The AI Podcast

We spoke with Xuchen Yao, co-founder of Kitt.ai, a startup using AI to build better chat experiences, about how voice and chat are turning into rich, interactive interfaces for a new generation of AI-powered services.

Are AI and VR the peanut butter and chocolate of computing? Are they a match made in heaven? We spoke with Michael Ludden, who heads up IBM Watson's AI and VR labs, about how these two technologies intersect at this week's GPU Technology Conference.

We spoke with Innit Chief Technology Officer Hristo Bojinov about all the surprising ways deep learning can help us better manage the very personal relationship we all have with food — from meal planning to kitchen inventory to cooking the perfect roast chicken.

We spoke with the team at Marble, which has turned AI loose on the streets of San Francisco delivering food in San Francisco's vibrant Mission District.

We spoke with Princeton researcher Aylin Caliskan, co-author of a headline-grabbing paper published in Science magazine earlier this month. Her paper details how learning machines can sometimes learn all too well, picking up our biases as well as our brilliance.

Previous episodes discussed deep learning systems trained to master games like Chess, Go, and even Texas Hold 'Em. But training a deep neural net on a racing game like Mario Kart 64? What can you learn from that? A lot, it turns out, explains Kevin Hughes.

If you're looking for the impact of deep learning, look to the end of your fork. We spoke with Blue River Technology co-founder and CTO Lee Redden about how the startup put deep learning to work tending 10% of the lettuce produced in the United States, and how deep learning promises to unleash a new agricultural revolution.

We spoke with Michael Bowling, a professor at the University of Alberta whose team of researchers created a GPU-trained AI that has defeated professional poker players at heads-up no-limit Texas hold’em. The work promises to yield applications in the real world, where — unlike games such as Go and Chess — we often have to make decisions based on incomplete information.

We speak with Matthew McKown, CEO of Conservation Metrics, about how deep learning techniques helped rediscover a bird that was once thought extinct, and how GPU-powered AI now helps biologists crunch vast quantities of data to spot trends that would have been impossible to detect before.

We talk with Dr. Bradley Erickson, a Mayo Clinic neuroradiologist, who uses AI to predict tumor genomics using MRIs. His method could give doctors easier access to invaluable genetic information. Information that could predict how quickly a tumor will progress, and if it will respond to specific drugs and other treatments.

Medicine — particularly radiology and pathology — have become more data-driven. The Massachusetts General Hospital Center for Clinical Data Science — led by Mark Michalski — promises to accelerate that, using AI technologies to spot patterns that can improve the detection, diagnosis and treatment of diseases.

University of Kentucky Computer Science Professor Brent Seales caused a worldwide sensation when he and his team were able to use non-invasive scans to unlock writings on the ancient En-Gedi scroll to reveal the earliest copy of a Pentateuchal book — Leviticus — ever found in a Holy Ark. Now he’s turning his expertise to more ancient texts, this time from the lost Roman city of Herculaneum.

If you want to bring autonomous vehicles to the mainstream, fast, first you’ve got to go fast. We spoke with Jonathan Cooke, chief marketing officer of Roborace, the first ever driverless electric racing championship, who wants to turn autonomous racing into a spectator sport that will spark the creation of more powerful, capable automotive AI.

Cybersecurity is a cat-and-mouse game where the mouse always has long had the upper hand because it’s so easy for new malware to go undetected. Dr. Eli David, an expert in computational intelligence and CTO of Deep Instinct, wants to use AI to change that, bringing the GPU-powered deep learning techniques underpinning modern speech and image recognition to the vexing world of cybersecurity.

Whether brewing hearty stouts or crisp lagers, flavor is a fickle thing. Not only is it hard to create consistently good brew, as humans our ability to identify - and remember - flavors is flawed. Yet brands worth billions rely on creating consistent flavors. We talk to Jason Cohen, founder of Gastrograph, who is using AI to help businesses that create beer, chocolate, wine, coffee, and spirits better understand flavor.