The AI Podcast

The robots that have taken on tasks in the real world - which is to say the world where physics apply - are primarily programmed to do a specific job, such as welding a joint in a car or sweeping up cat hair. So what if robots could learn, and take it a step further - what if they could teach themselves, and pass on their knowledge to other robots? Where could that take machines, and the notion of machine intelligence? And how fast could we get there? Those are the questions our guest Sergey Levine, an assistant professor at UC Berkeley's department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences, is finding answers to.

The next time you don’t recognize a transaction listed on your monthly Paypal statement, rest assured: AI will likely identify the culprit and help ensure it won’t happen again. With advances in machine learning and the deployments of neural networks, logistic regression-powered models are expanding their uses throughout PayPal, Vadim Kutsyy, a data scientist at the online payments company, told host Michael Copeland on this week’s edition of the AI Podcast.

We are here at the mothership of NVIDIA with this summer's Jetson interns. And Mokshith Voodarla, Mark Thies, Isaac Wilcove -- all recruited at top robotics competitions -- are building some amazing things with our Jetson embedded computing platform and deep learning, including a delivery robot, a robot that recognizes and disposes of trash, and a remote control car that can find people who are trapped in a building during a fire or earthquake.

AI systems have been trained to take photos and transform them into the style of great artists like Van Gogh, Picasso, or J.M.W. Turner. Take a photo, pick a style, and what emerges looks kind of like the lost work of an artistic master. Now, AI is heading in a different artistic direction: music. The soaring music featured on today's podcast, which made its debut at our GPU Technology Conference, was composed by an AI system developed by our guest, Pierre Barreau, head of Luxembourg-based startup Aiva Technologies.

We’ve heard of robots working in warehouses, picking the right windshield or a box of wiring harnesses from shevles. But what about making sure those shelves are stocked with the right stuff, in the right place, at the right time? Marc Gyongosi thinks that flying robots – better known as drones – are right for the job. Marc is the CEO founder of IFM, or Intelligent Flying Machines, which is pretty much what IFM does.

Purple shirts, haircuts, and cats. How are these three all related? According to deep learning pioneer Andrew Ng, they all played a part in AI’s growing presence in our lives. Ng, formerly of Google and Baidu, and the founder of his new company, Deeplearning.ai, joined this week’s episode of the AI Podcast to share his thoughts on AI being the new electricity.

Our guest on this segment, Paul Wigley, of the Australian National University, was part of a team of scientists who applied AI to an experiment to create a Bose-Einstein condensate. And in doing so they had a question: if we can use AI as a tool in this experiment, can we use AI as its own novel, scientist, to explore different parts of physics and different parts of science?

Tim Anglade, a consultant with HBO's "Silicon Valley," has engineered an app that solves an important problem for all of us: is that a hot dog... or not? The app was dreamed up by the writers and producers of HBO's hit comedy and brought to the real world by Anglade thanks to deep learning.

We all know about driverless cars, driverless cars get all the love and all the attention, because we don't want to drive. But we're going to talk in this segment about autonomous trucks, how and why we need autonomous trucks in many ways just as much as we need autonomous cars. To do that, we're talking to Xiaodi Hou the CTO and co-founder of TuSimple, a company that is bringing driverless trucks to the road.

We all know how far AI, and in particular deep learning, have pushed speech recognition, whether that is with Apple Siri, Amazon Alexa, or Google Assistant, Our guest on this segment, Syed Ahmed, is directing the power of AI towards another form of communication, American Sign Language. And what Syed has done is set up a deep learning model that translates American Sign Language into the English Language.

Over the last few years data intensive machine learning solutions have supplanted rule-based software systems at many technology-based companies. Think about Amazon, Netflix, and Uber. But the gaming world hasn't exactly followed suit, at least not as quickly. Most games are still a delicate mix of hard-wired behavior in the form of traditional code, and somewhat more responsive behavior in the form of large collections of rules. Our guest, Danny Lange, VP of AI and Machine Learning at Unity Technologies, is taking a different tack, using deep learning to help with game creation, that subtle combination of art, story, and software.

In recent years hedge funds have taken the lead in algorithmic investing - or robo-trading as it’s sometimes called. But there’s no reason the hedge fund world should have all the good stuff. In this episode of the AI Podcast, we speak with Gaurav Chakravorty, co-founder of qplum, a startup that’s working to bring that same machine learning investing approach to the rest of us.

How an argument in a bar led Google's Ian Goodfellow to create Generative Adversarial Networks - deep learning systems that argue with each other - an AI breakthrough that promises to help researchers build systems that can learn with less human intervention.

Whatever sport we follow, we all love a good highlight reel - and we want those highlights now. And whether they're following StarCraft II, League of Legends, or Heroes of the Storm, eSports fans are no different. To highlight the kills, and thrills, of a great eSports competition, Yale Song, Senior Research Scientist at Yahoo! Research, turned to AI.

With self-driving cars generating so much buzz, it’s hard to believe that a self-piloting air taxi is, err, flying under the radar. But not for long. We spoke with Arne Stoschek, head of autonomous systems at Airbus A3 (pronounced “A-cubed”), the Silicon Valley-based advanced products and partnerships outpost of Airbus Group about a plan to bring a self-piloted air taxi to the Bay Area’s skies.