Practical AI

While attending the NVIDIA GPU Technology Conference in Silicon Valley, Chris met up with Adam Stooke, a speaker and PhD student at UC Berkeley who is doing groundbreaking work in large-scale deep reinforcement learning and robotics. Adam took Chris on a tour of deep reinforcement learning - explaining what it is, how it works, and why it’s one of the hottest technologies in artificial intelligenc...

Longtime listeners know that we’re always advocating for ‘AI for good’, but this week we have taken it to a whole new level. We had the privilege of chatting with James Hodson, Director of the AI for Good Foundation, about ways they have used artificial intelligence to positively-impact the world - from food production to climate change. James inspired us to find our own ways to use AI for good, a...

GIPHY’s head of R&D, Nick Hasty, joins us to discuss their recently released celebrity detector project. He gives us all of the details about that project, but he also tells us about GIPHY’s origins, AI in general at GIPHY, and more! Sponsors: DigitalOcean – Check out DigitalOcean’s dedicated vCPU Droplets with dedicated vCPU threads. Get started for free with a $100 credit. Learn more at do.c...

Being that this is “practical” AI, we decided that it would be good to take time to discuss various aspects of AI infrastructure. In this full-connected episode, we discuss our personal/local infrastructure along with trends in AI, including infra for training, serving, and data management. Sponsors: DigitalOcean – Check out DigitalOcean’s dedicated vCPU Droplets with dedicated vCPU threads. Get s...

While at the NVIDIA GPU Technology Conference 2019 in Silicon Valley, Chris enjoyed an inspiring conversation with Anima Anandkumar. Clearly a role model - not only for women - but for anyone in the world of AI, Anima relayed how her lifelong passion for mathematics and engineering started when she was only 3 years old in India, and ultimately led to her pioneering deep learning research at Amazon...

Clément Delangue, the co-founder & CEO of Hugging Face, joined us to discuss fun, social, and conversational AI. Clem explained why social AI is important, what products they are building (social AIs who learn to chit-chat, talk sassy and trades selfies with you), and how this intersects with the latest research in AI for natural language. He also shared his vision for how AI for natural langu...

The White House recently published an “Executive Order on Maintaining American Leadership in Artificial Intelligence.” In this fully connected episode, we discuss the executive order in general and criticism from the AI community. We also draw some comparisons between this US executive order and other national strategies for leadership in AI. Sponsors: Linode – Our cloud server of choice. Deploy a...

While covering Applied Machine Learning Days in Switzerland, Chris met El Mahdi El Mhamdi by chance, and was fascinated with his work doing AI safety research at EPFL. El Mahdi agreed to come on the show to share his research into the vulnerabilities in machine learning that bad actors can take advantage of. We cover everything from poisoned data sets and hacked machines to AI-generated propaganda...

This week we discuss GPT-2, a new transformer-based language model from OpenAI that has everyone talking. It’s capable of generating incredibly realistic text, and the AI community has lots of concerns about potential malicious applications. We help you understand GPT-2 and we discuss ethical concerns, responsible release of AI research, and resources that we have found useful in learning about la...

While at Applied Machine Learning Days in Lausanne, Switzerland, Chris had an inspiring conversation with Anna Bethke, Head of AI for Social Good at Intel. Anna reveals how she started the AI for Social Good program at Intel, and goes on to share the positive impact this program has had - from stopping animal poachers, to helping the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children. Through th...

Chris sat down with Marta Martinez-Cámara and Miranda Kreković to learn how GirlsCoding.org is inspiring 9–16-year-old girls to learn about computer science. The site is successfully empowering young women to recognize computer science as a valid career choice through hands-on workshops, role models, and by smashing prevalent gender stereotypes. This is an episode that you’ll want to listen to wit...

Chris caught up with Jennifer Marsman, Principal Engineer on the AI for Earth team at Microsoft, right before her speech at Applied Machine Learning Days 2019 in Lausanne, Switzerland. She relayed how the team came into being, what they do, and some of the good deeds they have done for Mother Earth. They are giving away $50 million (US) in grants over five years! It was another excellent example o...

Fully Connected – a series where Chris and Daniel keep you up to date with everything that’s happening in the AI community. If you’re anything like us, your New Year’s resolutions probably included an AI section, so this week we explore some of the learning resources available for artificial intelligence and deep learning. Where you go with it depends upon what you want to achieve, so we discuss a...

Ajay Royyuru and Guillermo Cecchi from IBM Healthcare join Chris and Daniel to discuss the emerging field of computational psychiatry. They talk about how researchers at IBM are applying AI to measure mental and neurological health based on speech, and they give us their perspectives on things like bias in healthcare data, AI augmentation for doctors, and encodings of language structure. Sponsors:...

Fully Connected – a series where Chris and Daniel keep you up to date with everything that’s happening in the AI community. This week we look back at 2018 - from the GDPR and the Cambridge Analytica scandal, to advances in natural language processing and new open source tools. Then we offer our predications for what we expect in the year ahead, touching on just about everything in the world of AI....

Susan Etlinger, an Industry Analyst at Altimeter, a Prophet company, joins us to discuss The AI Maturity Playbook: Five Pillars of Enterprise Success . This playbook covers trends affecting AI, and offers a maturity model that practitioners can use within their own organizations - addressing everything from strategy and product development, to culture and ethics. Sponsors: Fastly – Our bandwidth p...

Fully Connected – a series where Chris and Daniel keep you up to date with everything that’s happening in the AI community. This week we discuss all things inference, which involves utilizing an already trained AI model and integrating it into the software stack. First, we focus on some new hardware from Amazon for inference and NVIDIA’s open sourcing of TensorRT for GPU-optimized inference. Then...

Joe Doliner (JD) joined the show to talk about productionizing ML/AI with Pachyderm, an open source data science platform built on Kubernetes (k8s). We talked through the origins of Pachyderm, challenges associated with creating infrastructure for machine learning, and data and model versioning/provenance. He also walked us through a process for going from a Jupyter notebook to a production data p...

Fully Connected – a series where Chris and Daniel keep you up to date with everything that’s happening in the AI community. This week we discuss BERT, a new method of pre-training language representations from Google for natural language processing (NLP) tasks. Then we tackle Facebook’s Horizon, the first open source reinforcement learning platform for large-scale products and services. We also ad...

We recently met up with Cormac Brick (Intel) and Mike Del Balso (Uber) at O’Reilly AI in SF. As the director of machine intelligence in Intel’s Movidius group, Cormac is an expert in porting deep learning models to all sorts of embedded devices (cameras, robots, drones, etc.). He helped us understand some of the techniques for developing portable networks to maximize performance on different compu...

Brett Gaylor joins Chris and Daniel to chat about the recently announced winners of Mozilla’s creative media awards, which focuses on exposing the impact of AI on society. These winners include a film that responds to the audience (via AI recognized emotions) and an interesting chatbot called Wanda. Sponsors: DigitalOcean – DigitalOcean is simplicity at scale. Whether your business is running one...

Himani Agrawal joins Daniel and Chris to talk about how she got into data science and artificial intelligence, and offers advice to others getting into these fields. She goes on to describe the role of artificial intelligence and machine learning within AT&T and telecom in general. Sponsors: DigitalOcean – DigitalOcean is simplicity at scale. Whether your business is running one virtual machin...

In this new and updates show, Daniel and Chris discuss, among other things, efforts to use AI in art and efforts to make AI interfaces look human. They also discuss some learning resources related to neural nets, AI fairness, and reinforcement learning. Sponsors: DigitalOcean – DigitalOcean is simplicity at scale. Whether your business is running one virtual machine or ten thousand, DigitalOcean g...

Lindsey Zuloaga joins us to discuss bias in hiring, bias in AI, and how we can fight bias in hiring with AI. Lindsey tells us about her experiences fighting bias at HireVue, where she is director of data science, and she gives some practical advice to AI practitioners about fairness in models and data. Sponsors: DigitalOcean – DigitalOcean is simplicity at scale. Whether your business is running o...

Chris and Daniel are back together in another news/updates show. They discuss PyTorch v1.0, some disturbing uses of AI for tracking social credit, and learning resources to get you started with machine learning. Sponsors: DigitalOcean – DigitalOcean is simplicity at scale. Whether your business is running one virtual machine or ten thousand, DigitalOcean gets out of your way so your team can build...