Eye On A.I.

A few months ago at the recent international conference on machine learning, a workshop and research paper launched a movement to use machine learning in addressing climate change. The response was huge and has given birth to the bones of an organization climate change.ai. This week I talked to David Rolnick, a postdoc at U Penn and Priya, Donti, a Phd student at Carnegie Mellon, about how the group came together and about how the organization is developing.

Automated machine-learning tools – or tools that automate the creation of machine-learning applications – are increasingly important in the current talent-scarce environment. Expensive ML engineers shouldn't spend their time doing stuff that machines can do quicker and cheaper. This week, we talk to Evan Sparks and Ameet Talwalkar, two of the founders of Determined AI, which builds tools that streamline workflows for machine-learning teams and, the company hopes, will eventually democratize AI.

This week, I talk to Brendan McCord, who wrote the Pentagon's AI strategy and is now a Special Government Employee at the National Security Commission on AI. Brendan talks about what he believes the US needs to do to stay competitive with China and promote an alternative vision of AI-powered security and prosperity to the world.

This week I enter the ‘smelliverse,’ the dimension of odors, with Alexei Koulakov, a professor at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory. Alexei uses machine learning to explore the least understood of our senses: the sense of smell. He’s working to unlock the mechanism by which we perceive odors and to classify millions of volatile molecules by their smell.

This week I talk to John Platt, a Distinguished Scientist at Google, about twin problems: finding cheap zero-carbon energy sources and mitigating global warming. John is a polymath, having discovered asteroids, helped put the touch in computer touchpads and even won an Academy Award for scientific and technical achievements in computer animation. Now, he is part of a growing movement of machine learning researchers tackling climate change.

This week we return to the world of thinking robots with Chelsea Finn, one of the youngest experts in the field, who talks about her journey, about her work in meta-learning and about lifelong learning for robots.

This week, we look at AI in India. With its massive population, fast-growing economy, English-language education and large supply of brilliant researchers and engineers, it should be competing with China and the U.S. for dominance in the space. But it is not. I talk to Partha Talukdar, a professor at the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore, about the challenges that have kept India from realizing its AI potential.

This week I talk to Trae Stephens and Brian Schimpf from Anduril Industries, an AI defense contractor, about the current state of AI research and deployment for national security, including how the US stacks up against China. We also talked about the resistance among US engineers to work on defense applications and whether that hobbles the US in the global AI arms race.

This week, I talk to Ken Church, a pioneer in Natural Language Processing, whose use of statistical models on part of speech tagging revolutionized the field and is what makes automatic dictation and machine translation so popular today. We talked about his early days at MIT, about explainable AI and about how the Holy See played a role in his probabilistic approach to NLP.