The TWIML AI Podcast (formerly This Week in Machine Learning & Artificial Intelligence)

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.

In this episode of our AI Rewind series, we’re bringing back one of your favorite guests of the year, Jeremy Howard, founder and researcher at Fast.ai. Jeremy joins us to discuss trends in Deep Learning in 2018 and beyond. We cover many of the papers, tools and techniques that have contributed to making deep learning more accessible than ever to so many developers and data scientists.

Today we close out both our NeurIPS series joined by Nando de Freitas, Team Lead & Principal Scientist at Deepmind. In our conversation, we explore his interest in understanding the brain and working towards artificial general intelligence. In particular, we dig into a couple of his team’s NeurIPS papers: “Playing hard exploration games by watching YouTube,” and “One-Shot high-fidelity imitation: Training large-scale deep nets with RL.”

Today we’re joined by David Spiegelhalter, Chair of Winton Center for Risk and Evidence Communication at Cambridge University and President of the Royal Statistical Society. David, an invited speaker at NeurIPS, presented on “Making Algorithms Trustworthy: What Can Statistical Science Contribute to Transparency, Explanation and Validation?”. In our conversation, we explore the nuanced difference between being trusted and being trustworthy, and its implications for those building AI systems.

Today we’re joined by Kunle Olukotun, Professor in the department of EE and CS at Stanford University, and Chief Technologist at Sambanova Systems. Kunle was an invited speaker at NeurIPS this year, presenting on “Designing Computer Systems for Software 2.0.” In our conversation, we discuss various aspects of designing hardware systems for machine and deep learning, touching on multicore processor design, domain specific languages, and graph-based hardware. This was a fun one!

Today we conclude our Trust in AI series with this conversation with Kathryn Hume, VP of Strategy at Integrate AI. We discuss her newly released white paper “Responsible AI in the Consumer Enterprise,” which details a framework for ethical AI deployment in e-commerce companies and other consumer-facing enterprises. We look at the structure of the ethical framework she proposes, and some of the many questions that need to be considered when deploying AI in an ethical manner.

Today we continue our exploration of Trust in AI with this interview with Richard Zemel, Professor in the department of Computer Science at the University of Toronto and Research Director at Vector Institute. In our conversation, Rich describes some of his work on fairness in machine learning algorithms, including how he defines both group and individual fairness and his group’s recent NeurIPS poster, “Predict Responsibly: Improving Fairness and Accuracy by Learning to Defer.”

In today’s episode we’re joined by Parinaz Sobhani, Director of Machine Learning at Georgian Partners. In our conversation, Parinaz and I discuss some of the main issues falling under the “trust” umbrella, such as transparency, fairness and accountability. We also explore some of the trust-related projects she and her team at Georgian are working on, as well as some of the interesting trust and privacy papers coming out of the NeurIPS conference.