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

Today we're joined by Gregg Willcox, Director of Research and Development at Unanimous AI. Inspired by the natural phenomenon called 'swarming', which uses the collective intelligence of a group to produce more accurate results than an individual alone, ‘Swarm AI’ was born. A game-like platform that channels the convictions of individuals to come to a consensus and using a behavioral neural networ...

Today we're joined by Gary Marcus, CEO and Founder at Robust. AI, well-known scientist, bestselling author, professor and entrepreneur. Hear Gary discuss his latest book, ‘Rebooting AI: Building Artificial Intelligence We Can Trust’, an extensive look into the current gaps, pitfalls and areas for improvement in the field of machine learning and AI. In this episode, Gary provides insight into what...

Today we're joined by Brian Burke, Analytics Specialist with the Stats & Information Group at ESPN. A former Navy pilot and lifelong football fan, Brian saw the correlation between fighter pilots and quarterbacks in the quick decisions both roles make on a regular basis. In this episode, we discuss his paper: “DeepQB: Deep Learning with Player Tracking to Quantify Quarterback Decision-Making & Per...

Today we're joined by Lotte Bransen, a Scientific Researcher at SciSports. With a background in mathematics, econometrics, and soccer, Lotte has honed her research on analytics of the game and its players, using trained models to understand the impact of mental pressure on a player’s performance. In this episode, Lotte discusses her paper, ‘Choke or Shine? Quantifying Soccer Players' Abilities to...

Today we're joined by Lukas Biewald, CEO and Co-Founder of Weights & Biases. Lukas founded the company after seeing a need for reproducibility in deep learning experiments. In this episode, we discuss his experiment tracking tool, how it works, the components that make it unique, and the collaborative culture that Lukas promotes. Listen in to how he got his start in deep learning and experiment tr...

Today we’re joined by Angela Bassa, Director of Data Science at iRobot. In our conversation, Angela and I discuss: • iRobot's re-architecture, and a look at the evolution of iRobot. • Where iRobot gets its data from and how they taxonomize data science. • The platforms and processes that have been put into place to support delivering models in production. •The role of DevOps in bringing these vari...

Today we’re joined by Olivier Bachem, a research scientist at Google AI on the Brain team. Olivier joins us to discuss his work on Google’s research football project, their foray into building a novel reinforcement learning environment. Olivier and Sam discuss what makes this environment different than other available RL environments, such as OpenAI Gym and PyGame, what other techniques they explo...

Today we’re joined by Tijmen Blankevoort, a staff engineer at Qualcomm, who leads their compression and quantization research teams. In our conversation with Tijmen we discuss:  • The ins and outs of compression and quantization of ML models, specifically NNs, • How much models can actually be compressed, and the best way to achieve compression,  • We also look at a few recent papers including “Lo...

Today we are joined by Anubhav Jain, Staff Scientist & Chemist at Lawrence Berkeley National Lab. We discuss his latest paper, ‘Unsupervised word embeddings capture latent knowledge from materials science literature’. Anubhav explains the design of a system that takes the literature and uses natural language processing to conceptualize complex material science concepts. He also discusses scientifi...

Today we are joined by Cynthia Rudin, Professor of Computer Science, Electrical and Computer Engineering, and Statistical Science at Duke University. In this episode we discuss her paper, ‘Please Stop Explaining Black Box Models for High Stakes Decisions’, and how interpretable models make for more comprehensible decisions - extremely important when dealing with human lives. Cynthia explains black...

Today we’re joined by Dr. Kate Darling, Research Specialist at the MIT Media Lab. Kate’s focus is on robot ethics, the social implication of how people treat robots and the purposeful design of robots in our daily lives. We discuss measuring empathy, the impact of robot treatment on kids behavior, the correlation between animals and robots, and why 'effective' robots aren’t always humanoid. Kate c...

Today we’re joined by Danny Stoll, Research Assistant at the University of Freiburg. Danny’s current research can be encapsulated in his latest paper, ‘Learning to Design RNA’. In this episode, Danny explains the design process through reverse engineering and how his team’s deep learning algorithm is applied to train and design sequences. We discuss transfer learning, multitask learning, ablation...

Today we’re joined by Theofanis Karayannis, Assistant Professor at the Brain Research Institute of the University of Zurich. Theo’s research is focused on brain circuit development and uses Deep Learning methods to segment the brain regions, then detect the connections around each region. He then looks at the distribution of connections that make neurological decisions in both animals and humans e...

Today we’re joined by Emma Strubell, currently a visiting scientist at Facebook AI Research. Emma’s focus is bringing state of the art NLP systems to practitioners by developing efficient and robust machine learning models. Her paper, Energy and Policy Considerations for Deep Learning in NLP, reviews carbon emissions of training neural networks despite an increase in accuracy. In this episode, we...

Today we’re joined by Zachary Lipton, Assistant Professor in the Tepper School of Business. With a theme of data interpretation, Zachary’s research is focused on machine learning in healthcare, with the goal of assisting physicians through the diagnosis and treatment process. We discuss supervised learning in the medical field, robustness under distribution shifts, ethics in machine learning syste...

Today we’re joined by Dr. Stephen Odaibo, Founder and CEO of RETINA-AI Health Inc. Stephen’s journey to machine learning and AI includes degrees in math, medicine and computer science, which led him to an ophthalmology practice before becoming an entrepreneur. In this episode we discuss his expertise in ophthalmology and engineering along with the current state of both industries that lead him to...

Today we’re joined by Rayid Ghani, Director of the Center for Data Science and Public Policy at the University of Chicago. Drawing on his range of experience, Rayid saw that while automated predictions can be helpful, they don’t always paint a full picture. The key is the relevant context when making tough decisions involving humans and their lives. We delve into the world of explainability method...

Today we’re joined by Michael Levin, Director of the Allen Discovery Institute at Tufts University. In our conversation, we talk about synthetic living machines, novel AI architectures and brain-body plasticity. Michael explains how our DNA doesn’t control everything and how the behavior of cells in living organisms can be modified and adapted. Using research on biological systems dynamic remodeli...

Today we’re joined by Batu Arisoy, Research Manager with the Vision Technologies & Solutions team at Siemens Corporate Technology. Batu’s research focus is solving limited-data computer vision problems, providing R&D for business units throughout the company. In our conversation, Batu details his group's ongoing projects, like an activity recognition project with the ONR, and their many CVPR submi...

Today we’re joined by Jeff Gehlhaar, VP of Technology and Head of AI Software Platforms at Qualcomm. Qualcomm has a hand in tons of machine learning research and hardware, and in our conversation with Jeff we discuss: • How the various training frameworks fit into the developer experience when working with their chipsets. • Examples of federated learning in the wild. • The role inference will play...

Today we’re joined by return guest Daniel Jeavons, GM of Data Science at Shell, and Adi Bhashyam, GM of Data Science at C3, who we had the pleasure of speaking to at this years C3 Transform Conference. In our conversation, we discuss: • The progress that Dan and his team has made since our last conversation, including an overview of their data platform. • Adi gives us an overview of the evolution...

Today we’re joined by Yunfan Gerry Zhang, a PhD student at UC Berkely, and an affiliate of Berkeley’s SETI research center. In our conversation, we discuss:  • Gerry's research on applying machine learning techniques to astrophysics and astronomy. • His paper “Fast Radio Burst 121102 Pulse Detection and Periodicity: A Machine Learning Approach”. • We explore the types of data sources used for this...

Today we’re joined by Laurence Watson, Co-Founder and CTO of Plentiful Energy and a former data scientist at Carbon Tracker. In our conversation, we discuss: • Carbon Tracker's goals, and their report “Nowhere to hide: Using satellite imagery to estimate the utilisation of fossil fuel power plants”. • How they are using computer vision to process satellite images of coal plants, including how the...

Today we’re joined by William Fehlman, director of data science at USAA, to discuss: • His work on topic modeling, which USAA uses in various scenarios, including member chat channels. • How their datasets are generated. • Explored methodologies of topic modeling, including latent semantic indexing, latent Dirichlet allocation, and non-negative matrix factorization. • We also explore how terms are...

Today we’re joined by Judy Gichoya an interventional radiology fellow at the Dotter Institute at Oregon Health and Science University. In our conversation, we discuss: • Judy's research on the paper “Phronesis of AI in Radiology: Superhuman meets Natural Stupidy,” reviewing the claims of “superhuman” AI performance in radiology. • Potential roles in which AI can have success in radiology, along wi...