The TWIML AI Podcast (formerly This Week in Machine Learning & Artificial Intelligence)

Today we continue our NeurIPS coverage joined by Tina Eliassi-Rad, a professor at Northeastern University, and an invited speaker at the I Still Can't Believe It's Not Better! Workshop. In our conversation with Tina, we explore her research at the intersection of network science, complex networks, and machine learning, how graphs are used in her work and how it differs from typical graph machine l...

Today we’re excited to kick off our annual NeurIPS, joined by Oriol Vinyals, the lead of the deep learning team at Deepmind. We cover a lot of ground in our conversation with Oriol, beginning with a look at his research agenda and why the scope has remained wide even through the maturity of the field, his thoughts on transformer models and if they will get us beyond the current state of DL, or if...

Today we’re joined by Michael McCourt the head of engineering at SigOpt. In our conversation with Michael, we explore the vast space around the topic of optimization, including the technical differences between ML and optimization and where they’re applied, what the path to increasing complexity looks like for a practitioner and the relationship between optimization and active learning. We also di...

Today we conclude our AWS re:Invent coverage joined by Brian Granger, a senior principal technologist at Amazon Web Services, and a co-creator of Project Jupyter. In our conversion with Brian, we discuss the inception and early vision of Project Jupyter, including how the explosion of machine learning and deep learning shifted the landscape for the notebook, and how they balanced the needs of thes...

Today we continue our 2021 re:Invent series joined by Jack Berkowitz, chief data officer at ADP. In our conversation with Jack, we explore the ever evolving role and growth of machine learning at the company, from the evolution of their ML platform, to the unique team structure. We discuss Jack’s perspective on data governance, the broad use cases for ML, how they approached the decision to move t...

Today we’re joined by Bratin Saha, vice president and general manager at Amazon. In our conversation with Bratin, we discuss quite a few of the recent ML-focused announcements coming out of last weeks re:Invent conference, including new products like Canvas and Studio Lab, as well as upgrades to existing services like Ground Truth Plus. We explore what no-code environments like the aforementioned...

Today we’re joined by Doug Burdick, a principal research staff member at IBM Research. In a recent interview, Doug’s colleague Yunyao Li joined us to talk through some of the broader enterprise NLP problems she’s working on. One of those problems is making documents machine consumable, especially with the traditionally archival file type, the PDF. That’s where Doug and his team come in. In our con...

Today we’re joined by Shayan Mortazavi, a data science manager at Accenture.  In our conversation with Shayan, we discuss his talk from the recent SigOpt HPC & AI Summit, titled A Novel Framework Predictive Maintenance Using Dl and Reliability Engineering. In the talk, Shayan proposes a novel deep learning-based approach for prognosis prediction of oil and gas plant equipment in an effort to preve...

Today we’re joined by friend-of-the-show Nasrin Mostafazadeh, co-founder of Verneek.  Though Verneek is still in stealth, Nasrin was gracious enough to share a bit about the company, including their goal of enabling anyone to make data-informed decisions without the need for a technical background, through the use of innovative human-machine interfaces. In our conversation, we explore the state of...

Today we’re joined by Julie Shah, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Julie’s work lies at the intersection of aeronautics, astronautics, and robotics, with a specific focus on collaborative and interactive robotics. In our conversation, we explore how robots would achieve the ability to predict what their human collaborators are thinking, what the process of building k...

Today we’re joined by Yunyao Li, a senior research manager at IBM Research.  Yunyao is in a somewhat unique position at IBM, addressing the challenges of enterprise NLP in a traditional research environment, while also having customer engagement responsibilities. In our conversation with Yunyao, we explore the challenges associated with productizing NLP in the enterprise, and if she focuses on sol...

Today we’re joined by Kim Branson, the SVP and global head of artificial intelligence and machine learning at GSK.  We cover a lot of ground in our conversation, starting with a breakdown of GSK’s core pharmaceutical business, and how ML/AI fits into that equation, use cases that appear using genetics data as a data source, including sequential learning for drug discovery. We also explore the 500...

Today we’re joined by David Ha, a research scientist at Google.  In nature, there are many examples of “bottlenecks”, or constraints, that have shaped our development as a species. Building upon this idea, David posits that these same evolutionary bottlenecks could work when training neural network models as well. In our conversation with David, we cover a TON of ground, including the aforemention...

Today we’re joined by Luke Stark, an assistant professor at Western University in London, Ontario.  In our conversation with Luke, we explore the existence and use of facial recognition technology, something Luke has been critical of in his work over the past few years, comparing it to plutonium. We discuss Luke’s recent paper, “Physiognomic Artificial Intelligence”, in which he critiques studies...

Today we’re joined by Francesc Joan Riera, an applied machine learning engineer at The LEGO Group.  In our conversation, we explore the ML infrastructure at LEGO, specifically around two use cases, content moderation and user engagement. While content moderation is not a new or novel task, but because their apps and products are marketed towards children, their need for heightened levels of modera...

Today we’re joined by Hamel Husain, Staff Machine Learning Engineer at GitHub.  Over the last few years, Hamel has had the opportunity to work on some of the most popular open source projects in the ML world, including fast.ai, nbdev, fastpages, and fastcore, just to name a few. In our conversation with Hamel, we discuss his journey into Silicon Valley, and how he discovered that the ML tooling an...

In today’s episode, we are joined by Julianna Ianni, vice president of AI research & development at Proscia. In our conversation, Julianna shares her and her team’s research focused on developing applications that would help make the life of pathologists easier by enabling tasks to quickly and accurately be diagnosed using deep learning and AI. We also explore their paper “A Pathology Deep Learnin...

Today we’re joined by Akshat Kaul, the head of data science and machine learning at Redfin. We’re all familiar with Redfin, but did you know that redfin.com is the largest real estate brokerage site in the US? In our conversation with Akshat, we discuss the history of ML at Redfin and a few of the key use cases that ML is currently being applied to, including recommendations, price estimates, and...

Today we’re joined by Edward Raff, chief scientist and head of the machine learning research group at Booz Allen Hamilton. Edward’s work sits at the intersection of machine learning and cybersecurity, with a particular interest in malware analysis and detection. In our conversation, we look at the evolution of adversarial ML over the last few years before digging into Edward’s recently released pa...

Today we’re joined by Andrea Banino, a research scientist at DeepMind. In our conversation with Andrea, we explore his interest in artificial general intelligence by way of episodic memory, the relationship between memory and intelligence, the challenges of applying memory in the context of neural networks, and how to overcome problems of generalization.  We also discuss his work on the PonderNet,...

Take our survey at twimlai.com/survey21! Today we’re joined by Tim Rocktäschel, a research scientist at Facebook AI Research and an associate professor at University College London (UCL).  Tim’s work focuses on training RL agents in simulated environments, with the goal of these agents being able to generalize to novel situations. Typically, this is done in environments like OpenAI Gym, MuJuCo, or...

In this special episode of the show, we’re excited to bring you our conversation with Prashanth Chandrasekar, CEO of Stack Overflow. This interview was recorded as a part of the annual Prosus AI Marketplace event.  In our discussion with Prashanth, we explore the impact the pandemic has had on Stack Overflow, how they think about community and enable collaboration in over 100 million monthly users...

Today we’re joined by Joseph Soriaga, a senior director of technology at Qualcomm.  In our conversation with Joseph, we focus on a pair of papers that he and his team will be presenting at Globecom later this year. The first, Neural Augmentation of Kalman Filter with Hypernetwork for Channel Tracking, details the use of deep learning to augment an algorithm to address mismatches in models, allowin...

Today we’re joined by Kanaka Rajan, an assistant professor at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mt Sinai. Kanaka, who is a recent recipient of the NSF Career Award, bridges the gap between the worlds of biology and artificial intelligence with her work in computer science. In our conversation, we explore how she builds “lego models” of the brain that mimic biological brain functions, then reverse en...

Today we’re joined by a friend of the show and return guest Ville Tuulos, CEO and co-founder of Outerbounds. In our previous conversations with Ville, we explored his experience building and deploying the open-source framework, Metaflow, while working at Netflix. Since our last chat, Ville has embarked on a few new journeys, including writing the upcoming book Effective Data Science Infrastructure...