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

Today we’re joined by Tim Jurka, Head of Feed AI at LinkedIn. In our conversation, Tim describes the holistic optimization of the feed and we discuss some of the interesting technical and business challenges associated with trying to do this. We talk through some of the specific techniques used at LinkedIn like Multi-arm Bandits and Content Embeddings, and also jump into a really interesting discu...

Today we’re joined by Gary Brotman, Senior Director of Product Management at Qualcomm Technologies, Inc. Gary, who got his start in AI through music, now leads strategy and product planning for the company’s AI and ML technologies, including those that make up the Qualcomm Snapdragon mobile platforms. In our conversation, we discuss AI on mobile devices and at the edge, including popular use cases...

A few weeks ago, I made the trek to Las Vegas for the world’s biggest electronics conference, CES. In this special visual only episode, we’re going to check out some of the interesting examples of machine learning and AI that I found at the event. Check out the video at https://twimlai.com/ces2019, and be sure to hit the like and subscribe buttons and let us know how you like the show via a commen...

Today we’re joined by Vladimir Bychkovsky, Engineering Manager at Facebook, to discuss Spiral, a system they’ve developed for self-tuning high-performance infrastructure services at scale, using real-time machine learning. In our conversation, we explore how the system works, how it was developed, and how infrastructure teams at Facebook can use it to replace hand-tuned parameters set using heuris...

Today we’re joined by JJ Espinoza, former Director of Data Science at 20th Century Fox. In this talk we dig into JJ and his team’s experience building and deploying a content recommendation system from the ground up. In our conversation, we explore the design of a couple of key components of their system, the first of which processes movie scripts to make recommendations about which movies the stu...

Today we’re joined by Solon Barocas, Assistant Professor of Information Science at Cornell University. Solon and I caught up to discuss his work on model interpretability and the legal and policy implications of the use of machine learning models. In our conversation, we explore the gap between law, policy, and ML, and how to build the bridge between them, including formalizing ethical frameworks...

In the final episode of our AI Rewind series, we’re excited to have Siddha Ganju back on the show. Siddha, who is now an autonomous vehicles solutions architect at Nvidia shares her thoughts on trends in Computer Vision in 2018 and beyond. We cover her favorite CV papers of the year in areas such as neural architecture search, learning from simulation, application of CV to augmented reality, and m...

In this episode of our AI Rewind series, we introduce a new friend of the show, Simon Osindero, Staff Research Scientist at DeepMind. We discuss trends in Deep Reinforcement Learning in 2018 and beyond. We’ve packed a bunch into this show, as Simon walks us through many of the important papers and developments seen this year in areas like Imitation Learning, Unsupervised RL, Meta-learning, and mor...

In this episode of our AI Rewind series, we’ve brought back recent guest Sebastian Ruder, PhD Student at the National University of Ireland and Research Scientist at Aylien, to discuss trends in Natural Language Processing in 2018 and beyond. In our conversation we cover a bunch of interesting papers spanning topics such as pre-trained language models, common sense inference datasets and large doc...

In this episode of our AI Rewind series, we’re back with Anima Anandkumar, Bren Professor at Caltech and now Director of Machine Learning Research at NVIDIA. Anima joins us to discuss her take on trends in the broader Machine Learning field in 2018 and beyond. In our conversation, we cover not only technical breakthroughs in the field but also those around inclusivity and diversity. For this episo...

In this episode of our AI Rewind series, we’re bringing back one of your favorite guests of the year, Jeremy Howard, founder and researcher at Fast.ai. Jeremy joins us to discuss trends in Deep Learning in 2018 and beyond. We cover many of the papers, tools and techniques that have contributed to making deep learning more accessible than ever to so many developers and data scientists.

Today we close out both our NeurIPS series joined by Nando de Freitas, Team Lead & Principal Scientist at Deepmind. In our conversation, we explore his interest in understanding the brain and working towards artificial general intelligence. In particular, we dig into a couple of his team’s NeurIPS papers: “Playing hard exploration games by watching YouTube,” and “One-Shot high-fidelity imitation:...

Today we’re joined by David Spiegelhalter, Chair of Winton Center for Risk and Evidence Communication at Cambridge University and President of the Royal Statistical Society. David, an invited speaker at NeurIPS, presented on “Making Algorithms Trustworthy: What Can Statistical Science Contribute to Transparency, Explanation and Validation?”. In our conversation, we explore the nuanced difference b...

Today we’re joined by Kunle Olukotun, Professor in the department of EE and CS at Stanford University, and Chief Technologist at Sambanova Systems. Kunle was an invited speaker at NeurIPS this year, presenting on “Designing Computer Systems for Software 2.0.” In our conversation, we discuss various aspects of designing hardware systems for machine and deep learning, touching on multicore processor...

Today we conclude our Trust in AI series with this conversation with Kathryn Hume, VP of Strategy at Integrate AI. We discuss her newly released white paper “Responsible AI in the Consumer Enterprise,” which details a framework for ethical AI deployment in e-commerce companies and other consumer-facing enterprises. We look at the structure of the ethical framework she proposes, and some of the man...

Today we continue our exploration of Trust in AI with this interview with Richard Zemel, Professor in the department of Computer Science at the University of Toronto and Research Director at Vector Institute. In our conversation, Rich describes some of his work on fairness in machine learning algorithms, including how he defines both group and individual fairness and his group’s recent NeurIPS pos...

In today’s episode we’re joined by Parinaz Sobhani, Director of Machine Learning at Georgian Partners. In our conversation, Parinaz and I discuss some of the main issues falling under the “trust” umbrella, such as transparency, fairness and accountability. We also explore some of the trust-related projects she and her team at Georgian are working on, as well as some of the interesting trust and pr...

In the final episode of our re:Invent series, we're joined by Thorsten Joachims, Professor in the Department of Computer Science at Cornell University. We discuss his presentation “Unbiased Learning from Biased User Feedback,” looking at some of the inherent and introduced biases in recommender systems, and the ways to avoid them. We also discuss how inference techniques can be used to make learni...

Today we’re joined by Jinho Choi, assistant professor of computer science at Emory University. Jinho presented at the conference on ELIT, their cloud-based NLP platform. In our conversation, we discuss some of the key NLP challenges that Jinho and his group are tackling, including language parsing and character mining. We also discuss their vision for ELIT, which is to make it easy for researchers...

I’m excited to present our second annual re:Invent Roundtable Roundup. This year I’m joined by Dave McCrory, VP of Software Engineering at Wise.io at GE Digital, and Val Bercovici, Founder and CEO of Pencil Data. If you missed the news coming out of re:Invent, we cover all of AWS’ most important ML and AI announcements, including SageMaker Ground Truth, Reinforcement Learning, DeepRacer, Inferenti...

Today we’re joined by Marisa Boston, Director of Cognitive Technology in KPMG’s Cognitive Automation Lab. We caught up to discuss some of the ways that KPMG is using AI to build tools that help augment the knowledge of their teams of professionals. We discuss knowledge graphs and how they can be used to map out and relate various concepts and how they use these in conjunction with NLP tools to cre...

Today, we’re joined by Stuart Reid, Chief Scientist at NMRQL Research. NMRQL is an investment management firm that uses ML algorithms to make adaptive, unbiased, scalable, and testable trading decisions for its funds. In our conversation, Stuart and I dig into the way NMRQL uses ML and DL models to support the firm’s investment decisions. We focus on techniques for modeling non-stationary time-ser...

In this episode of our AI Platforms series, we’re joined by Daniel Jeavons, General Manager of Data Science at Shell. In our conversation, we explore the evolution of analytics and data science at Shell, discussing IoT-related applications and issues, such as inference at the edge, federated ML, and digital twins, all key considerations for the way they apply ML. We also talk about the data scienc...

In this episode of our AI Platforms series, we’re joined by Leemay Nassery, Senior Engineering Manager and head of the recommendations team at Comcast. In our conversation, Leemay and I discuss just how she and her team resurrected the Xfinity X1 recommendations platform, including the rebuilding the data pipeline, the machine learning process, and the deployment and training of their updated mode...

In this episode of our AI Platforms series, we’re joined by Bee-Chung Chen, Principal Staff Engineer and Applied Researcher at LinkedIn. Bee-Chung and I caught up to discuss LinkedIn’s internal AI automation platform, Pro-ML. Bee-Chung breaks down some of the major pieces of the pipeline, LinkedIn’s experience bringing Pro-ML to the company's developers and the role the LinkedIn AI Academy plays i...