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

Today we’re joined by Stevie Chancellor, an Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Minnesota. In our conversation with Stevie, we explore her work at the intersection of human-centered computing, machine learning, and high-risk mental illness behaviors. We discuss how her background in HCC helps shapes her perspective, how machine learning he...

In this episode, we’re joined by Dataiku’s Director of Data Science, Conor Jensen. In our conversation, we explore the panel he lead at TWIMLcon “AI Operationalization: Where the AI Rubber Hits the Road for the Enterprise,” discussing the ML journey of each panelist’s company, and where Dataiku fits in the equation. The complete show notes for this episode can be found at https://twimlai.com/go/47...

In this episode, we’re joined by Diego Oppenheimer, Founder and CEO of Algorithmia. In our conversation, we discuss Algorithmia’s involvement with TWIMLcon, as well as an exploration of the results of their recently conducted survey on the state of the AI market. The complete show notes for this episode can be found at twimlai.com/go/470.

In this episode, we’re joined by Santiago Giraldo, Director Of Product Marketing for Data Engineering & Machine Learning at Cloudera. In our conversation, we discuss Cloudera’s talks at TWIMLcon, as well as their various research efforts from their Fast Forward Labs arm. The complete show notes for this episode can be found at twimlai.com/sponsorseries.

In this episode, we’re joined by Paul van der Boor, Senior Director of Data Science at Prosus, to discuss his TWIMLcon experience and how they’re using ML platforms to manage machine learning at a global scale. The complete show notes for this episode can be found at twimlai.com/sponsorseries.

Today we’re joined by Emily M. Bender, Professor at the University of Washington, and AI Researcher, Margaret Mitchell.  Emily and Meg, as well as Timnit Gebru and Angelina McMillan-Major, are co-authors on the paper On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots: Can Language Models Be Too Big? 🦜. As most of you undoubtedly know by now, there has been much controversy surrounding, and fallout from, this p...

Today we’re joined by Abhishek Gupta, a PhD Student at UC Berkeley.  Abhishek, a member of the BAIR Lab, joined us to talk about his recent robotics and reinforcement learning research and interests, which focus on applying RL to real-world robotics applications. We explore the concept of reward supervision, and how to get robots to learn these reward functions from videos, and the rationale behin...

Today we’re joined by David Carmona, General Manager of Artificial Intelligence & Innovation at Microsoft.  In our conversation with David, we focus on his work on AI at Scale, an initiative focused on the change in the ways people are developing AI, driven in large part by the emergence of massive models. We explore David’s thoughts about the progression towards larger models, the focus on parame...

Today we’re joined by Melanie Mitchell, Davis Professor at the Santa Fe Institute and author of Artificial Intelligence: A Guide for Thinking Humans.  While Melanie has had a long career with a myriad of research interests, we focus on a few, complex systems and the understanding of intelligence, complexity, and her recent work on getting AI systems to make analogies. We explore examples of social...

Today we’re joined by Adriana Kovashka, an Assistant Professor at the University of Pittsburgh. In our conversation with Adriana, we explore her visual commonsense research, and how it intersects with her background in media studies. We discuss the idea of shortcuts, or faults in visual question answering data sets that appear in many SOTA results, as well as the concept of masking, a technique de...

Today we’re joined by Nishan Subedi, VP of Algorithms at Overstock.com. In our conversation with Nishan, we discuss his interesting path to MLOps and how ML/AI is used at Overstock, primarily for search/recommendations and marketing/advertisement use cases. We spend a great deal of time exploring machine learning architecture and architectural patterns, how he perceives the differences between arc...

Today we’re joined by Vered Shwartz, a Postdoctoral Researcher at both the Allen Institute for AI and the Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering at the University of Washington. In our conversation with Vered, we explore her NLP research, where she focuses on teaching machines common sense reasoning in natural language. We discuss training using GPT models and the potential use of...

Today we’re joined by returning guest and newly appointed Dean of the College of Engineering at The Ohio State University, Ayanna Howard.  Our conversation with Dr. Howard focuses on her recently released book, Sex, Race, and Robots: How to Be Human in the Age of AI, which is an extension of her research on the relationships between humans and robots. We continue to explore this relationship throu...

Today we’re joined by returning guest and newly appointed Dean of the College of Engineering at The Ohio State University, Ayanna Howard.  Our conversation with Dr. Howard focuses on her recently released book, Sex, Race, and Robots: How to Be Human in the Age of AI, which is an extension of her research on the relationships between humans and robots. We continue to explore this relationship throu...

Today we’re joined by Penousal Machado, Associate Professor and Head of the Computational Design and Visualization Lab in the Center for Informatics at the University of Coimbra.  In our conversation with Penousal, we explore his research in Evolutionary Computation, and how that work coincides with his passion for images and graphics. We also discuss the link between creativity and humanity, and...

Today we’re joined by Arul Menezes, a Distinguished Engineer at Microsoft.  Arul, a 30 year veteran of Microsoft, manages the machine translation research and products in the Azure Cognitive Services group. In our conversation, we explore the historical evolution of machine translation like breakthroughs in seq2seq and the emergence of transformer models.  We also discuss how they’re using multili...

Today we’re joined by Luna Dong, Sr. Principal Scientist at Amazon. In our conversation with Luna, we explore Amazon’s expansive product knowledge graph, and the various roles that machine learning plays throughout it. We also talk through the differences and synergies between the media and retail product knowledge graph use cases and how ML comes into play in search and recommendation use cases....

Today we’re joined by Sarah Brown, an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at the University of Rhode Island. In our conversation with Sarah, whose research focuses on Fairness in AI, we discuss why a “systems-level” approach is necessary when thinking about ethical and fairness issues in models and algorithms. We also explore Wiggum: a fairness forensics tool, which explores bias and allows fo...

Today we’re joined by Andrew Trister, Deputy Director for Digital Health Innovation at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.  In our conversation with Andrew, we explore some of the AI use cases at the foundation, with the goal of bringing “community-based” healthcare to underserved populations in the global south. We focus on COVID-19 response and improving the accuracy of malaria testing with a b...

Today we’re joined by Drago Anguelov, Distinguished Scientist and Head of Research at Waymo.  In our conversation, we explore the state of the autonomous vehicles space broadly and at Waymo, including how AV has improved in the last few years, their focus on level 4 driving, and Drago’s thoughts on the direction of the industry going forward. Drago breaks down their core ML use cases, Perception,...

Today we’re joined by Ya Xu, head of Data Science at LinkedIn, and TWIMLcon: AI Platforms 2021 Keynote Speaker. We cover a ton of ground with Ya, starting with her experiences prior to becoming Head of DS, as one of the architects of the LinkedIn Platform. We discuss her “three phases” (building, adoption, and maturation) to keep in mind when building out a platform, how to avoid “hero syndrome” e...

Today we’re joined by Jesse Engel, Staff Research Scientist at Google, working on the Magenta Project.  In our conversation with Jesse, we explore the current landscape of creativity AI, and the role Magenta plays in helping express creativity through ML and deep learning. We dig deep into their Differentiable Digital Signal Processing (DDSP) library, which “lets you combine the interpretable stru...

Today we’re joined by return guest Francisco Webber, CEO & Co-founder of Cortical.io. Francisco was originally a guest over 4 years and 400 episodes ago, where we discussed his company Cortical.io, and their unique approach to natural language processing. In this conversation, Francisco gives us an update on Cortical, including their applications and toolkit, including semantic extraction, classif...

Today we’re joined by Gurdeep Pall, Corporate Vice President at Microsoft. Gurdeep, who we had the pleasure of speaking with on his 31st anniversary at the company, has had a hand in creating quite a few influential projects, including Skype for business (and Teams) and being apart of the first team that shipped wifi as a part of a general-purpose operating system. In our conversation with Gurdeep...

Today we’re joined by Bryan Carstens, a professor in the Department of Evolution, Ecology, and Organismal Biology & Head of the Tetrapod Division in the Museum of Biological Diversity at The Ohio State University. In our conversation with Bryan, who comes from a traditional biology background, we cover a ton of ground, including a foundational layer of understanding for the vast known unknowns in...