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

Today we’re joined by Max Welling, Vice President of Technologies at Qualcomm Netherlands, and Professor at the University of Amsterdam. In our conversation, we explore Max’s work in neural augmentation, and how it’s being deployed. We also discuss his work with federated learning and incorporating the technology on devices to give users more control over the privacy of their personal data. Max al...

Today we're joined by Iordanis Kerenidis, Research Director CNRS Paris and Head of Quantum Algorithms at QC Ware. Iordanis was an ICML main conference Keynote speaker on the topic of Quantum ML, and we focus our conversation on his presentation, exploring the prospects and challenges of quantum machine learning, as well as the field’s history, evolution, and future. We’ll also discuss the foundati...

Today we continue our ICML series with Elaine Nsoesie, assistant professor at Boston University. In our conversation, we discuss the different ways that machine learning applications can be used to address global health issues, including infectious disease surveillance, and tracking search data for changes in health behavior in African countries. We also discuss COVID-19 epidemiology and the impor...

Today we’re joined by Hal Daume III, professor at the University of Maryland and Co-Chair of the 2020 ICML Conference. We had the pleasure of catching up with Hal ahead of this year's ICML to discuss his research at the intersection of bias, fairness, NLP, and the effects language has on machine learning models, exploring language in two categories as they appear in machine learning models and sys...

Today we’re excited to be joined by return guest Michael Bronstein, Head of Graph Machine Learning at Twitter. In our conversation, we discuss the evolution of the graph machine learning space, his new role at Twitter, and some of the research challenges he’s faced, including scalability and working with dynamic graphs. Michael also dives into his work on differential graph modules for graph CNNs,...

Today we’re excited to bring ‘The Great ML Language (Un)Debate’ to the podcast! In the latest edition of our series of live discussions, we brought together experts and enthusiasts to discuss both popular and emerging programming languages for machine learning, along with the strengths, weaknesses, and approaches offered by Clojure, JavaScript, Julia, Probabilistic Programming, Python, R, Scala, a...

Today we’re joined by Eric Topol, Director & Founder of the Scripps Research Translational Institute, and author of the book Deep Medicine. We caught up with Eric to talk through what we’ve learned about the coronavirus since it's emergence, and the role of tech in understanding and preventing the spread of the disease. We also explore the broader opportunity for medical applications of AI, the pr...

Today we’re joined by Diana Marculescu, Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at UT Austin. We caught up with Diana to discuss her work on hardware-aware machine learning. In particular, we explore her keynote, “Putting the “Machine” Back in Machine Learning: The Case for Hardware-ML Model Co-design” from CVPR 2020. We explore how her research group is focusing on making models more eff...

Today we conclude our CVPR coverage joined by Flora Tasse, Head of Computer Vision & AI Research at Streem. Flora, a keynote speaker at the AR/VR workshop, walks us through some of the interesting use cases at the intersection of AI, CV, and AR technologies, her current work and the origin of her company Selerio, which was eventually acquired by Streem, the difficulties associated with building 3D...

Today we're Julian Quiroga, a Computer Vision Team Lead at Genius Sports, to discuss his recent paper “As Seen on TV: Automatic Basketball Video Production using Gaussian-based Actionness and Game States Recognition.” We explore camera setups and angles, detection and localization of figures on the court (players, refs, and of course, the ball), and the role that deep learning plays in the process...

Today we’re taking a break from our CVPR coverage to bring you this interview with Deb Raji, a Technology Fellow at the AI Now Institute. Recently there have been quite a few major news stories in the AI community, including the self-imposed moratorium on facial recognition tech from Amazon, IBM and Microsoft. In our conversation with Deb, we dig into these stories, discussing the origins of Deb’s...

Today we’re joined by Hima Lakkaraju, an Assistant Professor at Harvard University. At CVPR, Hima was a keynote speaker at the Fair, Data-Efficient and Trusted Computer Vision Workshop, where she spoke on Understanding the Perils of Black Box Explanations. Hima talks us through her presentation, which focuses on the unreliability of explainability techniques that center perturbations, such as LIME...

We continue our CVPR coverage with today’s guest, Pavan Turaga, Associate Professor at Arizona State University. Pavan gave a keynote presentation at the Differential Geometry in CV and ML Workshop, speaking on Revisiting Invariants with Geometry and Deep Learning. We go in-depth on Pavan’s research on integrating physics-based principles into computer vision. We also discuss the context of the te...

Today we’re joined by Babak Ehteshami Bejnordi, a Research Scientist at Qualcomm. Babak is currently focused on conditional computation, which is the main driver for today’s conversation. We dig into a few papers in great detail including one from this year’s CVPR conference, Conditional Channel Gated Networks for Task-Aware Continual Learning, covering how gates are used to drive efficiency and a...

Today we’re joined by Marsal Gavalda, head of machine learning for the Commerce platform at Square, where he manages the development of machine learning for various tools and platforms, including marketing, appointments, and above all, risk management. We explore how they manage their vast portfolio of projects, and how having an ML and technology focus at the outset of the company has contributed...

Today we’re joined by Jianxu Chen, a scientist at the Allen Institute for Cell Science. At the latest GTC conference, Jianxu presented his work on the Allen Cell Explorer Toolkit, an open-source project that allows users to do 3D segmentation of intracellular structures in fluorescence microscope images at high resolutions, making the images more accessible for data analysis. We discuss three of t...

Today we’re joined by Andreas Madsen, an independent researcher based in Denmark. While we caught up with Andreas to discuss his ICLR spotlight paper, “Neural Arithmetic Units,” we also spend time exploring his experience as an independent researcher, discussing the difficulties of working with limited resources, the importance of finding peers to collaborate with, and tempering expectations of ge...

Today we’re joined by Rumman Chowdhury, Managing Director and Global Lead of Responsible AI at Accenture. In our conversation with Rumman, we explored questions like:  • Why is now such a critical inflection point in the application of responsible AI? • How should engineers and practitioners think about AI ethics and responsible AI? • Why is AI ethics inherently personal and how can you define you...

Today we’re joined by Ana Maria Echeverri, Caroline Chavier, Hilary Mason, and Jacqueline Nolis, our guests for the recent Advancing Your Data Science Career During the Pandemic panel. In this conversation, we explore ways that Data Scientists and ML/AI practitioners can continue to advance their careers despite current challenges. Our panelists provide concrete tips, advice, and direction for tho...

Visit twimlai.com/blacklivesmatter for resources to support organizations pushing for social equity like Black Lives Matter, and groups offering relief for those jailed for exercising their rights to peaceful protest. 

Today we’re joined by Andreas Tolias, Professor of Neuroscience at Baylor College of Medicine. We caught up with Andreas to discuss his recent perspective piece, “Engineering a Less Artificial Intelligence,” which explores the shortcomings of state-of-the-art learning algorithms in comparison to the brain. The paper also offers several ideas about how neuroscience can lead the quest for better ind...

Today we’re joined by Joseph Gonzalez, Assistant Professor in the EECS department at UC Berkeley. In our conversation, we explore Joseph’s paper “Train Large, Then Compress: Rethinking Model Size for Efficient Training and Inference of Transformers,” which looks at compute-efficient training strategies for models. We discuss the two main problems being solved; 1) How can we rapidly iterate on vari...

Today we’re joined by Alpha Lee, Winton Advanced Fellow in the Department of Physics at the University of Cambridge. Our conversation centers around Alpha’s research which can be broken down into three main categories: data-driven drug discovery, material discovery, and physical analysis of machine learning. We discuss the similarities and differences between drug discovery and material science, h...

Today we’re joined by Emily M. Bender, Professor of Linguistics at the University of Washington. Our discussion covers a lot of ground, but centers on the question, "Is Linguistics Missing from NLP Research?" We explore if we would be making more progress, on more solid foundations, if more linguists were involved in NLP research, or is the progress we're making (e.g. with deep learning models lik...

Today we’re joined by Nataniel Ruiz, a PhD Student at Boston University. We caught up with Nataniel to discuss his paper “Disrupting DeepFakes: Adversarial Attacks Against Conditional Image Translation Networks and Facial Manipulation Systems.” In our conversation, we discuss the concept of this work, as well as some of the challenging parts of implementing this work, potential scenarios in which...