The AI Podcast

We talk a lot about technology, and data, specifically, impacting all facets of modern life. In this episode we're going to look at data's role in addressing one of the biggest threats to life as we know it: cancer. We'll talk to Dr. Richard Wender, chief cancer control officer at the American Cancer Society about how technology is key to redefining how we look at, and fight, cancer.

One of the things that makes the weather so dangerous is that it's so hard to predict. Tornadoes, hail, high winds and flash floods cause billions of dollars worth of property damage, and injure or kill hundreds of people in the United States each year. Knowing when storms may strike can save lives, and property. Our guest is part of a team at the National Center for Atmospheric Research that's doing just that. We spoke with David John Gagne, a postdoctoral fellow at the National Center for Atmospheric Research about his work with deep learning at the GPU Technology Conference in Silicon Valley this week.

Accountants have spreadsheets. Novelists have word processors. Now, deep learning promises to help take some of the grunt out of legal grunt work. Here's how one startup is using deep learning to help lawyers get legal work done faster and more accurately.

Ever since the internet went mainstream people have been struggling with perhaps the ultimate question: what do I call my web site? What domain name do I register? But almost as quickly as that became a question in people's mind, a secondary question came up: what's my domain name going to be worth? Well thanks to AI we have a better answer to that than ever. Joining us for this episode: Jason Ansel, senior principal engineer with GoDaddy, which is using AI to help you better understand the value of your domain name.

Sarcasm? On the Internet? You're kidding. But sarcasm is no joke. Long before today's sentiment analysis systems struggled to accurately understand human communication, people struggled to understand one another's sarcasm. Now, thanks to the work of Dr. Pushpak Bhattacharyya and his team computers are beginning to understand one of humanity's most challenging, and amusing, modes of communication. Dr. Bhattacharyya, director of IIT Patna, and a professor at the Computer Science and Engineering Department at IIT Bombay has spent the past few years using GPU-powered deep learning to detect sarcasm.

AI is being used to enhance and improve life in varied and often incredible ways. But what if we could use AI to improve the end of our lives, too? Our guest today is Anand Avati, a graduate student in the Artificial Intelligence Lab at Stanford University's Computer Science Department. Anand is co-author of a research paper entitled "Improving Palliative Care with Deep Learning" which details his team's use of a deep learning system to predict patient mortality with the aim of improving access to palliative care for critically-ill patients.

AI is getting better, and it's finding its way into more parts of our lives with each passing day. And talking about the future artificial intelligence has become a surefire way to spawn a thousand debates about the future, and nature, of humankind ourselves. Our guest today, Ken McLeod, is an award winning science fiction author whose work dives deep into the relationship between man and machine. His latest book, "The Corporation Wars: Emergence" is the final volume in an acclaimed trilogy whose cast of characters includes sentient robots, computer AIs that oversee Earth from afar, and, of course, emulated human minds running in digital simulations.

Love. The search for love. The search even for someone you just kind of like. It's been the subject of poems, novels, songs, you name it. For as long as humans have been around, they've been looking for love. But what if you could use AI to automate the process? To help you with everything from finding your true match, to swiping through all those not quite true matches. Oscar Alsing, our guest on this episode, will talk about how he's used AI, and Tinder, to do just that.

Election polling is an inexact science. If you've been paying attention to American politics at all over the past year or two, you don't need us to tell you that. But what if instead of asking voters their opinions on the candidates or the issues you took a different approach, one that involves artificial intelligence... and cars. Joining us for this edition of the AI podcast is Timnit Gebru, a post-doctoral researcher at Microsoft Research in New York and a newly minted PhD from the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. Timnit is co-author of a paper titled "Using Deep learning and Street View to Estimate the Demographic Makeup of Neighborhoods Across the United States."

Think you've got no artistic talent? You do now. Vincent AI is an application that lets you pick up a stylus, sketch out a few lines on a screen, and watch as your scribbles are turned into a work of art inspired by one of seven artistic masters. We speak with Monty Barlow, machine learning director for Cambridge Consultants, the technology development house behind this amazing demo.

Ever see a photo of an amazing looking meal, maybe in a food magazine or an Instagram feed, and wish you had the recipe to make it yourself? Thanks to a project born out of MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory we're a step closer to being able to do that. We talk with Nick Hynes, one of the minds and stomachs behind this effort just in time for Thanksgiving and the holiday food season.

Whether you're wandering through the sprawling virtual worlds of Grand Theft Auto... or just trying out a new couch in Ikea's virtual living room, virtual worlds are everywhere. But there's as problem. There just aren't enough artists to build all these virtual worlds and populate them with foes... or furniture. We spoke with Artomatix co-founder Eric Risser about how deep learning can help artists fill such burgeoning virtual worlds.

Tired of waiting in checkout lines? Malong Technologies offers technology that may one day let you grab what you want and go. We spoke to this startup about how it's turning its prowess in some of the world's top image recognition contests into a service businesses can use to put image recognition to work.

Picture this, you find yourself in a tattoo parlor. But none of the dragons, flaming skulls, or gothic font lifestyle mottos you see on the wall seem like something you want on your body. So what do you do? You turn to AI, of course. We spoke to two members of the development team at Tattoodo.com, who created an app that uses deep learning to help you create the tattoo of your dreams.

This might be the first time we've been able to say this, but we might have spoilers ahead on this episode. Joining us we have Zack Thoutt, a data scientist and a developer from Boulder, Colorado. Zack has done something we've all wanted to have done: he's working on finishing the books behind HBO's Game of Thrones - a Song of Ice and Fire - by putting an AI system to work with sometimes comical results.