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

I think you’re really going to enjoy today’s show. Our guest this week is Dominique Simmons, Applied research Scientist at AI tools vendor Dimensional Mechanics. Dominique brings an interesting background in Cognitive Psychology and psycholinguistics to her work and research in AI and, well, to this podcast. In our conversation, we cover the implications of cognitive psychology for neural networks...

Today we bring you our final interview from backstage at the NYU FutureLabs AI Summit. Our guest this week is Matt Zeiler. Matt graduated from the University of Toronto where he worked with deep learning researcher Geoffrey Hinton and went on to earn his PhD in machine learning at NYU, home of Yann Lecun. In 2013 Matt’s founded Clarifai, a startup whose cloud-based visual recognition system gives...

Today we bring you the second of three interviews we did backstage from the NYU FutureLabs AI Summit, this time with Ruchir Puri. Ruchir is the Chief Architect at IBM Watson as well as an IBM Fellow. I caught up with Ruchir after his talk on “engineering the Future of AI for Businesses”. Our conversation focused on cognition and reasoning, and we explored what these concepts represent, how enterpr...

This week's guest is Kathryn Hume. Kathryn is the President of Fast Forward Labs, which is an independent machine intelligence research company that helps organizations accelerate their data science and machine intelligence capabilities. If Fast Forward Labs sounds familiar, that's because we had their founder, Hilary Mason on a few months ago. We’ll link to that in the show notes. My discussion w...

This week my guest is Scott Stephenson. Scott is co-Founder & CEO of Deepgram, which has developed an AI-based platform for indexing and searching audio and video. Scott and I cover a ton of interesting topics including applying machine learning techniques to particle physics, his time in a lab 2 miles below the surface of the earth, applying neural networks to audio, and the Deep Learning Framewo...

This week I'm on location at NYU/ffVC AI NexusLab startup accelerator, speaking with founders from the 5 companies in the program's inaugural batch. This interview is with AlphaVertex, a FinTech startup creating a worldwide financial knowledge graph to help investors predict stock prices. The notes for this series can be found at twimlai.com/nexuslab. Thanks to Future Labs at NYU Tandon and ffVent...

This week I'm on location at NYU/ffVC AI NexusLab startup accelerator, speaking with founders from the 5 companies in the program's inaugural batch. This interview is with Behold.ai, which uses computer vision and natural language processing techniques to bring efficiencies to the world of healthcare insurance billing. The notes for this series can be found at twimlai.com/nexuslab. Thanks to Futur...

This week I'm on location at NYU/ffVC AI NexusLab startup accelerator, speaking with founders from the 5 companies in the program's inaugural batch. This interview is with Cambrian Intelligence, a company using AI to simplify the programming of industrial robots for the automotive industry. The notes for this series can be found at twimlai.com/nexuslab. Thanks to Future Labs at NYU Tandon and ffVe...

This week I'm on location at NYU/ffVC AI NexusLab startup accelerator, speaking with founders from the 5 companies in the program's inaugural batch. This interview is with Klustera, a company applying location-based intelligence and machine learning to help brands execute smarter marketing campaigns. The notes for this series can be found at twimlai.com/nexuslab. Thanks to Future Labs at NYU Tando...

This week I'm on location at NYU/ffVC AI NexusLab startup accelerator, speaking with founders from the 5 companies in the program's inaugural batch. This interview is with HelloVera, a company applying artificial intelligence to the challenge of automating customer support experiences. The notes for this series can be found at https://twimlai.com/nexuslab. Thanks to Future Labs at NYU Tandon and f...

This week my guest is Alekh Agarwal. Alekh is a researcher with Microsoft Research whose research is focused on Interactive Machine Learning. In our discussion, Alekh and I discuss various aspects of this exciting area of research such as active learning, reinforcement learning, contextual bandits and more.

This week my guest is Evan Wright, principal data scientist at cybersecurity startup Anomali. In my interview with Evan, he and I discussed about a number of topics surrounding the use of machine learning in cybersecurity. If Evan’s name sounds familiar, it’s because Evan was the winner of the O’Reilly Strata+Hadoop World ticket giveaway earlier this month. We met up at the conference last week an...

My guest this week is Stefano Ermon, Assistant Professor of Computer Science at Stanford University, and Fellow at Stanford’s Woods Institute for the Environment. Stefano and I met at the Re-Work Deep Learning Summit earlier this year, where he gave a presentation on Machine Learning for Sustainability. Stefano and I spoke about a wide range of topics, including the relationship between fundamenta...

This week my guest is Shubho Sengupta, Research Scientist at Baidu. I had the pleasure of meeting Shubho at the Rework Deep Learning Summit earlier this year, where he delivered a presentation on Systems Challenges for Deep Learning. We dig into this topic in the interview, and discuss a variety of issues including network architecture, productionalization, operationalization and hardware. The sho...

My guest this week is Dr. James McCaffrey, research engineer at Microsoft Research. James and I cover a ton of ground in this conversation, including recurrent neural nets (RNNs), convolutional neural nets (CNNs), long short term memory (LSTM) networks, residual networks (ResNets), generative adversarial networks (GANs), and more. We also discuss neural network architecture and promising alternati...

My guest this week is Brendan Frey, Professor of Engineering and Medicine at the University of Toronto and Co-Founder and CEO of the startup Deep Genomics. Brendan and I met at the Re-Work Deep Learning Summit in San Francisco last month, where he delivered a great presentation called “Reprogramming the Human Genome: Why AI is Needed.” In this podcast we discuss the application of AI to healthcare...

My guest this time is Hilary Mason. Hilary was one of the first “famous” data scientists. I remember hearing her speak back in 2011 at the Strange Loop conference in St. Louis. At the time she was Chief Scientist for bit.ly. Nowadays she’s running Fast Forward Labs, which helps organizations accelerate their data science and machine intelligence capabilities through a variety of research and consu...

My guest this time is Francisco Webber, founder and General Manager of artificial intelligence startup Cortical.io. Francisco presented at the O’Reilly AI conference on an approach to natural language understanding based on semantic representations of speech. His talk was called “AI is not a matter of strength but of intelligence.” My conversation with Francisco was a bit technical and abstract, b...

My guest this time is Pascale Fung, professor of electrical & computer engineering at Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. Pascale delivered a presentation at the recent O'Reilly AI conference titled "How to make robots empathetic to human feelings in real time," and I caught up with her after her talk to discuss teaching computers to understand and respond to human emotions. We also sp...

My guest this time is Diogo Almeida, senior data scientist at healthcare startup Enlitic. Diogo and I met at the O'Reilly AI conference, where he delivered a great presentation on in-the-trenches deep learning titled “Deep Learning: Modular in theory, inflexible in practice,” which we discuss in this interview. Diogo is also a past 1st place Kaggle competition winner, and we spend some time discus...

My guest this time is Carlos Guestrin, the Amazon professor of Machine Learning at the University of Washington. Carlos and I recorded this podcast at a conference, shortly after Apple's acquisition of his company Turi. Our focus for this podcast is the explainability of machine learning algorithms. In particular, we discuss some interesting new research published by his team at U of W. The notes...

My guest this time is Angie Hugeback, who is principal data scientist at Spare5. Spare5 helps customers generate the high-quality labeled training datasets that are so crucial to developing accurate machine learning models. In this show, Angie and I cover a ton of the real-world practicalities of generating training datasets. We talk through the challenges faced by folks that need to label trainin...

My guest this time is Joshua Bloom. Josh is professor of astronomy at the University of California, Berkeley and co-founder and Chief Technology Officer of machine learning startup Wise.io. In this wide-ranging interview you’ll learn how Josh and his research group at Berkeley pioneered the use of machine learning for the analysis of images from robotic infrared telescopes. We discuss the founding...

My guest this time is Charles Isbell, Jr., Professor and Senior Associate Dean in the College of Computing at Georgia Institute of Technology. Charles and I go back a bit… in fact he’s the first AI researcher I ever met. His research focus is what he calls “interactive artificial intelligence,” a discipline of AI focused specifically on the interactions between AIs and humans. We explore what this...

My guest this time is Xavier Amatriain. Xavier is a former researcher who went on to lead the machine learning recommendations team at Netflix, and is now the vice president of engineering at Quora, the Q&A site. We spend quite a bit of time digging into each of these experiences in the interview. Here are just a few of the things we cover in our discussion: Why Netflix invested $1 million in the...