Data Skeptic

Last year, the film development and production company End Cue produced a short film, called Sunspring, that was entirely written by an artificial intelligence using neural networks. More specifically, it was authored by a recurrent neural network (RNN) called long short-term memory (LSTM). According to End Cue's Chief Technical Officer, Deb Ray, the company has come a long way in improving the ge...

One Shot Learning is the class of machine learning procedures that focuses learning something from a small number of examples.   This is in contrast to "traditional" machine learning which typically requires a very large training set to build a reasonable model. In this episode, Kyle presents a coded message to Linhda who is able to recognize that many of these new symbols created are likely to be...

Recommender systems play an important role in providing personalized content to online users. Yet, typical data mining techniques are not well suited for the unique challenges that recommender systems face. In this episode, host Kyle Polich joins Dr. Joseph Konstan from the University of Minnesota at a live recording at FARCON 2017 in Minneapolis to discuss recommender systems and how machine lear...

Thanks to our sponsor  brilliant.org/dataskeptics A Long Short Term Memory (LSTM) is a neural unit, often used in Recurrent Neural Network (RNN) which attempts to provide the network the capacity to store information for longer periods of time. An LSTM unit remembers values for either long or short time periods. The key to this ability is that it uses no activation function within its recurrent co...

Zillow is a leading real estate information and home-related marketplace. We interviewed Andrew Martin, a data science Research Manager at Zillow, to learn more about how Zillow uses data science and big data to make real estate predictions.

Our guest Pranav Rajpurkar and his coauthored recently published  Cardiologist-Level Arrhythmia Detection with Convolutional Neural Networks , a paper in which they demonstrate the use of Convolutional Neural Networks which outperform board certified cardiologists in detecting a wide range of heart arrhythmias from ECG data.

RNNs are a class of deep learning models designed to capture sequential behavior.   An RNN trains a set of weights which depend not just on new input but also on the previous state of the neural network.   This directed cycle allows the training phase to find solutions which rely on the state at a previous time, thus giving the network a form of memory.   RNNs have been used effectively in languag...

Thanks to our sponsor  Springboard . In this week's episode, guest Andre Natal from Mozilla joins our host, Kyle Polich, to discuss a couple exciting new developments in open source speech recognition systems, which include  Project Common Voice . In June 2017, Mozilla launched a new open source project, Common Voice, a novel complementary project to the  TensorFlow-based DeepSpeech  implementatio...

A Bayesian Belief Network is an acyclic directed graph composed of nodes that represent random variables and edges that imply a conditional dependence between them. It's an intuitive way of encoding your statistical knowledge about a system and is efficient to propagate belief updates throughout the network when new information is added.

In this episode,  Tony Beltramelli  of  UIzard Technologies  joins our host, Kyle Polich, to talk about the ideas behind his latest app that can transform graphic design into functioning code, as well as his previous work on spying with wearables.

In statistics, two random variables might depend on one another (for example, interest rates and new home purchases). We call this conditional dependence. An important related concept exists called conditional independence. This phrase describes situations in which two variables are independent of one another given some other variable. For example, the probability that a vendor will pay their bill...

Animals can't tell us when they're experiencing pain, so we have to rely on other cues to help treat their discomfort. But it is often difficult to tell how much an animal is suffering. The sheep, for instance, is the most inscrutable of animals. However, scientists have figured out a way to understand sheep facial expressions using artificial intelligence. On this week's episode, Dr. Marwa Mahmou...

This episode collects interviews from my recent trip to Microsoft Build where I had the opportunity to speak with Dharma Shukla and Syam Nair about the recently announced CosmosDB. CosmosDB is a globally consistent, distributed datastore that supports all the popular persistent storage formats (relational, key/value pair, document database, and graph) under a single streamlined API. The system pro...

This episode discusses the vanishing gradient - a problem that arises when training deep neural networks in which nearly all the gradients are very close to zero by the time back-propagation has reached the first hidden layer. This makes learning virtually impossible without some clever trick or improved methodology to help earlier layers begin to learn.

hen faced with medical issues, would you want to be seen by a human or a machine? In this episode, guest Edward Choi, co-author of the study titled Doctor AI: Predicting Clinical Events via Recurrent Neural Network shares his thoughts. Edward presents his team's efforts in developing a temporal model that can learn from human doctors based on their collective knowledge, i.e. the large amount of El...

In a neural network, the output value of a neuron is almost always transformed in some way using a function. A trivial choice would be a linear transformation which can only scale the data. However, other transformations, like a step function allow for non-linear properties to be introduced. Activation functions can also help to standardize your data between layers. Some functions such as the sigm...

This episode recaps the Microsoft Build Conference.   Kyle recently attended and shares some thoughts on cloud, databases, cognitive services, and artificial intelligence.   The episode includes interviews with Rohan Kumar  and David Carmona.  

Max-pooling is a procedure in a neural network which has several benefits. It performs dimensionality reduction by taking a collection of neurons and reducing them to a single value for future layers to receive as input. It can also prevent overfitting, since it takes a large set of inputs and admits only one value, making it harder to memorize the input. In this episode, we discuss the intuitive...

This episode is an interview with Tinghui Zhou .  In the recent paper " Unsupervised Learning of Depth and Ego-motion from Video ", Tinghui and collaborators propose a deep learning architecture which is able to learn depth and pose information from unlabeled videos.  We discuss details of this project and its applications.

CNNs are characterized by their use of a group of neurons typically referred to as a filter or kernel.  In image recognition, this kernel is repeated over the entire image.  In this way, CNNs may achieve the property of translational invariance - once trained to recognize certain things, changing the position of that thing in an image should not disrupt the CNN's ability to recognize it.  In this...

Despite the success of GANs in imaging, one of its major drawbacks is the problem of 'mode collapse,' where the generator learns to produce samples with extremely low variety. To address this issue, today's guests Arnab Ghosh and Viveka Kulharia proposed two different extensions. The first involves tweaking the generator's objective function with a diversity enforcing term that would assess simila...

GANs are an unsupervised learning method involving two neural networks iteratively competing. The discriminator is a typical learning system. It attempts to develop the ability to recognize members of a certain class, such as all photos which have birds in them. The generator attempts to create false examples which the discriminator incorrectly classifies. In successive training rounds, the networ...

Recently, we've seen opinion polls come under some skepticism.  But is that skepticism truly justified?  The recent Brexit referendum and US 2016 Presidential Election are examples where some claims the polls "got it wrong".  This episode explores this idea.

No reliable, complete database cataloging home sales data at a transaction level is available for the average person to access. To a data scientist interesting in studying this data, our hands are complete tied. Opportunities like testing sociological theories, exploring economic impacts, study market forces, or simply research the value of an investment when buying a home are all blocked by the l...

There's more than one type of computer processor. The central processing unit (CPU) is typically what one means when they say "processor". GPUs were introduced to be highly optimized for doing floating point computations in parallel. These types of operations were very useful for high end video games, but as it turns out, those same processors are extremely useful for machine learning. In this min...