The AI Podcast

For a particle physicist, the world’s biggest questions — how did the universe originate and what’s beyond it — can only be answered with help from the world’s smallest building blocks. James Kahn, a consultant with German research platform Helmholtz AI and a collaborator on the global Belle II particle physics experiment, uses deep learning to understand the fundamental rules governing particle decay. Kahn spoke with AI Podcast host Noah Kravitz about the specifics of how AI is accelerating particle physics. He also touched on his work at Helmholtz AI. Khan helps researchers in fields spanning medicine to earth sciences apply AI to the problems they’re solving. His wide-ranging career — from particle physicist to computer scientist — shows how AI accelerates every industry. https://blogs.nvidia.com/blog/2021/05/19/ai-particle-physics/

With only one U.S. state without a Walmart supercenter — and over 4,600 stores across the country — the retail giant’s prediction analytics work with data on an enormous scale. Grant Gelven, a machine learning engineer at Walmart Global Tech, joined NVIDIA AI Podcast host Noah Kravitz for the latest episode of the AI Podcast. Gelven spoke about the big data and machine learning methods making it possible to improve everything from the customer experience to stocking to item pricing. https://blogs.nvidia.com/blog/2021/05/05/ai-walmart/

Julie Bernauer — senior solutions architect for machine learning and deep learning at NVIDIA — led the small team that successfully built Selene, the world’s fifth-fastest supercomputer. Adding to an already impressive feat, Bernauer’s team brought up Selene as the world went into lockdown in early 2020. They used skeleton crews, social distancing protocols, and remote cable validation to achieve what typically takes months with a larger install team in a few weeks. Bernauer told NVIDIA AI Podcast host Noah Kravitz about the goal in creating Selene, which was primarily to support NVIDIA’s researchers. Referencing her time as a doctoral student, Bernauer explains how researchers are often prevented from working on larger models due to expense and infrastructure. With Selene, the infrastructure is modular and can be scaled up or down depending on what users require, and allows for different types of research to be performed simultaneously. Bernauer said that Selene is proving most useful to autonomous vehicle and language modeling research at the moment. Going forward, Bernauer envisions some of the power and efficiency of systems like Selene becoming more available on widely accessible devices, such as laptops or edge products such as cars.

Shalini De Mello, a principal research scientist at NVIDIA who’s made her mark inventing computer vision technology that contributes to driver safety, finished 2020 with a bang — presenting two posters at the prestigious NeurIPS conference in December. A 10-year NVIDIA veteran, De Mello works on self-supervised and few-shot learning, 3D reconstruction, viewpoint estimation and human-computer interaction. She told NVIDIA AI Podcast host Noah Kravitz about her NeurIPS submissions on reconstructing 3D meshes and self-learning transformations for improving head and gaze redirection — both significant challenges for computer vision. https://blogs.nvidia.com/blog/2021/04/07/nvidia-research-shalini-de-mello/

Drawing on his trifecta of degrees in math, music and music technology, Tlacael Esparza, co-founder and CTO of Sunhouse, is revolutionizing electronic drumming. Esparza has created Sensory Percussion, a combination of hardware and software that uses sensors and AI to allow a single drum to produce a complex range of sounds depending on where and how the musician hits it. In the latest installment of the NVIDIA AI Podcast, Esparza spoke with host Noah Kravitz about the tech behind the tool, and what inspired him to create Sunhouse. Esparza has been doing drumstick tricks of his own for many years — prior to founding Sunhouse, he toured with a variety of bands and recorded drums for many albums. Esparza’s musical skill and programming knowledge formed the basis for Sensory Percussion. Partnering with his brother, Tenoch, and with support from a New York University startup accelerator, Sunhouse was born in 2014. Since then, it’s become successful with live performers. Esparza is especially proud of its popularity in the New York jazz community and among drumming legends like Marcus Gilmore and Wilco’s Glenn Kotche. https://blogs.nvidia.com/blog/2021/03/31/sunhouse-tlacael-esparza/

Call it Moneyball for AI. In his just released book, "Genius Makers," New York Times writer Cade Metz tells the funny, inspiring — and ultimately triumphant — tale of how a dogged group of AI researchers bet their careers on the long-dismissed technology of deep learning. https://blogs.nvidia.com/blog/2021/03/17/ai-cade-metz

Since NVIDIA announced construction of the U.K.’s most powerful supercomputer — Cambridge-1 — Marc Hamilton, vice president of solutions architecture and engineering, has been (remotely) overseeing its building across the pond. Cambridge-1, which will be available for U.K. healthcare researchers to work on pressing problems, is being built on NVIDIA DGX SuperPOD architecture for a whopping 400 petaflops of AI performance. Located at KAO Data, a data center using 100% renewable energy, Cambridge-1 will rank among the world’s top 3 most energy-efficient supercomputers on the current Green500 list. Hamilton points to the concentration of leading healthcare companies in the U.K. as a primary reason for Cambridge-1’s location. AstraZeneca, GSK, Oxford Nanopore and more have already announced their intent to harness the supercomputer for research in the coming months.

Pooja Rao, a doctor, data scientist and entrepreneur, wants to make cutting-edge medical care available to communities around the world, regardless of their resources. Her startup, Qure.ai, is doing exactly that, with technology that’s used in 150+ healthcare facilities in 27 countries. Rao is the cofounder and head of research and development at the Mumbai-based company, which started in 2016. The company develops AI technology that interprets medical images, with a focus on pulmonary and neurological scans. https://blogs.nvidia.com/blog/2021/02/18/pooja-rao-qure-ai/

Not many can claim to be a computer programmer, nonfiction author and poet, but Brian Christian has established himself as all three. Christian has just released his newest book, The Alignment Problem, which delves into the disparity that occurs when AI models don’t do exactly what they’re intended to do. The book follows on the success of Christian’s previous work, "The Most Human Human and Algorithms to Live By." Now a visiting scholar at UC Berkeley, Christian joined AI Podcast host Noah Kravitz to talk about the alignment problem and some new techniques being used to address the issue. The alignment problem can be caused by a range of reasons — such as data bias, or datasets used incorrectly and out of context. As AI takes on a variety of tasks, from medical diagnostics to parole sentencing decisions, machine learning researchers are expressing concern over the problem. Listen to the full podcast to hear about this and more — including Christian’s book club experience with Elon Musk and why he chose to double major in philosophy and computer science.

Sam Liang is making things easier for the creators of the NVIDIA AI Podcast — and just about every remote worker. He’s the CEO and co-founder of Otter.ai, which uses AI to produce speech-to-text transcriptions in real time or from recording uploads. The platform has a range of capabilities, from differentiating between multiple people, to understanding accents, to parsing through various background noises. And now, Otter.ai is making live captioning possible on a variety of platforms, including Zoom, Skype and Microsoft Teams. Even Liang’s conversation with AI Podcast host Noah Kravitz was captioned in real time over Skype. This new capability has been enthusiastically received by remote workers — Liang says that Otter.ai has already transcribed tens of millions of meetings. Liang envisions even more practical effects of Otter.ai’s live captions. The platform can already identify keywords. Soon he thinks it’ll be recognizing action items, helping manage agendas and providing notifications. https://blogs.nvidia.com/blog/2021/01/21/otter-ai-sam-liang/

Canadian high schooler Ana DuCristea has a clever solution for the quarantine blues, as days blur into weeks. Using AI and natural language processing, she programmed an app capable of setting customizable reminders so you won’t miss any important activities, like baking banana bread or whipping up Dalgona coffee. DuCristea, who’s familiar with Python and has taken a variety of online AI courses, set to work on the app after winning a Jetson Nano Developer Kit this summer at AI4ALL, an AI summer camp. She’d long been frustrated with the simplicity of current reminder apps and decided to create her own solution. Using Python and the Nano, DuCristea developed an app in just two months that integrates with mobile and PC messaging program Discord. With the app, users can message a bot on Discord requesting a reminder for a specific task, date and time.

Brendon Cassidy, CTO and chief scientist at Super Hi-Fi, uses AI to give everyone the experience of a radio station tailored to their unique tastes. Super Hi-Fi, an AI startup and member of the NVIDIA Inception program, develops technology that produces smooth transitions, intersperses content meaningfully and adjusts volume and crossfade. Started three years ago, Super Hi-Fi first partnered with iHeartRadio and is now also used by companies such as Peloton and Sonos. Results are showing that users like this personalized approach. Cassidy notes that they tested MagicStitch, one of their tools that eliminates the gap between songs, and found that customers listening with MagicStitch turned on spent 10 percent more time streaming music. https://blogs.nvidia.com/blog/2020/12/23/super-hifi-ai/

Anima Anandkumar is setting a personal record this week with seven of her team’s research papers accepted to NeurIPS 2020. The 34th annual Neural Information Processing Systems conference is taking place virtually from Dec. 6-12. The premier event on neural networks, NeurIPS draws thousands of the world’s best researchers every year. Anandkumar, NVIDIA’s director of machine learning research and Bren professor at CalTech’s CMS Department, joined AI Podcast host Noah Kravitz to talk about what to expect at the conference, and to explain what she sees as the future of AI. https://blogs.nvidia.com/blog/2020/12/09/neurips-nvidia-caltech-anima-anandkumar/

We've got an expert on AI powered translation joining us on the show today. Spence Green is CEO at Lilt, a Silicon Valley based AI-powered enterprise translation software and services company. Lilt's mission is to make more of the world's information accessible to more of the world's people, regardless of where they were born and what language they speak. Spence is here to talk to us about how they're doing it.

Pindar Van Arman, an American artist and roboticist, designs painting robots that explore the differences between human and computational creativity. Since his first system in 2005 he has built multiple artificially-creative multiple robots. The most famous, Cloud Painter, was awarded first place at Robotart 2018. PIndar, his robots, and their work have been featured all over the media, including on NPR, BBC, HBO, Vice, and the documentary "Machine" a film about artificial intelligence. You can see and learn more about Pindar on his website, cloudpainter.com. In fact, unless you're driving, you should go ahead and load it into your browser right now, so you can look at the art you listen to him talk. For more from Pindar Van Arman, check out: http://www.cloudpainter.com http://www.artonomo.us And explore his work on NVIDIA's AI Art Gallery: https://www.nvidia.com/ai-art-gallery/pindar-van-arman