloan Conference this year. https://twimlai.com/talk/157

In today’s episode of our AI in Sports series I'm joined by Mike Schumacher, director of business analytics for the Portland Trail Blazers, and Chenhui Hu, a data scientist at Microsoft to discuss how the Blazers are using machine learning to produce better-targeted sales campaigns, for both single-game and season-ticket buyers.

This week we’re excited to kick off a series of shows on AI in sports. In this episode I'm joined by Sinead Flahive, data scientist at Dublin, Ireland based Kitman Labs to discuss Kitman’s Athlete Optimization System, which allows sports trainers and coaches to collect and analyze data for player performance optimization and injury reduction. Enjoy!