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

Like last week’s interview with Bruno Goncalves, this week’s interview was also recorded at the last O’Reilly AI Conference back in New York in June. Also like last week’s show, this week’s is also focused on Natural Language Processing and I think you’ll enjoy it. I’m joined by Jonathan Mugan, co-founder and CEO of Deep Grammar, a company that is building a grammar checker using deep learning and...

This week i'm bringing you an interview from Bruno Goncalves, a Moore-Sloan Data Science Fellow at NYU. As you’ll hear in the interview, Bruno is a longtime listener of the podcast. We were able to connect at the NY AI conference back in June after I noted on a previous show that I was interested in learning more about word2vec. Bruno graciously agreed to come on the show and walk us through an ov...

My guest this week is Risto Miikkulainen, professor of computer science at UT-Austin and vice president of Research at Sentient Technologies. Risto came locked and loaded to discuss a topic that we've received a ton of requests for -- evolutionary algorithms. During our talk we discuss some of the things Sentient is working on in the financial services and retail fields, and we dig into the techno...

My guest this week is Jennifer Prendki. That name might sound familiar, as she was one of the great speakers from my Future of Data Summit back in May. At the time, Jennifer was senior data science manager and principal data scientist at Walmart Labs, but she's since moved on to become head of data science at Atlassian. Back at the summit, Jennifer gave an awesome talk on what she calls Data Mixol...

This week we have a very special interview to share with you! Those of you who’ve been receiving my newsletter for a while might remember that while in Switzerland last month, I had the pleasure of interviewing Jurgen Schmidhuber, in his lab IDSIA, which is the Dalle Molle Institute for Artificial Intelligence Research in Lugano, Switzerland, where he serves as Scientific Director. In addition to...

Today’s show, which concludes the first season of the Industrial AI Series, features my interview with Bonsai co-founder and CEO Mark Hammond. I sat down with Mark at Bonsai HQ a few weeks ago and we had a great discussion while I was there. We touched on a ton of subjects throughout this talk, including his starting point in Artificial intelligence, how Bonsai came about & more. Mark also describ...

Recently I had a chance to catch up with a friend and friend of the show, Josh Bloom, vice president of data & analytics at GE Digital. If you’ve been listening for a while, you already know that Josh was on the show around this time last year, just prior to the acquisition of his company Wise.io by GE Digital. It was great to catch up with Josh on his journey within GE, and the work his team is d...

This show features my interview with Drew Conway, whose Wrangle keynote could have been called “Confessions of a CIA Data Scientist.” The focus of our interview, and of Drew’s presentation, is an interesting set of observations he makes about the role of cognitive biases in data science. If your work involves making decisions or influencing behavior based on data-driven analysis--and it probably d...

The show you’re listening to features my interview with Erin Shellman. Erin is a statistician and data science manager with Zymergen, a company using robots and machine learning to engineer better microbes. If you’re wondering what exactly that means, I was too, and we talk about it in the interview. Our conversation focuses on Zymergen’s use of Apache Airflow, an open-source data management platf...

The show you’re about to listen to features my interview with Sharath Rao, Tech Lead Manager & Machine Learning Engineer at Instacart I reached out to Sharath about being on the show and was blown away when he replied that not only had he heard about the show, but that he was a fan and an avid listener. My conversation with him digs into some of the practical lessons and patterns he’s learned by b...

This week, I’m happy to bring you my interview with Calvin Seward, a research scientist with Berlin, Germany based Zalando. While our American listeners might not know the name Zalando, they’re one of the largest e-commerce companies in Europe with a focus on fashion and shoes. Calvin is a research scientist there, while also pursuing his doctorate studies at Johannes Kepler University in Linz, Au...

This week we continue our Industrial AI series with Sergey Levine, an Assistant Professor at UC Berkeley whose research focus is Deep Robotic Learning. Sergey is part of the same research team as a couple of our previous guests in this series, Chelsea Finn and Pieter Abbeel, and if the response we’ve seen to those shows is any indication, you’re going to love this episode! Sergey’s research intere...

After a brief hiatus, the Industrial AI Series is making its triumphant return! Our guest this week is Yodit Stanton, a self-described Data Nerd, and the Founder & CEO of Opensensors.io. OpenSensors.io is a real-time data exchange for IoT, that enables anyone to publish and subscribe to real time open data in order to build higher order smart systems and better understand the world around them. Ou...

My guest for the fourth show in the O'Reilly AI Series is Reza Zadeh. Reza is an adjunct professor of computational mathematics at Stanford University and founder and CEO of the startup Matroid. Reza has a background in machine translation and distributed machine learning, along with having helped build Apache Spark, and the"Who to Follow" feature on Twitter, which is based on a chapter from his P...

I talked about Intel’s acquisition of Nervana Systems on the podcast when it happened almost a year ago, so I was super excited to have an opportunity to sit down with Nervana co-founder Naveen Rao, who now leads Intel’s newly formed AI Products Group, for the first show in our O'Reilly AI series. We talked about how Intel plans to extend its leadership position in general purpose compute into the...

My guest for this third episode in the O'Reilly AI series is Ben Vigoda. Ben is the founder and CEO of Gamalon, a DARPA-funded startup working on Bayesian Program Synthesis. We dive into what exactly this means and how it enables what Ben calls idea learning in the show. Gamalon's first application structures unstructured data — input a paragraph or phrase of unstructured text and output a structu...

My guest for this second show in our O’Reilly AI series is Doug Eck of Google Brain. Doug did a keynote at the O’Reilly conference on Magenta, Google’s project for melding machine learning and the arts. Magenta’s goal is to produce open-source tools and models that help people in their personal creative processes. Doug’s research starts with using so-called “generative” machine learning models to...

My guest for this show is Rana el Kaliouby. Rana is co-founder and CEO of Affectiva. Affectiva, as Rana puts it, "is on a mission to humanize technology by bringing in artificial emotional intelligence". If you liked my conversation about Emotional AI with Pascale Fung from last year’s O’Reilly AI conference, you’re going to love this one. My conversation with Rana kind of picks up where the previ...

Our guest this week is Zornitsa Kozareva, Manager of Machine Learning with Amazon Web Services Deep Learning, where she leads a group focused on natural language processing and dialogue systems for products like Alexa and Lex, the latter of which we introduce in the podcast. We spend most of our time talking through the architecture of modern Natural Language Understanding systems, including the r...

This week we continue our series on industrial applications of machine learning and AI with a conversation with Chelsea Finn, a PhD student at UC Berkeley. Chelsea’s research is focused on machine learning for robotic perception and control. Despite being early in her career, Chelsea is an accomplished researcher with more than 14 published papers in the past 2 years, on subjects like Deep Visual...

This week our guest is Pieter Abbeel, Assistant Professor at UC Berkeley, Research Scientist at OpenAI, and Cofounder of Gradescope. Pieter has an extensive background in AI research, going way back to his days as Andrew Ng’s first PhD student at Stanford. His research today is focused on deep learning for robotics. During this conversation, Pieter and I really dig into reinforcement learning, a t...

Our first guest in the Industrial AI series is Ilia Baranov, engineering manager at Clearpath Robotics. Ilia is responsible for setting the engineering direction for all of Clearpath’s research platforms. Ilia likes to describe his role at the company as “both enabling and preventing the robot revolution.” He’s a longtime contributor to the Open Source Robotics Community and ROS, an open source ro...

This week I’ve invited my friend Ben Lorica onto the show. Ben is Chief Data Scientist for O’Reilly Media, and Program Director of Strata Data & the O'Reilly A.I. conference. Ben has worked on analytics and machine learning in the finance and retail industries, and serves as an advisor for nearly a dozen startups. In his role at O’Reilly he’s responsible for the content for 7 major conferences aro...

This week on the show my guest is Deep Varma, Vice President of Data Engineering at real estate startup Trulia. Deep has run data engineering teams in silicon valley for well over a decade, and is now responsible for the engineering efforts supporting Trulia’s Big Data Technology Platform, which encompasses everything from Data acquisition & management to Data Science & Algorithms. In the show we...

My guest on the show this week is Danny Lange, VP for Machine Learning & AI at video game technology developer Unity Technologies. Danny is well traveled in the world of ML and AI, and has had a hand in developing machine learning platforms at companies like Uber, Amazon and Microsoft. In this conversation we cover a bunch of topics, including How ML & AI are being used in gaming, the importance o...