The AI Podcast

What's a meme? And what makes a meme, dank? Today's guest is Lawrence Pierson, a PhD student in theoretical astrophysics at Stanford University, will answer these questions, and more. He's the author a paper detailing how he and a classmate built a neural network to generate memes. Some of them are even funny.

Robots following coded instructions to complete a task? Old school. Robots learning to do things by watching how humans do it? That’s the future. Earlier this year, Stanford’s Animesh Garg and Marynel Vázquez shared their research in a talk on “Generalizable Autonomy for Robotic Mobility and Manipulation” at the GPU Technology Conference last week. We caught up with them to learn more about generalizable autonomy - the idea that a robot should be able to observe human behavior, and learn to imitate it in a way that’s applicable to a variety of tasks and situations. Like learning to cook by watching YouTube videos, or figuring out how to cross a crowded room for another.

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. As the years have passed what passed since the invention of the personal computer, what passes in the world of technology has changed dramatically. So what’s next? Voice computing is once answer. Voice computing is one of the hottest and most fascinating areas of today’s’ technology landscape. Peter Cahill is the CEO of Voysis, an Irish startup using AI to make voice computing more realistic, and a part of more online retail experiences everywhere.

Airport control towers are icons of the aviation industry. But a Canadian startup wants to use artificial intelligence to make them a relic of the past. Searidge Technologies believes AI powered video systems can do a better job.

Credit scores are a funny thing. Funny might not be the right word, but you know what we mean. You can't have a credit score unless you have a credit history. You have to use your credit to keep your score up, but if your score's not good enough, you can't get credit. But never fear, AI and machine learning are here to help. Our guest on this episode is Ajay Gopal, he's with Deserve, a startup that's using machine learning to extend credit to people who may not have a typical credit history.

NVIDIA researchers are gearing up to present 19 accepted papers and posters, seven of them during speaking sessions, at the annual Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition conference next week in Salt Lake City, Utah. Joining us to discuss some of what's being presented at CVPR, and to share his perspective on the world of deep learning and AI in general is one of the pillars of the computer science world, Bill Dally, chief scientist at NVIDIA.

Smarts are always in fashion, and our next guest has that in spades. Costa Colbert has been chasing down how brains — both real and artificial — work for 30 years. Dr. Colbert — who holds degrees in fields ranging from neural science to electrical engineering — is known for his studies of information transmission in pyramidal neurons of the mammalian hippocampus and neocortex. At MAD Street Den his team is putting modern deep learning techniques to work for retailers in a wide variety of ways — including using Generative Adversarial Networks to create images of models wearing clothes.

NetFlix has changed the way we watch television for the better. The streaming video pioneer is much more than just an entertainment giant for the 21st century — it’s also a pioneer when it comes to using machine learning. While Justin Basilico, a research director with NetFlix, can’t share all the spoilers, he knows better than anyone how entertainment and machine learning intersect.

Think of it as like a USB port for your body. Emil Hewage is the co-founder and CEO at Cambridge Bio-Augmentation Systems, a neural engineering startup. They UK startup is building interfaces that use AI to help plug medical devices int our nervous systems. CBAS was named one of the top startups at Y Combinator’s Winter ‘17 cohort by TechCrunch and won the top prize with accelerator MassChallenge UK 2015.

Wayne Thompson was into big data, before big data was cool. Now the world — even much of our GPU Technology Conference — revolves around the kinds of challenges the 25-year veteran of analytics software developer SAS Institute has made a career of helping enterprises master. How did that happen? We asked Thomson, Chief Data Scientist of SAS Data Science Technologies to talk about the big data, big models, and big computations driving deep learning, and to give us some perspective about what makes today’s deep learning technologies different.

This week's episode features Bryan Catanzaro, vice president of applied deep learning research at NVIDIA, and if you've been following the podcast for a while, you know that an earlier episode featuring Bryan is one of the most popular podcasts we've done. Bryan is going to walk us through some of the latest developments at NVIDIA research... as well as share a story that involves Andrew Ng and cats.

Grab the goods and go. AiFi co-founder and CEO Steve Gu wants to give every store — from Mom and Pop bodegas to supermarket chains — the ability to let customers saunter out of the door without so much as a wave at a checker. The benefits involve more than just convenience: stores will have a better idea of how their customers behave and get a real-time bead on their inventory. To do that, our latest guests and his team at startup AiFi rely on advanced sensor fusion, simulation, and deep learning.

Clean, cheap fusion energy would change everything for the better. Our next guest, William Tang, has spent a career at the forefront of that field, currently as principal research physicist at the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory. He’s also one of the world’s foremost experts on how the science of fusion energy, and high-performance computing intersect. Now, he sees new tools — deep learning and artificial intelligence — being put to work to enable big-data-driven discovery in key scientific endeavors, such a the quest to deliver Fusion energy.

Deep learning has helped machines understand how to move pieces around a board to master, and win, Go, the most complicated game mankind has ever invented. Now it's helping a new generation of chemists better understand how to move molecules around to model new kinds of materials. Our guest, Olexandr Isayev, an assistant professor at the UNC Eshelman School of Pharmacy, at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, joined our show to explain how deep learning, Go, sci-fi, and computational chemistry intersect.

How do you win a fast-paced first-person shooter? Answer: it helps to have a good GPU, of course. How do you win one of the world’s most high profile robotics competitions? You guessed it, it helps to have a good GPU. Doug Morrison of the Australian Center for Robotic Vision helped lead the team that developed Cartman, a custom-built, cost-effective robotic system that picked and placed its way to victory in the 2017 Amazon Robotics Challenge global finals in Nagoya Japan last year.