Practical AI

Chandler McCann tells Daniel and Chris about how DataRobot engaged in a project to develop sustainable water solutions with the Global Water Challenge (GWC). They analyzed over 500,000 data points to predict future water point breaks. This enabled African governments to make data-driven decisions related to budgeting, preventative maintenance, and policy in order to promote and protect people’s ac...

Daniel and Chris get you Fully-Connected with AI questions from listeners and online forums: What do you think is the next big thing? What are CNNs? How does one start developing an AI-enabled business solution? What tools do you use every day? What will AI replace? And more… Sponsors: DigitalOcean – DigitalOcean’s developer cloud makes it simple to launch in the cloud and scale up as you grow. Th...

Daniel and Chris have a fascinating discussion with Anna Goldie and Azalia Mirhoseini from Google Brain about the use of reinforcement learning for chip floor planning - or placement - in which many new designs are generated, and then evaluated, to find an optimal component layout. Anna and Azalia also describe the use of graph convolutional neural networks in their approach. Sponsors: Linode – Ou...

In the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, Daniel and Chris have a timely conversation with Lucy Lu Wang of the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence about COVID-19 Open Research Dataset (CORD-19). She relates how CORD-19 was created and organized, and how researchers around the world are currently using the data to answer important COVID-19 questions that will help the world through this ongoin...

AI legend Stuart Russell, the Berkeley professor who leads the Center for Human-Compatible AI , joins Chris to share his insights into the future of artificial intelligence. Stuart is the author of Human Compatible , and the upcoming 4th edition of his perennial classic Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach , which is widely regarded as the standard text on AI. After exposing the shortcomings...

So many AI developers are coming up with creative, useful COVID-19 applications during this time of crisis. Among those are Timo from Deepset-AI and Tony from Intel. They are working on a question answering system for pandemic-related questions called COVID-QA. In this episode, they describe the system, related annotation of the CORD-19 data set, and ways that you can contribute! Sponsors: Digital...

Daniel Wilson and Rob Fletcher of ESRI hang with Chris and Daniel to chat about how AI powered modern geographic information systems (GIS) and location intelligence. They illuminate the various models used for GIS, spatial analysis, remote sensing, real-time visualization, and 3D analytics. You don’t want to miss the part about their work for the DoD’s Joint AI Center in humanitarian assistance /...

Practical AI is a weekly podcast that’s marking artificial intelligence practical, productive, and accessible to everyone. If world of AI affects your daily life, this show is for you. From the practitioner wanting to keep up with the latest tools & trends… (clip from episode #68 ) To the AI curious trying to understand the concepts at play and their implications on our lives… (clip from episo...

Catherine Breslin of Cobalt joins Daniel and Chris to do a deep dive on speech recognition. She also discusses how the technology is integrated into virtual assistants (like Alexa) and is used in other non-assistant contexts (like transcription and captioning). Along the way, she teaches us how to assemble a lexicon, acoustic model, and language model to bring speech recognition to life. Sponsors:...

Emily Robinson, co-author of the book Build a Career in Data Science , gives us the inside scoop about optimizing the data science job search. From creating one’s resume, cover letter, and portfolio to knowing how to recognize the right job at a fair compensation rate. Emily’s expert guidance takes us from the beginning of the process to conclusion, including being successful during your early day...

Matt Brems from General Assembly joins us to explain what “data science” actually means these days and how that has changed over time. He also gives us some insight into how people are going about data science education, how AI fits into the data science workflow, and how to differentiate yourself career-wise. Sponsors: DigitalOcean – DigitalOcean’s developer cloud makes it simple to launch in the...

Craig Wiley, from Google Cloud, joins us to discuss various pieces of the TensorFlow ecosystem along with TensorFlow Enterprise. He sheds light on how enterprises are utilizing AI and supporting AI-driven applications in the Cloud. He also clarifies Google’s relationship to TensorFlow and explains how TensorFlow development is impacting Google Cloud Platform. Sponsors: DigitalOcean – DigitalOcean’...

Expanding AI technology to the local languages of emerging markets presents huge challenges. Good data is scarce or non-existent. Users often have bandwidth or connectivity issues. Existing platforms target only a small number of high-resource languages. Our own Daniel Whitenack (data scientist at SIL International) and Dan Jeffries (from Pachyderm) discuss how these and related problems will only...

Daniel and Chris hang out with Mike McCourt from Invoca to learn about the natural language processing model architectures underlying Signal AI . Mike shares how they process conversational data, the challenges they have to overcome, and the types of insights that can be harvested. Sponsors: Linode – Our cloud of choice and the home of Changelog.com. Deploy a fast, efficient, native SSD cloud serv...

Daniel and Chris explore Semantic Scholar with Doug Raymond of the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence. Semantic Scholar is an AI-backed search engine that uses machine learning, natural language processing, and machine vision to surface relevant information from scientific papers. Featuring: Douglas Raymond – GitHub , LinkedIn , X Chris Benson – Website , GitHub , LinkedIn , X Daniel Whit...

Daniel and Chris do a deep dive into The AI Index 2019 Annual Report , which provides unbiased rigorously-vetted data that one can use “to develop intuitions about the complex field of AI”. Analyzing everything from R&D and technical advancements to education, the economy, and societal considerations, Chris and Daniel lay out this comprehensive report’s key insights about artificial intelligen...

Production ML systems include more than just the model. In these complicated systems, how do you ensure quality over time, especially when you are constantly updating your infrastructure, data and models? Tania Allard joins us to discuss the ins and outs of testing ML systems. Among other things, she presents a simple formula that helps you score your progress towards a robust system and identify...

One of the things people most associate with AI is automation, but how is AI actually shaping automation in manufacturing? Costas Boulis from Bright Machines joins us to talk about how they are using AI in various manufacturing processes and in their “microfactories.” He also discusses the unique challenges of developing AI models based on manufacturing data. Sponsors: Linode – Our cloud server of...

Chris and Daniel talk with Greg Allen, Chief of Strategy and Communications at the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) Joint Artificial Intelligence Center (JAIC). The mission of the JAIC is “to seize upon the transformative potential of artificial intelligence technology for the benefit of America’s national security… The JAIC is the official focal point of the DoD AI Strategy.” So if you want to un...

Wow, 2019 was an amazing year for AI! In this fully connected episode, Chris and Daniel discuss their list of top 5 notable AI things from 2019. They also discuss the “state of AI” at the end of 2019, and they make some predictions for 2020. Sponsors: DigitalOcean – The simplest cloud platform for developers and teams Whether you’re running one virtual machine or ten thousand, makes managing your...

We have all used web and product search technologies for quite some time, but how do they actually work and how is AI impacting search? Andrew Stanton from Etsy joins us to dive into AI-based search methods and to talk about neuroevolution. He also gives us an introduction to Rust for production ML/AI and explains how that community is developing. Sponsors: DigitalOcean – The simplest cloud platfo...

Evan Sparks, from Determined AI, helps us understand why many are still stuck in the “dark ages” of AI infrastructure. He then discusses how we can build better systems by leveraging things like fault tolerant training and AutoML. Finally, Evan explains his optimistic outlook on AI’s economic and environmental health impact. Sponsors: DigitalOcean – The simplest cloud platform for developers and t...

SpaCy is awesome for NLP! It’s easy to use, has widespread adoption, is open source, and integrates the latest language models. Ines Montani and Matthew Honnibal (core developers of spaCy and co-founders of Explosion) join us to discuss the history of the project, its capabilities, and the latest trends in NLP. We also dig into the practicalities of taking NLP workflows to production. You don’t wa...

GANs are at the center of AI hype. However, they are also starting to be extremely practical and be used to develop solutions to real problems. Jakub Langr and Vladimir Bok join us for a deep dive into GANs and their application. We discuss the basics of GANs, their various flavors, and open research problems. Sponsors: DigitalOcean – The simplest cloud platform for developers and teams Whether yo...

Streamlit recently burst onto the scene with their intuitive, open source solution for building custom ML/AI tools. It allows data scientists and ML engineers to rapidly build internal or external UIs without spending time on frontend development. In this episode, Adrien Treuille joins us to discuss ML/AI app development in general and Streamlit. We talk about the practicalities of working with St...