Eye On A.I.

In the third episode of six episodes looking at the National Security Commission on AI 's first quarter recommendations to Congress, we speak with Katharina McFarland, a former Assistant Secretary of Defense for Acquisition, about the commission's recommendation that the Department of Defense and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence establish a steering committee on emerging technol...

In this week's episode, we speak to  Jose-Marie Griffiths , a commissioner on the National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence, about the commission's recommendations on how to strengthen the federal government's AI workforce. The recommendations focused on raising understanding of AI within the government and the need to streamline government hiring practices in order to attract and re...

In April 2020, the National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence issued its first-quarter recommendations to Congress, covering seven lines of effort, six of which are public and one of which is classified. In the first of a series of podcast episodes about those recommendations, we spoke with Andrew Moore, a professor at Carnegie Mellon University and NSCAI commissioner about the commis...

COVID-19 continues to sweep through the human population, killing some and damaging the health of others. While this podcast is normally focused on machine-learning, this week I talk to Vittorio Sebastiano, an assistant professor of stem cell biology at Stanford University, about groundbreaking tech that could someday help restore scarred tissue to pre-COVID health. Vittorio talked about his hunt...

COVID-19 has swept across the world was startling speed, but with equally startling speed, the machine learning community has responded. This week I speak with Irina Rish, a professor at the University of Montreal and a Mila academic member, who is helping head a task force to understand the virus. She talked about where the efforts currently stand and where they expect to go in the weeks and mont...

There has been a debate in the past few years between the symbolists and the connectionists about the future of artificial intelligence. The symbolists say that traditional, explainable, logic-based approaches still hold tremendous promise while the connectionists say that the power of deep learning, for all its current opacity and narrow application, holds the key to more general forms of machine...

Justin Gottschlich, who founded the machine programming research group at Intel Labs, explains his group's efforts to automate software development. The ambition is to make it possible for anybody to create software simply by describing what they intend the software to do. 

This week I talk to Casimir Wierzynski, a senior director in Intel's AI Products Group, Cas talked about his work in privacy, taking me on a tour of the latest strategies that promise to unlock the data necessary to liberate AI. He talked about hardening encryption against the code-cracking power of quantum computers and about his work in connectomics with salami slicers for the brain that are mak...

Terry Sejnowski, author of the book Deep Learning Revolution, who together with Geoff Hinton created Boltzmann machines, a deep learning network that has remarkable similarities to learning in the brain, talks about whether machines dream and the algorithms of the brain, whether Marvin Minsky was the devil and how deep learning is shaping the future of education. 

We begin 2020 by looking back at some of the highlights from 2019 including conversations with Turing award winners, Yoshua, Bengio and Yann Lecun, as well as with the father of reinforcement learning, Rich Sutton. Our guests consider applying machine learning to the climate crisis; competition between the U S and China for dominance in AI; and the future of machine learning through various kinds...

Daphne Koller , formerly at Stanford University and cofounder of the online education company,  Coursera , talks this week about using machine-learning to develop new drugs. Her approach is to use machine learning to accuratley identify cellular or genetic targets for treatment. The field is just getting started but promises to speed the development of new and better therapies to treat disease.

My guest this week, Aude Billard from Switzerland's Learning Algorithms and Systems Laboratory, blends control theory with machine learning to build robotic systems that are both swift and precise but can handle some of the unpredictability of the real world. Her lab famously taught a robot arm to catch a tennis racket looping through the air and is working on ever more precise robots that can eve...

Former Google chief executive Eric Schmidt and former Deputy Defense Secretary Bob Work, co-chairs of the U.S. National Security Commission on AI, talk about the challenges the government faces in winning support from a skeptical private sector and in maintaining engagement with China while ensuring that that engagement doesn't work to America's detriment.  

The secret in much of artificial intelligence today is that it depends on hordes of unskilled workers to label the data used to train supervised learning models. But, in order for data science teams to work with labelers around the world, they need a platform. This week, in the second of a periodic series of sponsored episodes, I talk to Manu Sharma and Brian Rieger, who saw the opportunity to pro...

This week, I talk to Dawn Song, one of the world's foremost experts in computer security, about her vision of a new paradigm in which people control their data and are compensated for its use by corporations. Dawn, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, has recently launched a company, Oasis Labs, which is building a platform that brings together the immutability of blockchain and...

A few months ago at the recent international conference on machine learning, a workshop and research paper launched a movement to use machine learning in addressing climate change. The response was huge and has given birth to the bones of an organization climate change.ai. This week I talked to David Rolnick, a postdoc at U Penn and Priya, Donti, a Phd student at Carnegie Mellon, about how the gro...

Automated machine-learning tools – or tools that automate the creation of machine-learning applications – are increasingly important in the current talent-scarce environment. Expensive ML engineers shouldn't spend their time doing stuff that machines can do quicker and cheaper. This week, we talk to Evan Sparks and Ameet Talwalkar, two of the founders of Determined AI, which builds tools that stre...

This week, I talk to Brendan McCord, who wrote the Pentagon's AI strategy and is now a Special Government Employee at the National Security Commission on AI. Brendan talks about what he believes the US needs to do to stay competitive with China and promote an alternative vision of AI-powered security and prosperity to the world.

This week I talk to John Platt, a Distinguished Scientist at Google, about twin problems: finding cheap zero-carbon energy sources and mitigating global warming. John is a polymath, having discovered asteroids, helped put the touch in computer touchpads and even won an Academy Award for scientific and technical achievements in computer animation. Now, he is part of a growing movement of machine le...

This week we return to the world of thinking robots with Chelsea Finn, one of the youngest experts in the field, who talks about her journey, about her work in meta-learning and about lifelong learning for robots.

This week, we look at AI in India. With its massive population, fast-growing economy, English-language education and large supply of brilliant researchers and engineers, it should be competing with China and the U.S. for dominance in the space. But it is not. I talk to Partha Talukdar, a professor at the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore, about the challenges that have kept India from realizi...

This week I talk to Yann Lecun, one of the brightest minds in machine learning today. Yann's work lies behind some of the most critical AI applications, most notably computer vision systems that power everything from face recognition software to self-driving cars. He recently won the Turing Award, the highest prize in computer science. We talked about Yann's first computer, about how music led him...

This week I talk to Trae Stephens and Brian Schimpf from Anduril Industries, an AI defense contractor, about the current state of AI research and deployment for national security, including how the US stacks up against China. We also talked about the resistance among US engineers to work on defense applications and whether that hobbles the US in the global AI arms race. 

This week, I talk to Ken Church, a pioneer in Natural Language Processing, whose use of statistical models on part of speech tagging revolutionized the field and is what makes automatic dictation and machine translation so popular today. We talked about his early days at MIT, about explainable AI and about how the Holy See played a role in his probabilistic approach to NLP.

This week, I talk to Sergey Levine, one of the most prolific researchers in robot learning. We talked about developing a robot's sense of touch and about robot dreams and whether he believes we know what's happening in the field in Russia and China.