The complete show notes for this episode can be found at twimlai.com/go/509.

Most folks know Bryan as one of the founders/creators of cuDNN, the accelerated library for deep neural networks. In our conversation, we explore his interest in high-performance computing and its recent overlap with AI, his current work on Megatron, a framework for training giant language models, and the basic approach for distributing a large language model on DGX infrastructure. 

We also discuss the three different kinds of parallelism, tensor parallelism, pipeline parallelism, and data parallelism, that Megatron provides when training models, as well as his work on the Deep Learning Super Sampling project and the role it's playing in the present and future of game development via ray tracing. 

The complete show notes for this episode can be found at twimlai.com/go/507.

In our conversation with Lina, who was an invited speaker at the Neglected Assumptions in Causal Inference Workshop, we explored her work applying Optimal Dynamic Treatment (ODT) to understand which kinds of individuals respond best to specific interventions in the US criminal justice system. We discuss the concept of neglected assumptions and how it connects to ODT rule estimation, as well as a breakdown of the causal roadmap, coined by researchers at UC Berkeley. 

Finally, Lina talks us through the roadmap while applying the ODT rule problem, how she’s applied a “superlearner” algorithm to this problem, how it was trained, and what the future of this research looks like.

The complete show notes for this episode can be found at twimlai.com/go/506.

In our conversation with Gustavo, we explore his paper Beyond the Pareto Efficient Frontier: Constraint Active Search for Multiobjective Experimental Design, which focuses on a novel algorithmic solution for the iterative model search process. This new algorithm empowers teams to run experiments where they are not optimizing particular metrics but instead identifying parameter configurations that satisfy constraints in the metric space. This allows users to efficiently explore multiple metrics at once in an efficient, informed, and intelligent way that lends itself to real-world, human-in-the-loop scenarios.

The complete show notes for this episode can be found at twimlai.com/go/505.

In our conversation with Virginia, we explore her work on cross-device federated learning applications, including where the distributed learning aspects of FL are relative to the privacy techniques. We dig into her paper from ICML, Ditto: Fair and Robust Federated Learning Through Personalization, what fairness means in contrast to AI ethics, the particulars of the failure modes, the relationship between models, and the things being optimized across devices, and the tradeoffs between fairness and robustness.

We also discuss a second paper, Heterogeneity for the Win: One-Shot Federated Clustering, how the proposed method makes heterogeneity beneficial in data, how the heterogeneity of data is classified, and some applications of FL in an unsupervised setting.

The complete show notes for this episode can be found at twimlai.com/go/504.

In our conversation with Errol, we explore H&M’s AI journey, including its wide adoption across the company in 2016, and the various use cases in which it's deployed like fashion forecasting and pricing algorithms. We discuss Errol’s first steps in taking on the challenge of scaling AI broadly at the company, the value-added learning from proof of concepts, and how to align in a sustainable, long-term way. Of course, we dig into the infrastructure and models being used, the biggest challenges faced, and the importance of managing the project portfolio, while Errol shares their approach to building infra for a specific product with many products in mind.

Our conversation with Stefano centers on recent research of his called Graceful AI, which focuses on how to make trained systems evolve gracefully. We discuss the broader motivation for this research and the potential dangers or negative effects of constantly retraining ML models in production. We also talk about research into error rate clustering, the importance of model architecture when dealing with problems of model compression, how they’ve solved problems of regression and reprocessing by utilizing existing models, and much more.

The complete show notes for this episode can be found at twimlai.com/go/502.

Suchi shares a bit about her journey to working in the intersection of machine learning and healthcare, and how her research has spanned across both medical policy and discovery. We discuss why it has taken so long for machine learning to become accepted and adopted by the healthcare infrastructure and where exactly we stand in the adoption process, where there have been “pockets” of tangible success. 

Finally, we explore the state of healthcare data, and of course, we talk about Suchi’s recently announced startup Bayesian Health and their goals in the healthcare space, and an accompanying study that looks at real-time ML inference in an EMR setting.

The complete show notes for this episode can be found at twimlai.com/go/501.

In our conversation with Jeff, we cover a ton of ground, starting with a bit of exploration around ML compilers, what they are, and their role in solving issues of parallelism. We also dig into the latest additions to the Snapdragon platform, AI Engine Direct, and how it works as a bridge to bring more capabilities across their platform, how benchmarking works in the context of the platform, how the work of other researchers we’ve spoken to on compression and quantization finds its way from research to product, and much more! 

After you check out this interview, you can look below for some of the other conversations with researchers mentioned. 

The complete show notes for this episode can be found at twimlai.com/go/500.

In this conversation, we use a pair of research projects, Maia Chess and Situated Interaction, to springboard us into a conversation about the evolution of human-AI interaction. We discuss both of these projects individually, as well as the commonalities they have, how themes like understanding the human experience appear in their work, the types of models being used, the various types of data, and the complexity of each of their setups. 

We explore some of the challenges associated with getting computers to better understand human behavior and interact in ways that are more fluid. Finally, we touch on what excites both Dan and Sid about their respective projects, and what they’re excited about for the future.  

The complete show notes for this episode can be found at https://twimlai.com/go/499.

Julieta was a keynote speaker at the recent LatinX in AI workshop at CVPR, and our conversation focuses on her talk “What do Large-Scale Visual Search and Neural Network Compression have in Common,” which shows that multiple ideas from large-scale visual search can be used to achieve state-of-the-art neural network compression. We explore the commonality between large databases and dealing with high dimensional, many-parameter neural networks, the advantages of using product quantization, and how that plays out when using it to compress a neural network. 

We also dig into another paper Julieta presented at the conference, Deep Multi-Task Learning for Joint Localization, Perception, and Prediction, which details an architecture that is able to reuse computation between the three tasks, and is thus able to correct localization errors efficiently.

The complete show notes for this episode can be found at twimlai.com/go/498.

We cover quite a bit of ground in our conversation with Claire, including her journey down the path from environmental activist to one of the leading climate informatics researchers in the world. We explore her current research interests, and the available opportunities in applying machine learning to climate informatics, including the interesting position of doing ML from a data-rich environment. 

Finally, we dig into the evolution of climate science-focused events and conferences, as well as the Keynote Claire gave at the EarthVision workshop at CVPR “Deep Unsupervised Learning for Climate Informatics,” which focused on semi- and unsupervised deep learning approaches to studying rare and extreme climate events.

The complete show notes for this episode can be found at twimlai.com/go/497.

In our conversation with Amir, whose research primarily focuses on video perception, we discuss a few papers they presented at the event. We explore the paper Skip-Convolutions for Efficient Video Processing, which looks at training discrete variables to end to end into visual neural networks. We also discuss his work on his FrameExit paper, which proposes a conditional early exiting framework for efficient video recognition. 

The complete show notes for this episode can be found at twimlai.com/go/496.

In our conversation with Noam, we explore the history of Project Debater, the first AI system that can “debate” humans on complex topics. We also dig into the evolution of the project, which is the culmination of 7 years and over 50 research papers, and eventually becoming a Nature cover paper, “An Autonomous Debating System,” which details the system in its entirety. 

Finally, Noam details many of the underlying capabilities of Debater, including the relationship between systems preparation and training, evidence detection, detecting the quality of arguments, narrative generation, the use of conventional NLP methods like entity linking, and much more.

The complete show notes for this episode can be found at twimlai.com/go/495.

In our conversation with Madhur, we explore the super interesting work he’s doing at the intersection of autonomous driving, ML/AI, and Motorsports, where he’s teaching self-driving cars how to drive in an agile manner. We talk through the differences between traditional self-driving problems and those encountered in a racing environment, the challenges in solving planning, perception, control. 

We also discuss their upcoming race at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway, where Madhur and his students will compete for 1 million dollars in the world’s first head-to-head fully autonomous race, and how they’re preparing for it.

In our conversation with Eric, we explore his tenure as AAAI president and his focus on the future of AI and its ethical implications, the scope of the study on the topic, and how drastically the AI and machine learning landscape has changed since 2009. We also discuss Eric’s role at Microsoft and the Aether committee that has advised the company on issues of responsible AI since 2017.

Finally, we talk through his recent work as a member of the National Security Commission on AI, where he helped commission a 750+ page report on topics including the Future of AI R&D, Building Trustworthy AI systems, civil liberties and privacy, and the challenging area of AI and autonomous weapons.  

The complete show notes for this episode can be found at twimlai.com/go/493.

In our conversation, Parvez shares his interesting take on organizing principles for his organization, starting with how data science teams are broadly organized at LinkedIn. We explore how they ensure time investments on long-term projects are managed, how to identify products that can help in a cross-cutting way across multiple lines of business, quantitative methodologies to identify unintended consequences in experimentation, and navigating the tension between research and applied ML teams in an organization. Finally, we discuss differential privacy, and their recently released GreyKite library, an open-source Python library developed to support forecasting.

The complete show note for this episode can be found at twimlai.com/go/492.

In our conversation, we explore Katherine’s research interests, which lie at the intersection of haptics (physical interaction with the world) and machine learning, introducing us to the concept of “haptic intelligence.” We discuss how ML, mainly computer vision, has been integrated to work together with robots, and some of the devices that Katherine’s lab is developing to take advantage of this research.

We also talk about hugging robots, augmented reality in robotic surgery, and the degree to which she studies human-robot interaction. Finally, Katherine shares with us her passion for mentoring and the importance of diversity and inclusion in robotics and machine learning. 

The complete show notes for this episode can be found at twimlai.com/go/491.

In our conversation with Chris and Antje, we explore their roles as community builders prior to, and since, joining AWS, as well as their recently released book Data Science on AWS. In the book, Chris and Antje demonstrate how to reduce cost and improve performance while successfully building and deploying data science projects. 

We also discuss the release of their new Practical Data Science Specialization on Coursera, managing the complexity that comes with building real-world projects, and some of their favorite sessions from the recent ML Summit.

We begin our conversation with Ziad exploring the symbiosis between 5G and AI and what is enabling developers to take full advantage of AI on mobile devices. We also discuss the balance of product evolution and incorporating research concepts, and the evolution of their hardware infrastructure Cloud AI 100, their role in the deployment of Ingenuity, the robotic helicopter that operated on Mars just last year. 

Finally, we talk about specialization in building IoT applications like autonomous vehicles and smart cities, the degree to which federated learning is being deployed across the industry, and the importance of privacy and security of personal data. 

The complete show notes can be found at https://twimlai.com/go/489.

In our conversation with Nir, we explore how his view of the wide vs deep machine learning platforms paradox has changed and evolved over time, how companies should think about building vs buying and integration, and his thoughts on why experiment management has become an automatic buy, be it open source or otherwise. 

We also discuss the disadvantages of using a cloud vendor as opposed to a software-based approach, the balance between mlops and data science when addressing issues of overfitting, and how ClearML is applying techniques like federated machine learning and transfer learning to their solutions.

The complete show notes for this episode can be found at https://twimlai.com/go/488.

We had the pleasure to catch up with Alex prior to the upcoming AWS Machine Learning Summit, and we covered a TON of ground in the conversation. We start by focusing on his research in the domain of deep learning on graphs, including a few examples showcasing its function, and an interesting discussion around the relationship between large language models and graphs. Next up, we discuss their focus on AutoML research and how it's the key to lowering the barrier of entry for machine learning research.

Alex also shares a bit about his work on causality and causal modeling, introducing us to the concept of Granger causality. Finally, we talk about the aforementioned ML Summit, its exponential growth since its inception a few years ago, and what speakers he's most excited about hearing from.

The complete show notes for this episode can be found at https://twimlai.com/go/487.

We cover a lot of ground with Sean, starting with his recent decision to step away from his previous role as the lab director to take a more hands-on role, and what inspired that change. We also discuss his research at Rideshare Labs, where they take a more “moonshot” approach to solving the typical problems like forecasting and planning, marketplace experimentation, and decision making, and how his statistical approach manifests itself in his work.

Finally, we spend quite a bit of time exploring the role of causality in the work at rideshare labs, including how systems like the aforementioned forecasting system are designed around causal models, if driving model development is more effective using business metrics, challenges associated with hierarchical modeling, and much much more.

The complete show notes for this episode can be found at twimlai.com/go/486.

In our conversation with Jabran, we explore their recent endeavor into the complete mapping of which T-cells bind to which antigens through the Antigen Map Project. We discuss how Jabran’s background in astrophysics and cosmology has translated to his current work in immunology and biology, the origins of the antigen map, the biological and how the focus was changed by the emergence of the coronavirus pandemic.

We talk through the biological advancements, and the challenges of using machine learning in this setting, some of the more advanced ML techniques that they’ve tried that have not panned out (as of yet), the path forward for the antigen map to make a broader impact, and much more.

The complete show notes for this episode can be found at twimlai.com/go/485.

In our conversation with Konstantin, we explore his recent papers, titled coRNN and uniCORNN respectively, which focus on a novel architecture of recurrent neural networks for learning long-time dependencies.

We explore the inspiration he drew from neuroscience when tackling this problem, how the performance results compared to networks like LSTMs and others that have been proven to work on this problem and Konstantin’s future research goals.

The complete show notes for this episode can be found at twimlai.com/go/484.

One of our favorite recurring conversations on the podcast is the two-way street that lies between machine learning and neuroscience, which Allyson explores through the modeling of cognitive processes that pertain to language. In our conversation, we discuss how she approaches assessing the competencies of AI, the value of control of confounding variables in AI research, and how the pattern matching traits of Ml/DL models are not necessarily exclusive to these systems. 

Allyson also participated in a recent panel discussion at the ICLR workshop How Can Findings About The Brain Improve AI Systems?, centered around the utility of brain inspiration for developing AI models. We discuss ways in which we can try to more closely simulate the functioning of a brain, where her work fits into the analysis and interpretability area of NLP, and much more!

The complete show notes for this episode can be found at twimlai.com/go/483. 

In our conversation with Roberto, we explore his paper Probabilistic Numeric Convolutional Neural Networks, which represents features as Gaussian processes, providing a probabilistic description of discretization error. We discuss some of the other work the team at Qualcomm presented at the conference, including a paper called Adaptive Neural Compression, as well as work on Guage Equvariant Mesh CNNs. Finally, we briefly discuss quantum deep learning, and what excites Roberto and his team about the future of their research in combinatorial optimization.  

The complete show notes for this episode can be found at https://twimlai.com/go/482

In our conversation with Huiji, we dig into his interest in building NLP tools and systems, including a recent open-source project called DeText, a framework for generating models for ranking classification and language generation. We explore the motivation behind DeText, the landscape at LinkedIn before and after it was put into use broadly, and the various contexts it’s being used in at the company. We also discuss the relationship between BERT and DeText via LiBERT, a version of BERT that is trained and calibrated on LinkedIn data, the practical use of these tools from an engineering perspective, the approach they’ve taken to optimization, and much more!

The complete show notes for this episode can be found at https://twimlai.com/go/481. 

You might remember Jacqueline from our Advancing Your Data Science Career During the Pandemic panel, where she shared her experience trying to navigate the suddenly hectic data science job market. Now, a year removed from that panel, we explore her book on data science careers, top insights for folks just getting into the field, ways that job seekers should be signaling that they have the required background, and how to approach and navigate failure as a data scientist. 

We also spend quite a bit of time discussing Dask, an open-source library for parallel computing in Python, as well as use cases for the tool, the relationship between dask and Kubernetes and docker containers, where data scientists are in regards to the software development toolchain and much more!

The complete show notes for this episode can be found at https://twimlai.com/go/480.

Irene’s research is focused on developing new machine learning methods specifically for healthcare, through the lens of questions of equity and inclusion. In our conversation, we explore some of the various projects that Irene has worked on, including an early detection program for intimate partner violence. 

We also discuss how she thinks about the long term implications of predictions in the healthcare domain, how she’s learned to communicate across the interface between the ML researcher and clinician, probabilistic approaches to machine learning for healthcare, and finally, key takeaways for those of you interested in this area of research.

The complete show notes for this episode can be found at https://twimlai.com/go/479.

We also discuss the concept of intentional creativity and the lack of good theory on the subject, the adjacent areas in ML that he’s most excited about for their potential contribution to his research, his recent focus on model explainability, how he approaches problems of common sense, and much more! 

The complete show notes for this episode can be found at https://twimlai.com/go/478.

In our conversation with Jamie, we explore his work at the intersection of cognitive systems and natural language understanding, and how to use AI as a vehicle for better understanding human intelligence. We discuss the tie that binds these domains together, if the tasks are the same as traditional NLU tasks, and what are the specific things he’s trying to gain deeper insights into.

One of the unique aspects of Jamie’s research is that he takes an “old-school AI” approach, and to that end, we discuss the models he handcrafts to generate language. Finally, we examine how he evaluates the performance of his representations if he’s not playing the SOTA “game,” what he bookmarks against, identifying deficiencies in deep learning systems, and the exciting directions for his upcoming research. 

The complete show notes for this episode can be found at https://twimlai.com/go/477.

In our conversation with Pieter, we cover a ton of ground, starting with the specific goals and tasks of his work at Covariant, the shift in needs for industrial AI application and robots, if his experience solving real-world problems has changed his opinion on end to end deep learning, and the scope for the three problem domains of the models he’s building.

We also explore his recent work at the intersection of unsupervised and reinforcement learning, goal-directed RL, his recent paper “Pretrained Transformers as Universal Computation Engines” and where that research thread is headed, and of course, his new podcast Robot Brains, which you can find on all streaming platforms today!

The complete show notes for this episode can be found at twimlai.com/go/476.

In our conversation with Abhishek, we explore his Kaggle journey, including how his approach to competitions has evolved over time, what resources he used to prepare for his transition to a full-time practitioner, and the most important lessons he’s learned along the way.

We also spend a great deal of time discussing his new role at HuggingFace, where he's building AutoNLP. We talk through the goals of the project, the primary problem domain, and how the results of AutoNLP compare with those from hand-crafted models. Finally, we discuss Abhishek’s book, Approaching (Almost) Any Machine Learning Problem.

The complete show notes for this episode can be found at https://twimlai.com/go/475.

In our conversation with Saqib, we explore the Seeing AI app, an app “that narrates the world around you.” We discuss the various technologies and use cases for the app, and how it has evolved since the inception of the project, how the technology landscape supports projects like this one, and the technical challenges he faces when building out the app.

We also the relationship and trust between humans and robots, and how that translates to this app, what Saqib sees on the research horizon that will support his vision for the future of Seeing AI, and how the integration of tech like Apple’s upcoming “smart” glasses could change the way their app is used.

The complete show notes for this episode can be found at twimlai.com/go/474.

In our conversation with Jelani, we explore his research in computational theory, where he focuses on building streaming and sketching algorithms, random projections, and dimensionality reduction. We discuss how Jelani thinks about the balance between the innovation of new algorithms and the performance of existing ones, and some use cases where we’d see his work in action.

Finally, we talk through how his work ties into machine learning, what tools from the theorist’s toolbox he’d suggest all ML practitioners know, and his nonprofit AddisCoder, a 4 week summer program that introduces high-school students to programming and algorithms.

The complete show notes for this episode can be found at twimlai.com/go/473.

In our conversation with Stevie, we explore her work at the intersection of human-centered computing, machine learning, and high-risk mental illness behaviors. We discuss how her background in HCC helps shapes her perspective, how machine learning helps with understanding severity levels of mental illness, and some recent work where convolutional graph neural networks are applied to identify and discover new kinds of behaviors for people who struggle with opioid use disorder.

We also explore the role of computational linguistics and NLP in her research, issues in using social media data being used as a data source, and finally, how people who are interested in an introduction to human-centered computing can get started.

The complete show notes for this episode can be found at twimlai.com/go/472.

The complete show notes for this episode can be found at https://twimlai.com/go/471. 

The complete show notes for this episode can be found at twimlai.com/go/470.

The complete show notes for this episode can be found at twimlai.com/sponsorseries.

The complete show notes for this episode can be found at twimlai.com/sponsorseries.

Emily and Meg, as well as Timnit Gebru and Angelina McMillan-Major, are co-authors on the paper On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots: Can Language Models Be Too Big? 🦜. As most of you undoubtedly know by now, there has been much controversy surrounding, and fallout from, this paper. In this conversation, our main priority was to focus on the message of the paper itself. We spend some time discussing the historical context for the paper, then turn to the goals of the paper, discussing the many reasons why the ever-growing datasets and models are not necessarily the direction we should be going. 

We explore the cost of these training datasets, both literal and environmental, as well as the bias implications of these models, and of course the perpetual debate about responsibility when building and deploying ML systems. Finally, we discuss the thin line between AI hype and useful AI systems, and the importance of doing pre-mortems to truly flesh out any issues you could potentially come across prior to building models, and much much more. 

The complete show notes for this episode can be found at twimlai.com/go/467.

Abhishek, a member of the BAIR Lab, joined us to talk about his recent robotics and reinforcement learning research and interests, which focus on applying RL to real-world robotics applications. We explore the concept of reward supervision, and how to get robots to learn these reward functions from videos, and the rationale behind supervised experts in these experiments. 

We also discuss the use of simulation for experiments, data collection, and the path to scalable robotic learning. Finally, we discuss gradient surgery vs gradient sledgehammering, and his ecological RL paper, which focuses on the “phenomena that exist in the real world” and how humans and robotics systems interface in those situations. 

The complete show notes for this episode can be found at https://twimlai.com/go/466.

In our conversation with David, we focus on his work on AI at Scale, an initiative focused on the change in the ways people are developing AI, driven in large part by the emergence of massive models. We explore David’s thoughts about the progression towards larger models, the focus on parameters and how it ties to the architecture of these models, and how we should assess how attention works in these models.

We also discuss the different families of models (generation & representation), the transition from CV to NLP tasks, and an interesting point of models “becoming a platform” via transfer learning.

The complete show notes for this episode can be found at twimlai.com/go/465.

While Melanie has had a long career with a myriad of research interests, we focus on a few, complex systems and the understanding of intelligence, complexity, and her recent work on getting AI systems to make analogies. We explore examples of social learning, and how it applies to AI contextually, and defining intelligence. 

We discuss potential frameworks that would help machines understand analogies, established benchmarks for analogy, and if there is a social learning solution to help machines figure out analogy. Finally we talk through the overall state of AI systems, the progress we’ve made amid the limited concept of social learning, if we’re able to achieve intelligence with current approaches to AI, and much more!

The complete show notes for this episode can be found at twimlai.com/go/464.

In our conversation with Adriana, we explore her visual commonsense research, and how it intersects with her background in media studies. We discuss the idea of shortcuts, or faults in visual question answering data sets that appear in many SOTA results, as well as the concept of masking, a technique developed to assist in context prediction. Adriana then describes how these techniques fit into her broader goal of trying to understand the rhetoric of visual advertisements. 

Finally, Adriana shares a bit about her work on robust visual reasoning, the parallels between this research and other work happening around explainability, and the vision for her work going forward. 

The complete show notes for this episode can be found at twimlai.com/go/463.

In our conversation with Nishan, we discuss his interesting path to MLOps and how ML/AI is used at Overstock, primarily for search/recommendations and marketing/advertisement use cases. We spend a great deal of time exploring machine learning architecture and architectural patterns, how he perceives the differences between architectural patterns and algorithms, and emergent architectural patterns that standards have not yet been set for.

Finally, we discuss how the idea of anti-patterns was innovative in early design pattern thinking and if those concepts are transferable to ML, if architectural patterns will bleed over into organizational patterns and culture, and Nishan introduces us to the concept of Squads within an organizational structure.

The complete show notes for this episode can be found at https://twimlai.com/go/462.

In our conversation with Vered, we explore her NLP research, where she focuses on teaching machines common sense reasoning in natural language. We discuss training using GPT models and the potential use of multimodal reasoning and incorporating images to augment the reasoning capabilities.

Finally, we talk through some other noteworthy research in this field, how she deals with biases in the models, and Vered's future plans for incorporating some of the newer techniques into her future research.

The complete show notes for this episode can be found at https://twimlai.com/go/461. 

Our conversation with Dr. Howard focuses on her recently released book, Sex, Race, and Robots: How to Be Human in the Age of AI, which is an extension of her research on the relationships between humans and robots. We continue to explore this relationship through the themes of socialization introduced in the book, like associating genders to AI and robotic systems and the “self-fulfilling prophecy” that has become search engines. 

We also discuss a recurring conversation in the community around AI  being biased because of data versus models and data, and the choices and responsibilities that come with the ethical aspects of building AI systems. Finally, we discuss Dr. Howard’s new role at OSU, how it will affect her research, and what the future holds for the applied AI field. 

The complete show notes for this episode can be found at https://twimlai.com/go/460.

Our conversation with Dr. Howard focuses on her recently released book, Sex, Race, and Robots: How to Be Human in the Age of AI, which is an extension of her research on the relationships between humans and robots. We continue to explore this relationship through the themes of socialization introduced in the book, like associating genders to AI and robotic systems and the “self-fulfilling prophecy” that has become search engines. 

We also discuss a recurring conversation in the community around AI  being biased because of data versus models and data, and the choices and responsibilities that come with the ethical aspects of building AI systems. Finally, we discuss Dr. Howard’s new role at OSU, how it will affect her research, and what the future holds for the applied AI field. 

The complete show notes for this episode can be found at https://twimlai.com/go/460.

In our conversation with Penousal, we explore his research in Evolutionary Computation, and how that work coincides with his passion for images and graphics. We also discuss the link between creativity and humanity, and have an interesting sidebar about the philosophy of Sci-Fi in popular culture. 

Finally, we dig into Penousals evolutionary machine learning research, primarily in the context of the evolution of various animal species mating habits and practices.

The complete show notes for this episode can be found at twimlai.com/go/459.  

Arul, a 30 year veteran of Microsoft, manages the machine translation research and products in the Azure Cognitive Services group. In our conversation, we explore the historical evolution of machine translation like breakthroughs in seq2seq and the emergence of transformer models. 

We also discuss how they’re using multilingual transfer learning and combining what they’ve learned in translation with pre-trained language models like BERT. Finally, we explore what they’re doing to experience domain-specific improvements in their models, and what excites Arul about the translation architecture going forward. 

The complete show notes for this series can be found at twimlai.com/go/458.

In our conversation with Luna, we explore Amazon’s expansive product knowledge graph, and the various roles that machine learning plays throughout it. We also talk through the differences and synergies between the media and retail product knowledge graph use cases and how ML comes into play in search and recommendation use cases. Finally, we explore the similarities to relational databases and efforts to standardize the product knowledge graphs across the company and broadly in the research community.

The complete show notes for this episode can be found at https://twimlai.com/go/457.

In our conversation with Sarah, whose research focuses on Fairness in AI, we discuss why a “systems-level” approach is necessary when thinking about ethical and fairness issues in models and algorithms. We also explore Wiggum: a fairness forensics tool, which explores bias and allows for regular auditing of data, as well as her ongoing collaboration with a social psychologist to explore how people perceive ethics and fairness.

Finally, we talk through the role of tools in assessing fairness and bias, and the importance of understanding the decisions the tools are making.

The complete show notes can be found at twimlai.com/go/456.

In our conversation with Andrew, we explore some of the AI use cases at the foundation, with the goal of bringing “community-based” healthcare to underserved populations in the global south. We focus on COVID-19 response and improving the accuracy of malaria testing with a bayesian framework and a few others, and the challenges like scaling these systems and building out infrastructure so that communities can begin to support themselves. 

We also touch on Andrew's previous work at Apple, where he helped develop what is now known as Research Kit, their ML for health tools that are now seen in apple devices like phones and watches.

The complete show notes for this episode can be found at https://twimlai.com/go/455

In our conversation, we explore the state of the autonomous vehicles space broadly and at Waymo, including how AV has improved in the last few years, their focus on level 4 driving, and Drago’s thoughts on the direction of the industry going forward. Drago breaks down their core ML use cases, Perception, Prediction, Planning, and Simulation, and how their work has lead to a fully autonomous vehicle being deployed in Phoenix. 

We also discuss the socioeconomic and environmental impact of self-driving cars, a few research papers submitted to NeurIPS 2020, and if the sophistication of AV systems will lend themselves to the development of tomorrow’s enterprise machine learning systems.

The complete show notes for this episode can be found at twimlai.com/go/454. 

We cover a ton of ground with Ya, starting with her experiences prior to becoming Head of DS, as one of the architects of the LinkedIn Platform. We discuss her “three phases” (building, adoption, and maturation) to keep in mind when building out a platform, how to avoid “hero syndrome” early in the process.

Finally, we dig into the various tools and platforms that give LinkedIn teams leverage, their organizational structure, as well as the emergence of differential privacy for security use cases and if it's ready for prime time.

The complete show notes for this episode can be found at https://twimlai.com/go/453. 

In our conversation with Jesse, we explore the current landscape of creativity AI, and the role Magenta plays in helping express creativity through ML and deep learning. We dig deep into their Differentiable Digital Signal Processing (DDSP) library, which “lets you combine the interpretable structure of classical DSP elements (such as filters, oscillators, reverberation, etc.) with the expressivity of deep learning.”

Finally, Jesse walks us through some of the other projects that the Magenta team undertakes, including NLP and language modeling, and what he wants to see come out of the work that he and others are doing in creative AI research.

The complete show notes for this episode can be found at twimlai.com/go/452. 

Francisco was originally a guest over 4 years and 400 episodes ago, where we discussed his company Cortical.io, and their unique approach to natural language processing. In this conversation, Francisco gives us an update on Cortical, including their applications and toolkit, including semantic extraction, classifier, and search use cases. We also discuss GPT-3, and how it compares to semantic folding, the unreasonable amount of data needed to train these models, and the difference between the GPT approach and semantic modeling for language understanding.

The complete show notes for this episode can be found at twimlai.com/go/451.

Gurdeep, who we had the pleasure of speaking with on his 31st anniversary at the company, has had a hand in creating quite a few influential projects, including Skype for business (and Teams) and being apart of the first team that shipped wifi as a part of a general-purpose operating system.

In our conversation with Gurdeep, we discuss Microsoft’s acquisition of Bonsai and how they fit in the toolchain for creating brains for autonomous systems with “machine teaching,” and other practical applications of machine teaching in autonomous systems. We also explore the challenges of simulation, and how they’ve evolved to make the problems that the physical world brings more tenable. Finally, Gurdeep shares concrete use cases for autonomous systems, and how to get the best ROI on those investments, and of course, what’s next in the very broad space of autonomous systems.

The complete show notes for this episode can be found at twimlai.com/go/450.

In our conversation with Bryan, who comes from a traditional biology background, we cover a ton of ground, including a foundational layer of understanding for the vast known unknowns in species and biodiversity, and how he came to apply machine learning to his lab’s research.

We explore a few of his lab’s projects, including applying ML to genetic data to understand the geographic and environmental structure of DNA, what factors keep machine learning from being used more frequently used in biology, and what’s next for his group.

The complete show notes for this episode can be found at twimlai.com/go/449.

In our conversation with Jason, we explore their Reinforcement Learning platform, Re-Agent (Horizon). We discuss the role of decision making and game theory in the platform and the types of decisions they’re using Re-Agent to make, from ranking and recommendations to their eCommerce marketplace.

Jason also walks us through the differences between online/offline and on/off policy model training, and where Re-Agent sits in this spectrum. Finally, we discuss the concept of counterfactual causality, and how they ensure safety in the results of their models.

The complete show notes for this episode can be found at twimlai.com/go/448.

We caught up with Saiph during NeurIPS where she delivered an insightful invited talk “A Future of Work for the Invisible Workers in A.I.”. In our conversation with Saiph, we gain a better understanding of the “Invisible workers,” or the people doing the work of labeling for machine learning and AI systems, and some of the issues around lack of economic empowerment, emotional trauma, and other issues that arise with these jobs.

We discuss ways that we can empower these workers, and push the companies that are employing these workers to do the same. Finally, we discuss Saiph’s participatory design work with rural workers in the global south.

The complete show notes for this episode can be found at twimlai.com/go/447.

In our conversation with Michael, we touch on his thoughts about the year in Machine Learning overall, including GPT-3 and Implicit Neural Representations, but spend a major chunk of time on the sub-field of Graph Machine Learning. 

We talk through the application of Graph ML across domains like physics and bioinformatics, and the tools to look out for. Finally, we discuss what Michael thinks is in store for 2021, including graph ml applied to molecule discovery and non-human communication translation.

We last spoke with Sameer at our Natural Language Processing office hours back at TWIMLfest, and was the perfect person to help us break down 2020 in NLP. Sameer tackles the review in 4 main categories, Massive Language Modeling, Fundamental Problems with Language Models, Practical Vulnerabilities with Language Models, and Evaluation. 

We also explore the impact of GPT-3 and Transformer models, the intersection of vision and language models, and the injection of causal thinking and modeling into language models, and much more.

The complete show notes for this episode can be found at twimlai.com/go/445.

Pavan, who joined us back in June to talk through his work from CVPR ‘20, Invariance, Geometry and Deep Neural Networks, is back to walk us through the trends he’s seen in Computer Vision last year. We explore the revival of physics-based thinking about scenes, differential rendering, the best papers, and where the field is going in the near future.

We want to hear from you! Send your thoughts on the year that was 2020 below in the comments, or via Twitter at @samcharrington or @twimlai.

The complete show notes for this episode can be found at twimlai.com/go/444

Pablo joined us earlier this year for a discussion about Music & AI, and his Geometric Perspective on Reinforcement Learning, as well our RL office hours during the inaugural TWIMLfest. In today’s conversation, we explore some of the latest and greatest RL advancements coming out of the major conferences this year, broken down into a few major themes, Metrics/Representations, Understanding and Evaluating Deep Reinforcement Learning, and RL in the Real World.

This was a very fun conversation, and we encourage you to check out all the great papers and other resources available on the show notes page.

At NeurIPS, Aravind presented his paper MOReL: Model-Based Offline Reinforcement Learning. In our conversation, we explore model-based reinforcement learning, and if models are a “prerequisite” to achieve something analogous to transfer learning. We also dig into MOReL and the recent progress in offline reinforcement learning, the differences in developing MOReL models and traditional RL models, and the theoretical results they’re seeing from this research.

The complete show notes for this episode can be found at twimlai.com/go/442

This year Charles gave an Invited Talk at this year’s conference, You Can’t Escape Hyperparameters and Latent Variables: Machine Learning as a Software Engineering Enterprise. In our conversation, we explore the success of the Georgia Tech Online Masters program in CS, which now has over 11k students enrolled, and the importance of making the education accessible to as many people as possible. We spend quite a bit speaking about the impact machine learning is beginning to have on the world, and how we should move from thinking of ourselves as compiler hackers, and begin to see the possibilities and opportunities that have been ignored.

We also touch on the fallout from Timnit Gebru being “resignated” and the importance of having diverse voices and different perspectives “in the room,” and what the future holds for machine learning as a discipline.

The complete show notes for this episode can be found at twimlai.com/go/441. 

In our conversation with Taco, we discuss his current research in equivariant networks and video compression using generative models, as well as his paper “Natural Graph Networks,” which explores the concept of “naturality, a generalization of equivariance” which suggests that weaker constraints will allow for a “wider class of architectures.”

We also discuss some of Taco’s recent research on neural compression and a very interesting visual demo for equivariance CNNs that Taco and the Qualcomm team released during the conference.

The complete show notes for this episode can be found at twimlai.com/go/440.

Edgar spoke at this year's re:Invent conference about Productionizing R Workloads, and the resurrection of R for machine learning and productionalization. In our conversation with Edgar, we explore the fundamentals of building a strong machine learning infrastructure, and how they’re breaking down applications and using mixed technologies to build models.

We also discuss their industrial applications, including wind, power production management, managing systems intent on decreasing the environmental impact of pre-existing installations, and their extensive use of time-series forecasting across these use cases.

The complete show notes can be found at twimlai.com/go/439.

As we teased earlier this week, one of the major announcements coming from AWS at re:Invent was the release of the SageMaker Feature Store. To our pleasant surprise, we came to learn that our friends at Intuit are the original architects of this offering and partnered with AWS to productize it at a much broader scale. In our conversation with Srivathsan, we explore the focus areas that are supported by the Intuit machine learning platform across various teams, including QuickBooks and Mint, Turbotax, and Credit Karma,  and his thoughts on why companies should be investing in feature stores. 

We also discuss why the concept of “feature store” has seemingly exploded in the last year, and how you know when your organization is ready to deploy one. Finally, we dig into the specifics of the feature store, including the popularity of graphQL and why they chose to include it in their pipelines, the similarities (and differences) between the two versions of the store, and much more!

The complete show notes for this episode can be found at twimlai.com/go/438.

During re:Invent last week, Amazon made a ton of announcements on the machine learning front, including quite a few advancements to SageMaker. In this roundup conversation, we discuss the motivation for hosting the first-ever machine learning keynote at the conference, a bunch of details surrounding tools like Pipelines for workflow management, Clarify for bias detection, and JumpStart for easy to use algorithms and notebooks, and many more.

We also discuss the emphasis placed on DevOps and MLOps tools in these announcements, and how the tools are all interconnected. Finally, we briefly touch on the announcement of the AWS feature store, but be sure to check back later this week for a more in-depth discussion on that particular release!

The complete show notes for this episode can be found at twimlai.com/go/437.

23andMe handles a massive amount of genomic data every year from its core ancestry business but also uses that data for disease prediction, which is the core use case we discuss in our conversation.

Subarna talks us through an initial use case of creating an evaluation of polygenic scores, and how that led them to build an ML pipeline and platform. We talk through the tools and tech stack used for the operationalization of their platform, the use of synthetic data, the internal pushback that came along with the changes that were being made, and what’s next for her team and the platform.

The complete show notes for this episode can be found at twimlai.com/go/436.

In our conversation with Daan, we explore the RTL MLOps journey, and their need to put platform infrastructure in place for ad optimization and forecasting, personalization, and content understanding use cases. Daan walks us through some of the challenges on both the modeling and engineering sides of building the platform, as well as the inherent challenges of video applications.

Finally, we discuss the current state of their platform, and the benefits they’ve seen from having this infrastructure in place, and why using building a custom platform was worth the investment.

The complete show notes for this episode can be found at twimlai.com/go/435. 

In our conversation with Peter, we discuss MLCommons and MLPerf, the former an open engineering group with the goal of accelerating machine learning innovation, and the latter a set of standardized Machine Learning speed benchmarks used to measure things like model training speed, throughput speed for inference. 

We explore the target user for the MLPerf benchmarks, the need for benchmarks in the ethics, bias, fairness space, and how they’re approaching this through the "People’s Speech" datasets. We also walk through the MLCommons best practices of getting a model into production, why it's so difficult, and how MLCube can make the process easier for researchers and developers.

The complete show notes page for this episode can be found at twimlai.com/go/434.

Charlene, who we also had the pleasure of hosting at NLP Office Hours during TWIMLfest, is back to share some of the work she’s been doing with NLP. In our conversation, we explore her experiences working with newer NLP models and tools like BERT and HuggingFace, as well as whats she’s learned along the way with word embeddings, labeling tasks, debugging, and more. We also focus on a few of her projects, like her popular multi-lingual BERT project, and a COVID-19 classifier. 

Finally, Charlene shares her experience getting into data science and machine learning coming from a non-technical background, and what the transition was like, and tips for people looking to make a similar shift.