Today's episode features Brandon Rohrer, Principal Data Scientist at iRobot. iRobot is an American robotics company that designs and builds consumer robots, including the Roomba, an AI powered autonomous robotic vacuum cleaner. Brandon is also the founder and lead instructor of an online course, "End-to-end Machine Learning", or E2EML, is a fun and very helpful learning environment focused on helping students learn the fundamental concepts in python based machine learning & AI. E2EML just hit 10,000 students around the original time of our LIVE discussion, so congratulations to Brandon on that huge achievement. If you are interested in learning or further understanding machine learning topics from basic to advanced, definitely take a look at his course, links included below.

Brandon brings with him a deep math and sciences background with graduate and PhD degrees in Mechanical Engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), as well as data science experiences from modeling plant genetics, to teaching and solving problems in big tech at Microsoft to Facebook, to helping robots do more efficient and intelligent jobs, at iRobot.

Key Takeaways:

[08:03] What Brandon does at iRobot and how he got into data science 

[12:45] The types of problems in the world, that make data science so important right now 

[16:06] What Brandon likes about difficult problems and what his framework is when approaching them 

[21:59] The difference between robotics and machine intelligence 

[25:08] Brandon’s opinions and perspectives on intelligence: narrow vs broad 

[29:43] Specific limitations to technology that Brandon thinks people and organizations should consider 

[33:44] What Brandon thinks should be done to make it easier for folks to truly democratize opportunities behind quickly evolving technologies 

[38:28] The mindset needed to explore key new concepts 

[43:15] Brandon’s fear management protocol 

[46:31] The importance of teaching robotics to children 

[50:18] What Brandon’s End-to-End Machine Learning school is all about 

Memorable Quotes:

[33:45] “One of the most radical things I can think of is to make technology education available to everyone.” 

[38:34] “We have a lot of pressure not to be wrong, not to say the dumb thing, not to make mistakes.” 

[40:48] Getting comfortable being wrong, getting comfortable making mistakes is one thing. Also, knowing that feeling lost is normal. It doesn’t mean you’re doing it wrong.” 

Resources:

Brandon Rohrer LinkedIn –  https://www.linkedin.com/in/brohrer/

End-to-end Machine Learning - https://end-to-end-machine-learning.teachable.com/p/complete-course-library-full-end-to-end-machine-learning-catalog

Brandor Rohrer Youtube Channel - https://www.youtube.com/user/BrandonRohrer

Brandon Rohrer Twitter - https://twitter.com/_brohrer_?lang=en

Japan rapidly moving toward Society 5.0:

https://hbr.org/sponsored/2020/02/how-japan-uses-ai-and-robotics-to-solve-social-issues-and-achieve-economic-growth

The Scientist in the Crib: What Early Learning Tells Us About the Mind by Alison Gopnik - https://www.amazon.com/Scientist-Crib-Early-Learning-Tells/dp/0688177883

iRobot - https://www.irobot.com/

Thank you for listening!

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