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

Today we’re joined by Dan Schrider, assistant professor in the department of genetics at UNC Chapel Hill. My discussion with Dan starts with an overview of population genomics, looking into his application of ML in the field. We then dig into Dan’s paper “The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Convolutional Neural Networks in Population Genetic Inference,” which examines the idea that CNNs are capable...

Today we’re joined by Rob Walker, Vice President of Decision Management at Pegasystems. Rob joined us back in episode 127 to discuss “Hyperpersonalizing the customer experience.” Today, he’s back for a discussion about the role of empathy in AI systems. In our conversation, we dig into the role empathy plays in consumer-facing human-AI interactions, the differences between empathy and ethics, and...

Today we’re joined by Tom Szumowski, Data Scientist at URBN, parent company of Urban Outfitters and other consumer fashion brands. Tom and I caught up to discuss his project “Exploring Custom Vision Services for Automated Fashion Product Attribution.” We look at the process Tom and his team took to build custom attribution models, and the results of their evaluation of various custom vision APIs f...

Today we’re joined by Peter Wittek, Assistant Professor at the University of Toronto working on quantum-enhanced machine learning and the application of high-performance learning algorithms. In our conversation, we discuss the current state of quantum computing, a look ahead to what the next 20 years of quantum computing might hold, and how current quantum computers are flawed. We then dive into o...

In this special bonus episode of the podcast, I’m joined by Ewin Tang, a PhD student in the Theoretical Computer Science group at the University of Washington. In our conversation, Ewin and I dig into her paper “A quantum-inspired classical algorithm for recommendation systems,” which took the quantum computing community by storm last summer. We haven’t called out a Nerd-Alert interview in a long...

Today we're joined by Alfredo Luque, a software engineer on the machine infrastructure team at Airbnb. If you’re interested in AI Platforms and ML infrastructure, you probably remember my interview with Airbnb’s Atul Kale, in which we discussed their Bighead platform. In my conversation with Alfredo, we dig a bit deeper into Bighead’s support for TensorFlow, discuss a recent image categorization c...

Today we’re joined by Elena Nieddu, Phd Student at Roma Tre University, who presented on her project “In Codice Ratio” at the TF Dev Summit. In our conversation, Elena provides an overview of the project, which aims to annotate and transcribe Vatican secret archive documents via machine learning. We discuss the many challenges associated with transcribing this vast archive of handwritten documents...

Today we're joined by Paige Bailey, TensorFlow developer advocate at Google, to discuss the TensorFlow 2.0 alpha release. Paige and I talk through the latest TensorFlow updates, including the evolution of the TensorFlow APIs and the role of eager mode, tf.keras and tf.function, the evolution of TensorFlow for Swift and its inclusion in the new fast.ai course, new updates to TFX (or TensorFlow Exte...

Today we’re joined by Andrew Trask, PhD student at the University of Oxford and Leader of the OpenMined Project, an open-source community focused on researching, developing, and promoting tools for secure, privacy-preserving, value-aligned artificial intelligence. We dig into why OpenMined is important, exploring some of the basic research and technologies supporting Private, Decentralized Data Sc...

Today we’re joined by Jos Van Der Westhuizen, PhD student in Engineering at Cambridge University. Jos’ research focuses on applying LSTMs, or Long Short-Term Memory neural networks, to biological data for various tasks. In our conversation, we discuss his paper "The unreasonable effectiveness of the forget gate," in which he explores the various “gates” that make up an LSTM module and the general...

Today we’re joined by Andrew Guldman, VP of Product Engineering and R&D at Fluid to discuss Fluid XPS, a user experience built to help the casual shopper decide on the best product choices during online retail interactions. We specifically discuss its origins as a product to assist outerwear retailer The North Face. In our conversation, we discuss their use of heat-sink algorithms and graph databa...

Today we’re joined by Kevin Tran, PhD student at Carnegie Mellon University. In our conversation, we explore the challenges surrounding the creation of renewable energy fuel cells, which is discussed in his recent Nature paper “Active learning across intermetallics to guide discovery of electrocatalysts for CO2 reduction and H2 evolution.” The AI Conference is returning to New York in April and we...

Today we’re joined by Aydogan Ozcan, Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at UCLA, exploring his group's research into the intersection of deep learning and optics, holography and computational imaging. We specifically look at a really interesting project to create all-optical neural networks which work based on diffraction, where the printed pixels of the network are analogous to neur...

Today we’re joined by Hema Raghavan and Scott Meyer of LinkedIn to discuss the graph database and machine learning systems that power LinkedIn features such as “People You May Know” and second-degree connections. Hema shares her insight into the motivations for LinkedIn’s use of graph-based models and some of the challenges surrounding using graphical models at LinkedIn’s scale, while Scott detail...

Today we conclude our Black in AI series with Sicelukwanda Zwane, a masters student at the University of Witwatersrand and graduate research assistant at the CSIR, who presented on “Safer Exploration in Deep Reinforcement Learning using Action Priors” at the workshop. In our conversation, we discuss what “safer exploration” means in this sense, the difference between this work and other techniques...

In the inaugural TWiML Live, Sam Charrington is joined by Amanda Askell (OpenAI), Anima Anandkumar (NVIDIA/CalTech), Miles Brundage (OpenAI), Robert Munro (Lilt), and Stephen Merity to discuss the controversial recent release of the OpenAI GPT-2 Language Model. We cover the basics like what language models are and why they’re important, and why this announcement caused such a stir, and dig deep in...

Today we present the final episode in our AI for the Benefit of Society series, in which we’re joined by Mira Lane, Partner Director for Ethics and Society at Microsoft. Mira and I focus our conversation on the role of culture and human-centered design in AI. We discuss how Mira defines human-centered design, its connections to culture and responsible innovation, and how these ideas can be scalabl...

Today we’re joined by Hanna Wallach, a Principal Researcher at Microsoft Research. Hanna and I really dig into how bias and a lack of interpretability and transparency show up across ML. We discuss the role that human biases, even those that are inadvertent, play in tainting data, and whether deployment of “fair” ML models can actually be achieved in practice, and much more. Hanna points us to a T...

In this episode, we’re joined by Peter Lee, Corporate Vice President at Microsoft Research responsible for the company’s healthcare initiatives. Peter and I met back at Microsoft Ignite, where he gave me some really interesting takes on AI development in China, which is linked in the show notes. This conversation centers around impact areas Peter sees for AI in healthcare, namely diagnostics and t...

Today, we're joined by Justice Amoh Jr., a Ph. D. student at Dartmouth’s Thayer School of Engineering. Justice presented his work on “An Optimized Recurrent Unit for Ultra-Low Power Acoustic Event Detection.” In our conversation, we discuss his goal of bringing low cost, high-efficiency wearables to market for monitoring asthma. We explore the challenges of using classical machine learning models...

Today, we continue our Black in AI series with Alvin Grissom II, Assistant Professor of Computer Science at Ursinus College. In our conversation, we dive into the paper he presented at the workshop, “Pathologies of Neural Models Make Interpretations Difficult.” We talk through some of the “pathological behaviors” he identified in the paper, how we can better understand the overconfidence of traine...

Today we’re joined by Lucas Joppa, Chief Environmental Officer at Microsoft and Zach Parisa, Co-founder and president of Silvia Terra, a Microsoft AI for Earth grantee. In our conversation, we explore the ways that ML & AI can be used to advance our understanding of forests and other ecosystems, supporting conservation efforts. We discuss how Silvia Terra uses computer vision and data from a wide...

Today we’re joined by Wendy Chisholm, a principal accessibility architect at Microsoft, and one of the chief proponents of the AI for Accessibility program, which extends grants to AI-powered accessibility projects the areas of Employment, Daily Life, and Communication & Connection. In our conversation, we discuss the intersection of AI and accessibility, the lasting impact that innovation in AI c...

Today we're joined by Justin Spelhaug, General Manager of Technology for Social Impact at Microsoft. In our conversation, we discuss the company’s efforts in AI for Humanitarian Action, covering Microsoft’s overall approach to technology for social impact, how his group helps mission-driven organizations best leverage technologies like AI, and how AI is being used at places like the World Bank, Op...

Today, in the first episode of our Black in AI series, we’re joined by Randi Williams, PhD student at the MIT Media Lab. At the Black in AI workshop Randi presented her research on Popbots: A Early Childhood AI Curriculum, which is geared towards teaching preschoolers the fundamentals of artificial intelligence. In our conversation, we discuss the origins of the project, the three AI concepts that...