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

In the final episode of our re:Invent series, we're joined by Thorsten Joachims, Professor in the Department of Computer Science at Cornell University. We discuss his presentation “Unbiased Learning from Biased User Feedback,” looking at some of the inherent and introduced biases in recommender systems, and the ways to avoid them. We also discuss how inference techniques can be used to make learning algorithms more robust to bias, and how these can be enabled with the correct type of logging policies.

Today we’re joined by Jinho Choi, assistant professor of computer science at Emory University. Jinho presented at the conference on ELIT, their cloud-based NLP platform. In our conversation, we discuss some of the key NLP challenges that Jinho and his group are tackling, including language parsing and character mining. We also discuss their vision for ELIT, which is to make it easy for researchers to develop, access, and deploying cutting-edge NLP tools models on the cloud.

I’m excited to present our second annual re:Invent Roundtable Roundup. This year I’m joined by Dave McCrory, VP of Software Engineering at Wise.io at GE Digital, and Val Bercovici, Founder and CEO of Pencil Data. If you missed the news coming out of re:Invent, we cover all of AWS’ most important ML and AI announcements, including SageMaker Ground Truth, Reinforcement Learning, DeepRacer, Inferentia and Elastic Inference, ML Marketplace and much more. For the show notes visit https://twimlai.com/ta

Today we’re joined by Marisa Boston, Director of Cognitive Technology in KPMG’s Cognitive Automation Lab. We caught up to discuss some of the ways that KPMG is using AI to build tools that help augment the knowledge of their teams of professionals. We discuss knowledge graphs and how they can be used to map out and relate various concepts and how they use these in conjunction with NLP tools to create insight engines. We also look at tools that curate and contextualize news and other text-based data sour

Today, we’re joined by Stuart Reid, Chief Scientist at NMRQL Research. NMRQL is an investment management firm that uses ML algorithms to make adaptive, unbiased, scalable, and testable trading decisions for its funds. In our conversation, Stuart and I dig into the way NMRQL uses ML and DL models to support the firm’s investment decisions. We focus on techniques for modeling non-stationary time-series, stationary vs non-stationary time-series, and challenges of building models using financial data.

In this episode of our AI Platforms series, we’re joined by Daniel Jeavons, General Manager of Data Science at Shell. In our conversation, we explore the evolution of analytics and data science at Shell, discussing IoT-related applications and issues, such as inference at the edge, federated ML, and digital twins, all key considerations for the way they apply ML. We also talk about the data science process at Shell and the importance of platform technologies to the company as a whole.

In this episode of our AI Platforms series, we’re joined by Leemay Nassery, Senior Engineering Manager and head of the recommendations team at Comcast. In our conversation, Leemay and I discuss just how she and her team resurrected the Xfinity X1 recommendations platform, including the rebuilding the data pipeline, the machine learning process, and the deployment and training of their updated models. We also touch on the importance of A-B testing and maintaining their rebuilt infrastructure.

In this episode of our AI Platforms series, we’re joined by Bee-Chung Chen, Principal Staff Engineer and Applied Researcher at LinkedIn. Bee-Chung and I caught up to discuss LinkedIn’s internal AI automation platform, Pro-ML. Bee-Chung breaks down some of the major pieces of the pipeline, LinkedIn’s experience bringing Pro-ML to the company's developers and the role the LinkedIn AI Academy plays in helping them get up to speed. For the complete show notes, visit https://twimlai.com/talk/200.

In this episode of our AI Platforms series we’re joined by OpenAI’s Head of Infrastructure, Christopher Berner. In our conversation, we discuss the evolution of OpenAI’s deep learning platform, the core principles which have guided that evolution, and its current architecture. We dig deep into their use of Kubernetes and discuss various ecosystem players and projects that support running deep learning at scale on the open source project.

In this episode of our AI Platforms series, we’re joined by Atul Kale, Engineering Manager on the machine learning infrastructure team at Airbnb. In our conversation, we discuss Airbnb’s internal machine learning platform, Bighead. Atul outlines the ML lifecycle at Airbnb and how the various components of Bighead support it. We then dig into the major components of Bighead, some of Atul’s best practices for scaling machine learning, and a special announcement that Atul and his team made at Strata.

In the kickoff episode of our AI Platforms series, we’re joined by Aditya Kalro, Engineering Manager at Facebook, to discuss their internal machine learning platform FBLearner Flow. FBLearner Flow is the workflow management platform at the heart of the Facebook ML engineering ecosystem. We discuss the history and development of the platform, as well as its functionality and its evolution from an initial focus on model training to supporting the entire ML lifecycle at Facebook.

In this episode we’re joined by Nina Miolane, researcher and lecturer at Stanford University. Nina and I spoke about her work in the field of geometric statistics in ML, specifically the application of Riemannian geometry, which is the study of curved surfaces, to ML. In our discussion we review the differences between Riemannian and Euclidean geometry in theory and her new Geomstats project, which is a python package that simplifies computations and statistics on manifolds with geometric structures.

In this episode, we’re joined by Sebastian Ruder, PhD student studying NLP at National University of Ireland and Research Scientist at text analysis startup Aylien. We discuss recent milestones in neural NLP, including multi-task learning and pretrained language models. We also look at the use of attention-based models, Tree RNNs and LSTMs, and memory-based networks. Finally, Sebastian walks us through his ULMFit paper, which he co-authored with Jeremy Howard of fast.ai who I interviewed in episode 186.

In this episode, we’re joined by Garrett Hoffman, Director of Data Science at Stocktwits. Stocktwits is a social network for the investing community which has its roots in the use of the $cashtag on Twitter. In our conversation, we discuss applications such as Stocktwits’ own use of “social sentiment graphs” built on multilayer LSTM networks to gauge community sentiment about certain stocks in real time, as well as the more general use of natural language processing for generating trading ideas.

In the final episode of our Deep Learning Indaba series, we speak with Vukosi Marivate, Chair of Data Science at the University of Pretoria and a co-organizer of the Indaba. My conversation with Vukosi falls into two distinct parts, his PhD research in reinforcement learning, and his current research, which falls under the banner of data science with social impact. We discuss several advanced RL scenarios, along with several applications he is currently exploring in areas like public safety and energy.