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

Today we’re joined by Sherri Rose, Associate Professor at Harvard Medical School. We cover a lot of ground in our conversation, including the intersection of her research with the current COVID-19 pandemic, the importance of quality in datasets and rigor when publishing papers, and the pitfalls of using causal inference. We also touch on Sherri’s work in algorithmic fairness, the shift she’s seen...

Today we’re joined by Lukas Biewald, founder and CEO of Weights & Biases, to discuss their new tool Artifacts, an end to end pipeline tracker. In our conversation, we explore Artifacts’ place in the broader machine learning tooling ecosystem through the lens of our eBook “The definitive guide to ML Platforms” and how it fits with the W&B model management platform. We discuss also discuss what exac...

Today we’re joined Richard Socher, Chief Scientist and Executive VP at Salesforce. Richard and his team have published quite a few great projects lately, including CTRL: A Conditional Transformer Language Model for Controllable Generation, and ProGen, an AI Protein Generator, both of which we cover in-depth in this conversation. We also explore the balancing act between investments, product requir...

Today we’re joined by Manuela Veloso, Head of AI Research at J.P. Morgan Chase. Since moving from CMU to JP Morgan Chase, Manuela and her team established a set of seven lofty research goals. In this conversation we focus on the first three: building AI systems to eradicate financial crime, safely liberate data, and perfect client experience. We also explore Manuela’s background, including her tim...

In this discussion, we explore how data scientists and ML/AI practitioners can responsibly contribute to the fight against coronavirus and COVID-19. Four experts: Rex Douglass, Rob Munro, Lea Shanley, and Gigi Yuen-Reed shared a ton of valuable insight on the best ways to get involved. We've gathered all the resources that our panelists discussed during the conversation, you can find those at twim...

Today we’re joined by Aleksander Madry, Faculty in the MIT EECS Department, to discuss his paper “Adversarial Examples Are Not Bugs, They Are Features.” In our conversation, we talk through what we expect these systems to do, vs what they’re actually doing, if we’re able to characterize these patterns, and what makes them compelling, and if the insights from the paper will help inform opinions on...

Today we’re joined by Ben Green, PhD Candidate at Harvard and Research Fellow at the AI Now Institute at NYU. Ben’s research is focused on the social and policy impacts of data science, with a focus on algorithmic fairness and the criminal justice system. We discuss his paper ‘Good' Isn't Good Enough,’ which explores the 2 things he feels are missing from data science and machine learning research...

Today we’re joined by Risto Miikkulainen, Associate VP of Evolutionary AI at Cognizant AI. Risto joined us back on episode #47 to discuss evolutionary algorithms, and today we get an update on the latest on the topic. In our conversation, we discuss use cases for evolutionary AI and the latest approaches to deploying evolutionary models. We also explore his paper “Better Future through AI: Avoidin...

Today we’re super excited to share our recent conversation with Quoc Le, a research scientist at Google. Quoc joins us to discuss his work on Google’s AutoML Zero, semi-supervised learning, and the development of Meena, the multi-turn conversational chatbot. This was a really fun conversation, so much so that we decided to release the video! April 16th at 12 pm PT, Quoc and Sam will premiere the v...

Today we’re joined by return guest Karim Beguir, Co-Founder and CEO of InstaDeep. In our conversation, we chat with Karim about InstaDeep’s new offering, DeepPCB, an end-to-end platform for automated circuit board design. We discuss challenges and problems with some of the original iterations of auto-routers, how Karim defines circuit board “complexity,” the differences between reinforcement learn...

Today we’re joined by David Duvenaud, Assistant Professor at the University of Toronto, to discuss his research on Neural Ordinary Differential Equations, a type of continuous-depth neural network. In our conversation, we talk through a few of David’s papers on the subject. We discuss the problem that David is trying to solve with this research, the potential that ODEs have to replace “the backbon...

Today we’re joined by Sharad Goel, Assistant Professor at Stanford. Sharad, who also has appointments in the computer science, sociology, and law departments, has spent recent years focused on applying ML to understanding and improving public policy. In our conversation, we discuss Sharad’s extensive work on discriminatory policing, and The Stanford Open Policing Project. We also dig into Sharad’s...

Today we’re joined by Cathy Wu, Assistant Professor at MIT. We had the pleasure of catching up with Cathy to discuss her work applying RL to mixed autonomy traffic, specifically, understanding the potential impact autonomous vehicles would have on various mixed-autonomy scenarios. To better understand this, Cathy built multiple RL simulations, including a track, intersection, and merge scenarios....

Today we’re joined by one of, if not the most cited computer scientist in the world, Yoshua Bengio, Professor at the University of Montreal and the Founder and Scientific Director of MILA. We caught up with Yoshua to explore his work on consciousness, including how Yoshua defines consciousness, his paper “The Consciousness Prior,” as well as his current endeavor in building a COVID-19 tracing appl...

Today we’re joined by Josh Tobin, Co-Organizer of the machine learning training program Full Stack Deep Learning. We had the pleasure of sitting down with Josh prior to his presentation of his paper Geometry-Aware Neural Rendering at NeurIPS. Josh's goal is to develop implicit scene understanding, building upon Deepmind's Neural scene representation and rendering work. We discuss challenges, the v...

Today we’re joined by Ken Goldberg, professor of engineering at UC Berkeley, focused on robotic learning. In our conversation with Ken, we chat about some of the challenges that arise when working on robotic grasping, including uncertainty in perception, control, and physics. We also discuss his view on the role of physics in robotic learning, and his thoughts on potential robot use cases, from th...

Today we’re joined by Stefan Lee, an assistant professor at Oregon State University. In our conversation, we focus on his paper ViLBERT: Pretraining Task-Agnostic Visiolinguistic Representations for Vision-and-Language Tasks. We discuss the development and training process for this model, the adaptation of the training process to incorporate additional visual information to BERT models, where this...

Today we’re joined by Jürgen Schmidhuber, Co-Founder and Chief Scientist of NNAISENSE, the Scientific Director at IDSIA, as well as a Professor of AI at USI and SUPSI in Switzerland. Jürgen’s lab is well known for creating the Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) network, and in this conversation, we discuss some of the recent research coming out of his lab, namely Upside-Down Reinforcement Learning.

Beidi Chen is part of the team that developed a cheaper, algorithmic, CPU alternative to state-of-the-art GPU machines. They presented their findings at NeurIPS 2019 and have since gained a lot of attention for their paper, SLIDE: In Defense of Smart Algorithms Over Hardware Acceleration for Large-Scale Deep Learning Systems. Beidi shares how the team took a new look at deep learning with the case...

Today we're joined by Sergey Levine, an Assistant Professor at UC Berkeley. We last heard from Sergey back in 2017, where we explored Deep Robotic Learning. Sergey and his lab’s recent efforts have been focused on contributing to a future where machines can be “out there in the real world, learning continuously through their own experience.” We caught up with Sergey at NeurIPS 2019, where Sergey a...

Imagine spending years learning ML from the ground up, from its theoretical foundations, but still feeling like you didn’t really know how to apply it. That’s where David Odaibo found himself in 2015, after the second year of his PhD. David’s solution was Kaggle, a popular platform for data science competitions. Fast forward four years, and David is now a Kaggle Grandmaster, the highest designatio...

Predicting the future of science, particularly physics, is the task that Matteo Chinazzi, an associate research scientist at Northeastern University focused on in his paper Mapping the Physics Research Space: a Machine Learning Approach. In addition to predicting the trajectory of physics research, Matteo is also active in the computational epidemiology field. His work in that area involves buildi...

The unfortunate reality is that many of the most commonly used machine learning metrics don't account for the complex trade-offs that come with real-world decision making. This is one of the challenges that Sanmi Koyejo, assistant professor at the University of Illinois, has dedicated his research to address. Sanmi applies his background in cognitive science, probabilistic modeling, and Bayesian i...

Today we’re joined by Ilias Diakonikolas, faculty in the CS department at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and author of the paper Distribution-Independent PAC Learning of Halfspaces with Massart Noise, recipient of the NeurIPS 2019 Outstanding Paper award. The paper is regarded as the first progress made around distribution-independent learning with noise since the 80s. In our conversation, w...

Today we’re joined by Kamran Khan, founder & CEO of BlueDot, and professor of medicine and public health at the University of Toronto. BlueDot has been the recipient of a lot of attention for being the first to publicly warn about the coronavirus that started in Wuhan. How did the company’s system of algorithms and data processing techniques help flag the potential dangers of the disease? In our c...