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

Today we continue our CVPR 2021 coverage joined by Claire Monteleoni, an associate professor at the University of Colorado Boulder.  We cover quite a bit of ground in our conversation with Claire, including her journey down the path from environmental activist to one of the leading climate informatics researchers in the world. We explore her current research interests, and the available opportunit...

Today we kick off our CVPR coverage joined by Amir Habibian, a senior staff engineer manager at Qualcomm Technologies.  In our conversation with Amir, whose research primarily focuses on video perception, we discuss a few papers they presented at the event. We explore the paper Skip-Convolutions for Efficient Video Processing, which looks at training discrete variables to end to end into visual ne...

Today we’re joined by Noam Slonim, the principal investigator of Project Debater at IBM Research.  In our conversation with Noam, we explore the history of Project Debater, the first AI system that can “debate” humans on complex topics. We also dig into the evolution of the project, which is the culmination of 7 years and over 50 research papers, and eventually becoming a Nature cover paper, “An A...

Today we’re joined by Madhur Behl, an Assistant Professor in the department of computer science at the University of Virginia.  In our conversation with Madhur, we explore the super interesting work he’s doing at the intersection of autonomous driving, ML/AI, and Motorsports, where he’s teaching self-driving cars how to drive in an agile manner. We talk through the differences between traditional...

Today we continue our AI Innovation series joined by Microsoft’s Chief Scientific Officer, Eric Horvitz.  In our conversation with Eric, we explore his tenure as AAAI president and his focus on the future of AI and its ethical implications, the scope of the study on the topic, and how drastically the AI and machine learning landscape has changed since 2009. We also discuss Eric’s role at Microsoft...

Today we’re joined by Parvez Ahammad, head of data science applied research at LinkedIn. In our conversation, Parvez shares his interesting take on organizing principles for his organization, starting with how data science teams are broadly organized at LinkedIn. We explore how they ensure time investments on long-term projects are managed, how to identify products that can help in a cross-cutting...

Today we’re joined Katherine J. Kuchenbecker, director at the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems and of the haptic intelligence department.  In our conversation, we explore Katherine’s research interests, which lie at the intersection of haptics (physical interaction with the world) and machine learning, introducing us to the concept of “haptic intelligence.” We discuss how ML, mainly co...

Today we continue our coverage of the AWS ML Summit joined by Chris Fregly, a principal developer advocate at AWS, and Antje Barth, a senior developer advocate at AWS.  In our conversation with Chris and Antje, we explore their roles as community builders prior to, and since, joining AWS, as well as their recently released book Data Science on AWS. In the book, Chris and Antje demonstrate how to r...

Today we’re joined by Ziad Asghar, vice president of product management for snapdragon technologies & roadmap at Qualcomm Technologies.  We begin our conversation with Ziad exploring the symbiosis between 5G and AI and what is enabling developers to take full advantage of AI on mobile devices. We also discuss the balance of product evolution and incorporating research concepts, and the evolution o...

Today we’re joined by Nir Bar-Lev, co-founder and CEO of ClearML. In our conversation with Nir, we explore how his view of the wide vs deep machine learning platforms paradox has changed and evolved over time, how companies should think about building vs buying and integration, and his thoughts on why experiment management has become an automatic buy, be it open source or otherwise.  We also discu...

Today we’re joined by Alex Smola, Vice President and Distinguished Scientist at AWS AI. We had the pleasure to catch up with Alex prior to the upcoming AWS Machine Learning Summit, and we covered a TON of ground in the conversation. We start by focusing on his research in the domain of deep learning on graphs, including a few examples showcasing its function, and an interesting discussion around t...

Today we’re joined by Sean Taylor, Staff Data Scientist at Lyft Rideshare Labs. We cover a lot of ground with Sean, starting with his recent decision to step away from his previous role as the lab director to take a more hands-on role, and what inspired that change. We also discuss his research at Rideshare Labs, where they take a more “moonshot” approach to solving the typical problems like forec...

Today we’re joined by Jabran Zahid, a Senior Researcher at Microsoft Research. In our conversation with Jabran, we explore their recent endeavor into the complete mapping of which T-cells bind to which antigens through the Antigen Map Project. We discuss how Jabran’s background in astrophysics and cosmology has translated to his current work in immunology and biology, the origins of the antigen ma...

Today we conclude our 2021 ICLR coverage joined by Konstantin Rusch, a PhD Student at ETH Zurich. In our conversation with Konstantin, we explore his recent papers, titled coRNN and uniCORNN respectively, which focus on a novel architecture of recurrent neural networks for learning long-time dependencies. We explore the inspiration he drew from neuroscience when tackling this problem, how the perf...

Today we continue our ICLR ‘21 series joined by Allyson Ettinger, an Assistant Professor at the University of Chicago.  One of our favorite recurring conversations on the podcast is the two-way street that lies between machine learning and neuroscience, which Allyson explores through the modeling of cognitive processes that pertain to language. In our conversation, we discuss how she approaches as...

Today we kick off our ICLR 2021 coverage joined by Roberto Bondesan, an AI Researcher at Qualcomm.  In our conversation with Roberto, we explore his paper Probabilistic Numeric Convolutional Neural Networks, which represents features as Gaussian processes, providing a probabilistic description of discretization error. We discuss some of the other work the team at Qualcomm presented at the conferen...

Today we’re joined by Huiji Gao, a Senior Engineering Manager of Machine Learning and AI at LinkedIn.  In our conversation with Huiji, we dig into his interest in building NLP tools and systems, including a recent open-source project called DeText, a framework for generating models for ranking classification and language generation. We explore the motivation behind DeText, the landscape at LinkedI...

Today we’re joined by Jacqueline Nolis, Head of Data Science at Saturn Cloud, and co-host of the Build a Career in Data Science Podcast.  You might remember Jacqueline from our Advancing Your Data Science Career During the Pandemic panel, where she shared her experience trying to navigate the suddenly hectic data science job market. Now, a year removed from that panel, we explore her book on data...

Today we’re joined by Irene Chen, a Ph. D. student at MIT.  Irene’s research is focused on developing new machine learning methods specifically for healthcare, through the lens of questions of equity and inclusion. In our conversation, we explore some of the various projects that Irene has worked on, including an early detection program for intimate partner violence.  We also discuss how she think...

Today we’re joined by Mark Riedl, a Professor in the School of Interactive Computing at Georgia Tech. In our conversation with Mark, we explore his work building AI storytelling systems, mainly those that try and predict what listeners think will happen next in a story and how he brings together many different threads of ML/AI together to solve these problems. We discuss how the theory of mind is...

Today we’re joined by Jamie Macbeth, an assistant professor in the department of computer science at Smith College.  In our conversation with Jamie, we explore his work at the intersection of cognitive systems and natural language understanding, and how to use AI as a vehicle for better understanding human intelligence. We discuss the tie that binds these domains together, if the tasks are the sam...

Today we’re joined by Pieter Abbeel, a Professor at UC Berkeley, co-Director of the Berkeley AI Research Lab (BAIR), as well as Co-founder and Chief Scientist at Covariant. In our conversation with Pieter, we cover a ton of ground, starting with the specific goals and tasks of his work at Covariant, the shift in needs for industrial AI application and robots, if his experience solving real-world p...

Today we’re joined by Abhishek Thakur, a machine learning engineer at Hugging Face, and the world’s first Quadruple Kaggle Grandmaster! In our conversation with Abhishek, we explore his Kaggle journey, including how his approach to competitions has evolved over time, what resources he used to prepare for his transition to a full-time practitioner, and the most important lessons he’s learned along...

Today we’re joined by Saqib Shaikh, a Software Engineer at Microsoft, and the lead for the Seeing AI Project. In our conversation with Saqib, we explore the Seeing AI app, an app “that narrates the world around you.” We discuss the various technologies and use cases for the app, and how it has evolved since the inception of the project, how the technology landscape supports projects like this one,...

Today we’re joined by Jelani Nelson, a professor in the Theory Group at UC Berkeley. In our conversation with Jelani, we explore his research in computational theory, where he focuses on building streaming and sketching algorithms, random projections, and dimensionality reduction. We discuss how Jelani thinks about the balance between the innovation of new algorithms and the performance of existin...