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

In the final #TWIMLfest Keynote Interview, we’re joined by Salman Khan, Founder of Khan Academy. In our conversation with Sal, we explore the amazing origin story of the academy, and how coronavirus is shaping the future of education and remote and distance learning, for better and for worse. We also explore Sal’s perspective on machine learning and AI being used broadly in education, the potentia...

In this special #TWIMLfest Keynote episode, we’re joined by Milind Tambe, Director of AI for Social Good at Google Research India, and Director of the Center for Research in Computation and Society (CRCS) at Harvard University. In our conversation, we explore Milind’s various research interests, most of which fall under the umbrella of AI for Social Impact, including his work in public health, bot...

In this special #TWIMLfest episode of the podcast, we’re joined by Jeremy Howard, Founder of Fast.ai. In our conversation with Jeremy, we discuss his career path, including his journey through the consulting world and how those experiences led him down the path to ML education, his thoughts on the current state of the machine learning adoption cycle, and if we’re at maximum capacity for deep learn...

Today we’re joined by Mike del Balso, co-Founder and CEO of Tecton.  Mike, who you might remember from our last conversation on the podcast, was a foundational member of the Uber team that created their ML platform, Michelangelo. Since his departure from the company in 2018, he has been busy building up Tecton, and their enterprise feature store.  In our conversation, Mike walks us through why he...

In this special #TWIMLfest episode, we’re joined by Suzana Ilić, a computational linguist at Causaly and founder of Machine Learning Tokyo (MLT). Suzana joined us as a keynote speaker to discuss the origins of the MLT community, but we cover a lot of ground in this conversation. We briefly discuss Suzana’s work at Causaly, touching on her experiences transitioning from linguist and domain expert t...

In this special #TWIMLfest edition of the podcast, we’re joined by Shakir Mohamed, a Senior Research Scientist at DeepMind. Shakir is also a leader of Deep Learning Indaba, a non-profit organization whose mission is to Strengthen African Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence. In our conversation with Shakir, we discuss his recent paper ‘Decolonial AI,’ the distinction between decolonizing A...

Today we’re joined by Adina Trufinescu, Principal Program Manager at Microsoft, to discuss some of the computer vision updates announced at Ignite 2020.  We focus on the technical innovations that went into their recently announced spatial analysis software, and the software’s use cases including the movement of people within spaces, distance measurements (social distancing), and more.  We also di...

Today we’re joined by Cha Zhang, a Partner Engineering Manager at Microsoft Cloud & AI.  Cha’s work at MSFT is focused on exploring ways that new technologies can be applied to optical character recognition, or OCR, pushing the boundaries of what has been seen as an otherwise ‘solved’ problem. In our conversation with Cha, we explore some of the traditional challenges of doing OCR in the wild, and...

In this special edition of the show, we discuss the various ways in which machine learning plays a role in helping businesses overcome their challenges in the food delivery space.  A few weeks ago Sam had the opportunity to moderate a panel at the Prosus AI Marketplace virtual event with Sandor Caetano of iFood, Dale Vaz of Swiggy, Nicolas Guenon of Delivery Hero, and Euro Beinat of Prosus.  In th...

Today we're joined by Jeff Gehlhaar, VP of Technology at Qualcomm, and Zahra Koochak, Staff Machine Learning Engineer at Qualcomm AI Research.  If you haven’t had a chance to listen to our first interview with Jeff, I encourage you to check it out here! In this conversation, we catch up with Jeff and Zahra to get an update on what the company has up to since our last conversation, including the Sn...

Today we’re joined by Sasha Luccioni, a Postdoctoral Researcher at the MILA Institute, and moderator of our upcoming TWIMLfest Panel, ‘Machine Learning in the Fight Against Climate Change.’  We were first introduced to Sasha’s work through her paper on ‘Visualizing The Consequences Of Climate Change Using Cycle-consistent Adversarial Networks’, and we’re excited to pick her brain about the ways ML...

Today we’re joined by Burr Settles, Research Director at Duolingo. Most would acknowledge that one of the most effective ways to learn is one on one with a tutor, and Duolingo’s main goal is to replicate that at scale. In our conversation with Burr, we dig how the business model has changed over time, the properties that make a good tutor, and how those features translate to the AI tutor they’ve b...

Today we’re joined by Artur Yakimovich, Co-Founder at Artificial Intelligence for Life Sciences and a visiting scientist in the Lab for Molecular Cell Biology at University College London. In our conversation with Artur, we explore the gulf that exists between life science researchers and the tools and applications used by computer scientists.  While Artur’s background is in viral chemistry, he ha...

Today we’re joined by Kavita Bala, the Dean of Computing and Information Science at Cornell University.  Kavita, whose research explores the overlap of computer vision and computer graphics, joined us to discuss a few of her projects, including GrokStyle, a startup that was recently acquired by Facebook and is currently being deployed across their Marketplace features. We also talk about StreetSty...

Today we’re joined by Nikos Athanasiou, Muhammed Kocabas, Ph. D. students, and Michael Black, Director of the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems.  We caught up with the group to explore their paper VIBE: Video Inference for Human Body Pose and Shape Estimation, which they submitted to CVPR 2020. In our conversation, we explore the problem that they’re trying to solve through an adversari...

Today we’re joined by Georgia Gkioxari, a research scientist at Facebook AI Research.  Georgia was hand-picked by the TWIML community to discuss her work on the recently released open-source library PyTorch3D. In our conversation, Georgia describes her experiences as a computer vision researcher prior to the 2012 deep learning explosion, and how the entire landscape has changed since then.  Georgi...

Today we’re joined by the legendary Michael I. Jordan, Distinguished Professor in the Departments of EECS and Statistics at UC Berkeley.  Michael was gracious enough to connect us all the way from Italy after being named IEEE’s 2020 John von Neumann Medal recipient. In our conversation with Michael, we explore his career path, and how his influence from other fields like philosophy shaped his path...

Today we’re joined by Sameer Singh, an assistant professor in the department of computer science at UC Irvine.  Sameer’s work centers on large-scale and interpretable machine learning applied to information extraction and natural language processing. We caught up with Sameer right after he was awarded the best paper award at ACL 2020 for his work on Beyond Accuracy: Behavioral Testing of NLP Model...

Today we’re joined by Gary Ren, a machine learning engineer for the logistics team at DoorDash.  In our conversation, we explore how machine learning powers the entire logistics ecosystem. We discuss the stages of their “marketplace,” and how using ML for optimized route planning and matching affects consumers, dashers, and merchants. We also talk through how they use traditional mathematics, clas...

Today we’re joined by Dillon Erb, Co-founder & CEO of Paperspace. We’ve followed Paperspace since their origins offering GPU-enabled compute resources to data scientists and machine learning developers, to the release of their Jupyter-based Gradient service. Our conversation with Dillon centered on the challenges that organizations face building and scaling repeatable machine learning workflows, a...

Today we’re joined by Professor of Computer Science at UC Berkeley, Dawn Song. Dawn’s research is centered at the intersection of AI, deep learning, security, and privacy. She’s currently focused on bringing these disciplines together with her startup, Oasis Labs.  In our conversation, we explore their goals of building a ‘platform for a responsible data economy,’ which would combine techniques li...

Today we’re joined by Wilka Carvalho, a PhD student at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. In our conversation, we focus on his paper ‘ROMA: A Relational, Object-Model Learning Agent for Sample-Efficient Reinforcement Learning.’ In the paper, Wilka explores the challenge of object interaction tasks, focusing on every day, in-home functions. We discuss how he’s addressing the challenge of ‘objec...

Today we bring you the latest Discussion Series: The Model Explainability Forum. Our group of experts and researchers explore the current state of explainability and discuss the key emerging ideas shaping the field. Each guest shares their unique perspective and contributions to thinking about model explainability in a practical way. We explore concepts like stakeholder-driven explainability, adve...

Today we’re joined by Johannes Eichstaedt, an Assistant Professor of Psychology at Stanford University. In our conversation, we explore how Johannes applies his physics background to a career as a computational social scientist, some of the major patterns in the data that emerged over the first few months of lockdown, including mental health, social norms, and political patterns. We also explore h...

Today we’re joined by Devi Parikh, Associate Professor at the School of Interactive Computing at Georgia Tech, and research scientist at Facebook AI Research (FAIR). In our conversation, we touch on Devi’s definition of creativity, explore multiple ways that AI could impact the creative process for artists, and help humans become more creative. We investigate tools like casual creator for preferen...