This episode includes an interview with Aaron Roth author of The Ethical Algorithm.

Machine learning has shown a rapid expansion into every sector and industry. With increasing reliance on models and increasing stakes for the decisions of models, questions of how models actually work are becoming increasingly important to ask.

Welcome to Data Skeptic Interpretability.

In this episode, Kyle interviews Christoph Molnar about his book Interpretable Machine Learning.

Thanks to our sponsor, the Gartner Data & Analytics Summit going on in Grapevine, TX on March 23 – 26, 2020. Use discount code: dataskeptic.

Our new theme song is #5 by Big D and the Kids Table.

Incidental music by Tanuki Suit Riot.

A year in recap.

We are joined by Colin Raffel to discuss the paper "Exploring the Limits of Transfer Learning with a Unified Text-to-Text Transformer".

Seth Juarez joins us to discuss the toolbox of options available to a data scientist to jumpstart or extend their machine learning efforts.

Alex Reeves joins us to discuss some of the challenges around building a serverless, scalable, generic machine learning pipeline.  The is a technical deep dive on architecting solutions and a discussion of some of the design choices made.

Buck Woody joins Kyle to share experiences from the field and the application of the Team Data Science Process - a popular six-phase workflow for doing data science.

Thea Sommerschield joins us this week to discuss the development of Pythia - a machine learning model trained to assist in the reconstruction of ancient language text.

Kyle met up with Damian Brady at MS Ignite 2019 to discuss machine learning operations.

The modern deep learning approaches to natural language processing are voracious in their demands for large corpora to train on.  Folk wisdom estimates used to be around 100k documents were required for effective training.  The availability of broadly trained, general-purpose models like BERT has made it possible to do transfer learning to achieve novel results on much smaller corpora.

Thanks to these advancements, an NLP researcher might get value out of fewer examples since they can use the transfer learning to get a head start and focus on learning the nuances of the language specifically relevant to the task at hand.  Thus, small specialized corpora are both useful and practical to create.

In this episode, Kyle speaks with Mor Geva, lead author on the recent paper Are We Modeling the Task or the Annotator? An Investigation of Annotator Bias in Natural Language Understanding Datasets, which explores some unintended consequences of the typical procedure followed for generating corpora.

Source code for the paper available here: https://github.com/mega002/annotator_bias