Data Skeptic

By Kyle Polich

Technology

What's Data Skeptic about?

The Data Skeptic Podcast features interviews and discussion of topics related to data science, statistics, machine learning, artificial intelligence and the like, all from the perspective of applying critical thinking and the scientific method to evaluate the veracity of claims and efficacy of approaches.

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LAST EPISODE

Why Machines Will Never Rul...

05.29.2023

Barry Smith and Jobst Landgrebe, authors of the book “Why Machines will never Rule the World,” join us today. They discussed the limitations of AI systems in today’s world. They also shared elaborate reasons AI will struggle to attain the ...

Data Skeptic episodes:

05.29.2023 Why Machines Will Never Rule the World Barry Smith and Jobst Landgrebe, authors of the book “Why Machines will never Rule the World,” join us today. They discussed the limitations of AI systems in today’s world. They also shared elaborate reasons AI will struggle to attain the ...
05.23.2023 A Psychopathological Approach to Safety in AGI While the possibilities with AGI emergence seem great, it also calls for safety concerns. On the show, Vahid Behzadan, an Assistant Professor of Computer Science and Data Science, joins us to discuss the complexities of modeling AGIs to accurately achieve ...
05.15.2023 The NLP Community Metasurvey Julian Michael, a postdoc at the Center for Data Science, New York University, joins us today. Julian’s conversation with Kyle was centered on the NLP community metasurvey: a survey aimed at understanding expert opinions on controversial NLP issues. He shared ...
05.10.2023 Skeptical Survey Interpretation Kyle shares his own perspectives on challenges getting insight from surveys. The discussion ranges from commentary on the market research industry to specific advice for detecting disingenuous or fraudulent responses and filtering them from your analysis. Finally, he shares some ...
05.01.2023 The Gallup Poll Jeff Jones, a Senior Editor at Gallup, joins us today. His conversation with Kyle spanned a range of topics on Gallup’s poll creation process. He discussed how Gallup generates unbiased questionnaires, gets respondents, analyzes results, and everything in between.
04.25.2023 Inclusive Study Group Formation at Scale Gireeja Ranade, a University of California at Berkeley professor, speaks with us today. She presented her study on implementing inclusive study groups at scale and shared the observed student performance improvements after the intervention.
04.21.2023 The PhilPapers Survey Today, we are joined by David Bourget. David is an Associate Professor in Philosophy at Western University in London, Ontario. David is also the co-director of the PhilPapers Foundation and Director of the Center for Digital Philosophy. He joins us ...
04.10.2023 Non-Response Bias Today’s show focused on an essential part of surveys — missing values. This is typically caused by a low response rate or non-response from respondents. Yajuan Si is a Research Associate Professor at the Survey Research Center at the University ...
04.03.2023 Measuring Trust in Robots with Likert Scales We are joined by two guests today, Mariah, a Ph.D. student in the CORE Robotics Lab at Georgia Tech, and Matthew Gombolay, the Director of the CORE Robotics Lab. They both discuss practices for measuring a respondent’s perception in a ...
03.27.2023 CAREER Prediction Ever wondered what your next career would be? Today, Keyon Vafa, a computer science Ph.D. student at Columbia University, joins us to discuss his latest research on developing a machine-learning model for career prediction. Keyon extensively spoke about how the ...
03.21.2023 The Panel Study of Income Dynamics Noura Insolera, a Research Investigator with the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID), joins us to share how PSID conducts longitudinal household surveys. She also shared some interesting findings from their data exploration, particularly on the observation and trends in ...
03.14.2023 Survey Design Working Session Susan Gerbic joins Kyle to review some of the surveys Data Skeptic has launch, draft a new survey about podcast listening habits, and then review the results of that survey. You can see those results at the link below. https://survey.dataskeptic.com/survey/result/1675102237053 ...
03.06.2023 Bot Detection and Dyadic Surveys The use of social bots to fill out online surveys is becoming prevalent. Today, we speak with Sara Bybee, a postdoctoral research scholar at the University of Utah. Sara shares from her research, how she detected social bots, the strategies ...
02.20.2023 Reproducible ESP Testing Our guest today is Zoltán Kekecs, a Ph.D. holder in Behavioural Science. Zoltán highlights the problem of low replicability in journal papers and illustrates how researchers can better ensure complete replication of their research and findings. He used Bem’s experiment ...
02.13.2023 A Survey of Data Science Methodologies On the show, Iñigo Martinez, a Ph.D. student at the University of Navarra shares his survey results which investigated how data practitioners perform data science projects. He revealed the methodologies typically used by data practitioners and the success factors in ...
02.06.2023 Opinion Dynamics Models On the show today, Dino Carpentras, a post-doctoral researcher at the Computational Social Science group at ETH Zürich joins us to discuss how opinion dynamics models are built and validated. He explained how quantifying opinions is complex, and strategies to ...
01.30.2023 Casual Affective Triggers Crafting survey questions is one thing but getting your audience to fill it is yet another. On the show today, we speak with Alexander Nolte, an Associate Professor at the University of Tartu. Alexander discussed the use of Casual Affective ...
01.23.2023 Conversational Surveys Traditional surveys have straight-jacket questions to be answered, thus restricting the information that can be gotten. Today, Ziang Xiao, a Postdoc Researcher in the FATE group at Microsoft Research Montréal, talks about conversational surveys, a type of survey that asks ...
01.17.2023 Do Results Generalize for Privacy and Security Surveys Today, Jenny Tang, a Ph.D. student of societal computing at Carnegie Mellon University discusses her work on the generalization of privacy and security surveys on platforms such as Amazon MTurk and Prolific. Jenny shared the drawbacks of using such online ...
01.10.2023 4 out of 5 Data Scientists Agree This episode kicks off the new season of the show, Data Skeptic: Surveys. Linhda rejoins the show for a conversation with Kyle about her experience taking surveys and what questions she has for the season. Lastly, Kyle announces the launch ...
12.26.2022 Crowdfunded Board Games It may be intuitive to think crowdfunding a project drives its innovation and novelty, but there are no empirical studies that prove this. On the show, Johannes Wachs shares his research that sought to determine whether crowdfunding truly drives innovation. ...
12.19.2022 Russian Election Interference Effectiveness There were reports of Russia’s interference in the 2016 US elections. In today’s episode, Koustuv Saha, a researcher at Microsoft Research walks us through the effect of targeted ads for political campaigns. Using practical examples, he discusses how targeted ads ...
12.15.2022 Placement Laundering Fraud There is an unsung kind of ad fraud brewing in the ad tech space — placement laundering fraud. On the show, Jeff Kline discusses what placement laundering fraud is, how it can be identified, and possible solutions to it. Listen ...
12.12.2022 Data Clean Rooms Bosko Milekic, the Co-founder of Optable, a data collaboration platform for the media and advertising industry, joins us today. Bosko talked about the clean rooms, the technology driving data privacy during collaboration. He discussed why clean rooms are gaining widespread ...
12.05.2022 Dark Patterns in Site Design Kerstin Bongard-Blanchy is a Research Associate at the University of Luxembourg. She joins us to discuss her study that investigated dark patterns in web designs. She discussed the results, the effect of dark patterns effect on users, whether an average ...
12.03.2022 Internet Advertising Bureau Media Lab We are joined by Anthony Katsur, the CEO of IAB Tech Lab. Anthony discusses standards within the ad tech industry. He explained how IAB Tech Lab set and propagates global standards, actions to ensure compliance from advertisers, and industry trends ...
11.28.2022 Your Mouse Reveals Your Gender and Age When we navigate a webpage, it is fairly easy for our mouse movement to be tracked and collected. Today, Luis Leiva, a Professor of Computer Science discusses how these mouse tracking data can be used to predict age, gender and ...
11.21.2022 Measuring Web Search Behavior On the show, Aleksandra Urman and Mykola Makhortykh join us to discuss their work on the comparative analysis of web search behavior using web tracking data. They shared interesting results from their analysis, bordering around the user preferences for search ...
11.18.2022 StrategyQA and Big Bench Did Aristotle Use a Laptop? That's a question from the StrategyQA benchmark which highlights the stretch goals for current artificial intelligence systems. Answering a question like that requires several cognitive steps and reasoning. Constructing a dataset of similarly challenging questions ...
11.14.2022 Ad Blockers Effect on News Consumption While at first glance, the use of ad blockers drops the revenue of news publishers, this may not be completely true. On the show today, Shunyao Yan, an Assistant Professor in Marketing at Leavey School of Business, Santa Clara University, ...
11.07.2022 Your Consent is Worth 75 Euros a Year People who do not want their data tracked and shared online can pay a token for a cookie paywall. But are the websites keeping to their side of the bargain? Victor Morel, a Postdoc candidate at the Chalmers University of ...
10.31.2022 Automated Email Generation for Targeted Attacks The advancement of generative language models has been a force for good, but also for evil. On the show, Avisha Das, a post-doctoral scholar at the University of Texas Health Center, joins us to discuss how attackers use machine learning ...
10.24.2022 Tribal Marketing Peter Gloor, a Research Scientist at the MIT Center for Collective Intelligence, takes us on a new world of tribe classification. He extensively discussed the need for such classification on the internet and how he built a machine learning model ...
10.17.2022 Nano-targetted Facebook Ads
10.10.2022 Debiasing GPT-3 Job Ads We hear about the impeccable achievements of GPT-3 models, but such large generative models come with their bias. On the show today, Conrad Borchers, a Ph.D. student in Human-Computer Interaction, joins us to discuss the bias in GPT-3 for job ...
10.06.2022 ML Ops in Production Moses Guttman from Clear ML joins us to share insights about how organizations leveraging machine learning keep their programs on track. While many parallels exist between the software development life cycle (SWLC) and the machine learning development life cycle, successful ...
10.03.2022 Ad Network Tomography Data sharing in the ad tech space has largely been a black box system. While it is obvious the data is being collected, the data sharing process is obscure to users. On the show today, Maaz Bin Musa and Rishab, ...
09.26.2022 First Party Tracking Cookies When you accept cookies on a website, you cannot tell whether the cookies are used for tracking your personal data or not. Shaoor Munir’s machine learning model does that. On the show today, the Ph.D student at the University of ...
09.19.2022 The Harms of Targeted Weight Loss Ads Liza Gak, a Ph.D. student at UC Berkeley, joins us to discuss her research on harmful weight loss advertising. She discussed how weight loss ads are not fact-checked, and how they typically target the most vulnerable. She extensively discussed her ...
09.12.2022 Podcast Advertising Growing your podcast to the point of monetization is not a walk in the park. Today, Rob Walch, the VP of Podcast Relations at Libsyn talks about podcast advertising. He discussed how advertising works, how to grow your audience and ...
09.05.2022 Fairness in e-Commerce Search When we search for products in e-commerce stores, we do not care what goes on under the hood to generate the results. However, there may be an intentional algorithmic effort to gravitate us toward a particular product. On the show, ...
08.29.2022 Fraudulent Amazon Reviewers Chances are that you have bought a product online majorly because of the reviews you saw. Unfortunately, not all reviews are genuine. Today, Rajvardhan Oak shares some insight from his research on fraudulent Amazon reviews. He explained the inner workings ...
08.22.2022 Ad Targeting in Amazon Smart Speakers While we give attention to textual data on the web, many do not know the unique power of echo interactions with smart devices for ad targeting. Today, our guest, Umar Iqbal joins us to discuss his study on using Amazon ...
08.15.2022 Adwords with Unknown Budgets Rajan Udwani, an Assistant Professor at the University of California Berkeley joins us to discuss his work on AdWords with unknown budgets. He discussed the previous approaches to ad allocation, as well as his maiden approach that introduced randomization for ...
08.12.2022 ML Ops Best Practices Today, we are joined by Piotr Niedźwiedź, Founder and CEO of Neptune.ai. Piotr discusses common MLOps activities by data science teams and how they can take advantage of Neptune.ai for better experiment tracking and efficiency. Listen for more!
08.08.2022 Affiliate Marketing Rabbithole Affiliate marketing creates an opportunity for marketers to gain a commission by promoting a product or service. Cookies are typically used for tracking and the advertiser whose product or service is being featured pays the marketing only on transactions. Today's ...
08.01.2022 Monetization of Youtube Conspiracy Theorists Cameron Ballard joins us today to discuss his work around YouTube conspiracy theories. He revealed interesting observations about conspiracy theories on YouTube including how predatory ads are most common in conspiracy theory videos and how YouTube’s algorithm subtly works for ...
07.25.2022 User Perceptions of Problematic Ads Eric Zeng joins us to discuss his study around understanding bad ads and efforts that can be taken to limit bad ads online. He discussed how he and his co authors scrapped a large amount of ad data, applied a ...
07.21.2022 Political Digital Advertising Analysis NaLette Brodnax, a political scientist and an Assistant Professor in the McCourt School of Public Policy at Georgetown University joins us to discuss her work on analyzing digital advertisements for political campaigns. She used data for electoral campaigns on Facebook ...
07.18.2022 Fraud Detection in Crowdfunding Campaigns

Older episodes

Data Skeptic

What's Data Skeptic about?

Download our free app to listen on your phone

Data Skeptic episodes:

Why Machines Will Never Rule the World

A Psychopathological Approach to Safety in AGI

The NLP Community Metasurvey

Skeptical Survey Interpretation

The Gallup Poll

Inclusive Study Group Formation at Scale

The PhilPapers Survey

Non-Response Bias

Measuring Trust in Robots with Likert Scales

CAREER Prediction

The Panel Study of Income Dynamics

Survey Design Working Session

Bot Detection and Dyadic Surveys

Reproducible ESP Testing

A Survey of Data Science Methodologies

Opinion Dynamics Models

Casual Affective Triggers

Conversational Surveys

Do Results Generalize for Privacy and Security Surveys

4 out of 5 Data Scientists Agree

Crowdfunded Board Games

Russian Election Interference Effectiveness

Placement Laundering Fraud

Data Clean Rooms

Dark Patterns in Site Design

Internet Advertising Bureau Media Lab

Your Mouse Reveals Your Gender and Age

Measuring Web Search Behavior

StrategyQA and Big Bench

Ad Blockers Effect on News Consumption

Your Consent is Worth 75 Euros a Year

Automated Email Generation for Targeted Attacks

Tribal Marketing

Nano-targetted Facebook Ads

Debiasing GPT-3 Job Ads

ML Ops in Production

Ad Network Tomography

First Party Tracking Cookies

The Harms of Targeted Weight Loss Ads

Podcast Advertising

Fairness in e-Commerce Search

Fraudulent Amazon Reviewers

Ad Targeting in Amazon Smart Speakers

Adwords with Unknown Budgets

ML Ops Best Practices

Affiliate Marketing Rabbithole

Monetization of Youtube Conspiracy Theorists

User Perceptions of Problematic Ads

Political Digital Advertising Analysis

Fraud Detection in Crowdfunding Campaigns