The AI Podcast

In the future imagined by Pinar Yanardag, a postdoctoral research associate at MIT Media Lab, AI will collaborate with humans, not replace them. This is the concept behind her project, “How to Generate (Almost) Anything,” which she created with other students from the MIT Media Lab and professionals in the Boston area. Yanardag sat down with AI Podcast host Noah Kravitz to talk about this project, along with her other new creations.

We’ve all chosen the self-checkout stand over the human cashier, thinking it’ll take less time. But somehow, things take a terrible turn. The barcodes aren’t scanning, there’s a pop-up scolding you for not placing the product in the bagging area (though you did, of course), and an employee is coming over to fix the chaos. It would’ve taken less time to go to the cashier. Focal Systems is applying deep learning and computer vision to automate portions of retail stores in order to streamline store operations and get customers in and out more efficiently, without the pitfalls of the traditional self-checkout. CEO Francois Chaubard sat down with AI Podcast host Noah Kravitz to talk about how the company is changing retailers.

College students are many things — sleepy, overly caffeinated, stressed — but above all, they are hungry. Kiwi Campus is here to help. Co-founder and CEO of Kiwi Campus, Felipe Chávez, joined AI Podcast host Noah Kravitz to talk about Kiwi and its delivery service. Based in Berkeley, Calif., the company specializes in creating a robotic ecosystem for last mile delivery. Its solution is the Kiwibot. The small autonomous robot delivers orders seven days a week from 10 AM to 8 PM. Its coverage area includes UC Berkeley and the surrounding streets.

Charter Communications is working to make customer service smarter even before an operator picks up the phone. Charter Communications, also known as Spectrum, is using AI to improve their customer service and process data more intelligently. Senior Director of Wireless Engineering Jared Ritter took a break from his presentations at GTC Santa Clara to talk to AI Podcast host Noah Kravitz about Charter’s perspective on customer relations.

Artificial intelligence thrives on data, the more the better. But when we’re talking about putting data in many industries, such as health care, to work, things can get very complicated, very quickly. Walter De Brouwer is CEO of Doc.ai, a Silicon Valley based company that’s building a medical research platform that can address this issue with federated learning.

Imagine staring into the high-beams of an oncoming car. Now imagine trying to pick out a speck of dust in the glare of the headlights. That’s the challenge Olivier Guyon and Damien Gratadour face as they try to find the dull glint of an exoplanet — a planet orbiting a star outside our solar system — beside the bright light of its star. The pair -- Guyon is an instrument developer for Japan’s Subaru Telescope, and an astronomer at the University of Arizona; and Gratadour is an associate professor at the Observatoire de Paris and an instrument scientist at the Australian National University -- spoke with AI Podcast host Noah Kravitz about how they’re using GPU-powered extreme adaptive optics in very large telescopes to image nearby habitable planets.

The words “data science” often inspire feelings of dread or confusion. But Virtualitics, an AI-based analytics platform, is bringing creativity and excitement to the field through machine learning and immersive virtualization. In our latest episode of the AI Podcast, Virtualitics Machine Learning Projects Head Aakash Indurkhya spoke with AI Podcast host Noah Kravitz about why VR can now be so useful.

Some say style never fades, and now with the help of AI, finding one’s fashion sense is about to get a whole lot easier. Fashion ecommerce startup Stitch Fix is piecing together a seamless balance between AI-powered decision making and human judgement. We spoke with Stitch Fix Chief Algorithms Officer Brad Klingenberg about how the company is using AI to help us all dress better.

We’re all aware of the race to deliver self driving cars that will allow consumers to sit back and be chauffeured wherever they wish. But the implications of self-driving trucks might actually be bigger, in the short term. Our guest today is Chuck Price, Chief Product Officer of TuSimple, which is developing commercially ready level four fully autonomous driving solutions for the logistics industry: self-driving trucks. So let’s talk trucks.

AI is bringing convenience to your healthcare experience. Health insurance company Anthem helps patients personalize and better understand their healthcare information through AI. We spoke with Rajeev Ronanki, senior vice president and chief digital officer at Anthem, about how AI makes data "meaningful and useful," for the healthcare giant.

SAS Chief Operating Officer Oliver Schabenberger spoke with us about how organizations can use AI and related technologies.

The path to self driving vehicles is usually marked by six milestones, or levels, from level 0, or no automation, to level 5, or full autonomy. Jianxiong Xiao, CEO of of startup AutoX, has his sights set on level 4, defined by the National Highway Traffic Administration as “a car capable of performing all driving functions under certain conditions."

Sticky. Kind. Chronic. Reefer. Forget the dated slang. These days the word is ‘opportunity.’ The market for legal cannabis in the United States was estimated at $12 billion last year, up 30% year over year from 2017, and it’s projected to grow to $44 billion by 2020. Our guests this episode is Vincent Harkiewicz, is CEO and co-founder of Boulder, Colorado-based Grownetics, a startup that sits at the intersection of agtech, marjijuana, data analytics and artificial intelligence.

Tara Chklovski is CEO and founder of Iridescent, a non-profit that provides access to hands on learning opportunities to prepare underrepresented children and adults for the future of work. She’s been called everything from the “pioneer empowering the incredible tech girls of the future,” to a “CEO science superstar hero.” Tara is here to talk about a bunch of things, including the UN’s AI for Good Global Summit this May in Geneva, and the AI World Championship, part of the AI Family Challenge, May 18 in Silicon Valley.

Good news: astronomers are getting new tools to let them see further, better than ever before. The bad news: they’ll soon be getting more data than humans can handle. To turn the vast quantities of data that will be pouring out of these instruments into world-changing scientific discoveries, Brant Robertson, a visiting professor at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton and an associate professor of astronomy at UC Santa Cruz, is turning to AI.