The Gradient: Perspectives on AI

In episode 72 of The Gradient Podcast, Daniel Bashir speaks to Brigham Hyde. Brigham is Co-Founder and CEO of Atropos Health. Prior to Atropos, he served as President of Data and Analytics at Eversana, a life sciences commercialization service provider. He led the investment in Concert AI in the oncology real-world data space at Symphony AI. Brigham has also held research faculty positions at Tuft...

In episode 72 of The Gradient Podcast, Daniel Bashir speaks to Professor Scott Aaronson. Scott is the Schlumberger Centennial Chair of Computer Science at the University of Texas at Austin and director of its Quantum Information Center. His research interests focus on the capabilities and limits of quantum computers and computational complexity theory more broadly. He has recently been on leave to...

In episode 71 of The Gradient Podcast, Daniel Bashir speaks to Ted Underwood . Ted is a professor in the School of Information Sciences with an appointment in the Department of English at the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign. Trained in English literary history, he turned his research focus to applying machine learning to large digital collections. His work explores literary patterns tha...

In episode 70 of The Gradient Podcast, Daniel Bashir speaks to Irene Solaiman . Irene is an expert in AI safety and policy and the Policy Director at HuggingFace, where she conducts social impact research and develops public policy. In her former role at OpenAI, she initiated and led bias and social impact research at OpenAI in addition to leading public policy. She built AI policy at Zillow group...

In episode 69 of The Gradient Podcast, Daniel Bashir speaks to Drago Anguelov . Drago is currently a Distinguished Scientist and Head of Research at Waymo, where he joined in 2018. Earlier, he spent eight years at Google working on 3D vision and pose estimation for StreetView, then leading a research team that developed computer vision systems for annotating Google Photos. He has been involved in...

In episode 68 of The Gradient Podcast, Daniel Bashir speaks to Professor Joanna Bryson . Professor Bryson is Professor of Ethics and Technology at the Hertie School, where her research focuses on the impact of technology on human cooperation and AI/ICT governance. Professor Bryson has advised companies, governments, transnational agencies, and NGOs, particularly in AI policy. She is one of the few...

In episode 67 of The Gradient Podcast, Daniel Bashir speaks to Daniel Situnayake . Daniel is head of Machine Learning at Edge Impulse. He is co-author of the O’Reilly books "AI at the Edge" and "TinyML". Previously, he’s worked on the Tensorflow Lite team at Google AI and co-founded Tiny Farms, an insect farming company. Daniel has also lectured in AIDC technologies at Birmingham City University....

In episode 66 of The Gradient Podcast, Daniel Bashir speaks to Soumith Chintala . Soumith is a Research Engineer at Meta AI Research in NYC. He is the co-creator and lead of Pytorch, and maintains a number of other open-source ML projects including Torch-7 and EBLearn. Soumith has previously worked on robotics, object and human detection, generative modeling, AI for video games, and ML systems res...

In episode 65 of The Gradient Podcast, Daniel Bashir speaks to Sewon Min . Sewon is a fifth-year PhD student in the NLP group at the University of Washington, advised by Hannaneh Hajishirzi and Luke Zettlemoyer. She is a part-time visiting researcher at Meta AI and a recipient of the JP Morgan PhD Fellowship. She has previously spent time at Google Research and Salesforce research. Have suggestion...

In episode 64 of The Gradient Podcast, Daniel Bashir speaks to Richard Socher . Richard is founder and CEO of you.com, a new search engine that lets you personalize your search workflow and eschews tracking and invasive ads. Richard was previously Chief Scientist at Salesforce where he led work on fundamental and applied research, product incubation, CRM search, customer service automation and a c...

In episode 63 of The Gradient Podcast, Daniel Bashir speaks to Joe Edelman . Joe developed the meaning-based organizational metrics at Couchsurfing.com , then co-founded the Center for Humane Technology with Tristan Harris, and coined the term “Time Well Spent” for a family of metrics adopted by teams at Facebook, Google, and Apple. Since then, he's worked on the philosophical underpinnings for ne...

In episode 62 of The Gradient Podcast, Daniel Bashir speaks to Ed Grefenstette . Ed is Head of Machine Learning at Cohere and an Honorary Professor at University College London. He previously held research scientist positions at Facebook AI Research and DeepMind, following a stint as co-founder and CTO of Dark Blue Labs. Before his time in industry, Ed worked at Oxford’s Department of Computer Sci...

In episode 61 of The Gradient Podcast, Daniel Bashir speaks to Ken Liu . Ken is an author of speculative fiction. A winner of the Nebula, Hugo, and World Fantasy awards, he is the author of silkpunk epic fantasy series Dandelion Dynasty and short story collections The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories and The Hidden Girl and Other Stories . Prior to writing full-time, Ken worked as a software engi...

In episode 60 of The Gradient Podcast, Daniel Bashir speaks to Hattie Zhou . Hattie is a PhD student at the Université de Montréal and Mila. Her research focuses on understanding how and why neural networks work, based on the belief that the performance of modern neural networks exceeds our understanding and that building more capable and trustworthy models requires bridging this gap. Prior to Mil...

In episode 59 of The Gradient Podcast, Daniel Bashir speaks to Professor Kyunghyun Cho . Professor Cho is an associate professor of computer science and data science at New York University and CIFAR Fellow of Learning in Machines & Brains. He is also a senior director of frontier research at the Prescient Design team within Genentech Research & Early Development. He was a research scientist at Fac...

In episode 58 of The Gradient Podcast, Daniel Bashir speaks to Professor Steve Miller. Steve is a Professor Emeritus of Information Systems at Singapore Management University. Steve served as Founding Dean for the SMU School of Information Systems, and established and developed the technology core of SIS research and project capabilities in Cybersecurity, Data Management & Analytics, Intelligent S...

In episode 57 of The Gradient Podcast, Andrey Kurenkov speaks to Blair Attard-Frost. Note : this interview was recorded 8 months ago, and some aspects of Canada’s AI strategy have changed since then. It is still a good overview of AI governance and other topics, however. Blair is a PhD Candidate at the University of Toronto’s Faculty of Information who researches the governance and management of a...

In episode 56 of The Gradient Podcast, Daniel Bashir speaks to Linus Lee. Linus is an independent researcher interested in the future of knowledge representation and creative work aided by machine understanding of language. He builds interfaces and knowledge tools that expand the domain of thoughts we can think and qualia we can feel. Linus has been writing online since 2014–his blog boasts half a...

In episode 55 of The Gradient Podcast, Daniel Bashir speaks to Professor Suresh Venkatasubramanian. Professor Venkatasubramanian is a Professor of Computer Science and Data Science at Brown University, where his research focuses on algorithmic fairness and the impact of automated decision-making systems in society. He recently served as Assistant Director for Science and Justice in the White House...

In episode 54 of The Gradient Podcast, Andrey Kurenkov speaks with Pete Florence . Note: this was recorded 2 months ago. Andrey should be getting back to putting out some episodes next year. Pete Florence is a Research Scientist at Google Research on the Robotics at Google team inside Brain Team in Google Research . His research focuses on topics in robotics, computer vision, and natural language...

Have suggestions for future podcast guests (or other feedback)? Let us know here ! In episode 53 of The Gradient Podcast, Daniel Bashir speaks to Professor Melanie Mitchell . Professor Mitchell is the Davis Professor at the Santa Fe Institute. Her research focuses on conceptual abstraction, analogy-making, and visual recognition in AI systems. She is the author or editor of six books and her work...

Have suggestions for future podcast guests (or other feedback)? Let us know here ! In episode 52 of The Gradient Podcast, Daniel Bashir speaks to Professor Marc Bellemare . Professor Bellemare leads the reinforcement learning efforts at Google Brain Montréal and is a core industry member at Mila, where he also holds the Canada CIFAR AI Chair. His PhD work, completed at the University of Alberta, p...

In episode 51 of The Gradient Podcast, Daniel Bashir speaks to François Chollet . François is a Senior Staff Software Engineer at Google and creator of the Keras deep learning library, which has enabled many people (including me) to get their hands dirty with the world of deep learning. Francois is also the author of the book “Deep Learning with Python.” Francois is interested in understanding the...

Happy episode 50! This week’s episode is being released on Monday to avoid Thanksgiving. Have suggestions for future podcast guests (or other feedback)? Let us know here ! In episode 50 of The Gradient Podcast, Daniel Bashir speaks to Professor Yoshua Bengio. Professor Bengio is a Full Professor at the Université de Montréal as well as Founder and Scientific Director of the MILA-Quebec AI Institut...

In episode 49 of The Gradient Podcast, Daniel Bashir speaks to Kanjun Qiu and Josh Albrecht . Kanjun and Josh are CEO and CTO of Generally Intelligent, an AI startup aiming to develop general-purpose agents with human-like intelligence that can be safely deployed in the real world. Kanjun and Josh have played these roles together in the past as CEO and CTO of AI recruiting startup Sourceress. Kanj...