Eye On A.I.

This week, I talk to Sergey Levine, one of the most prolific researchers in robot learning. We talked about developing a robot's sense of touch and about robot dreams and whether he believes we know what's happening in the field in Russia and China.

Thinking robots: that's how much of the world envisions artificial intelligence and if there is one person on the planet who understands the limitations and promise of intelligence in robots, it's Pieter Abbeel, one of the world's foremost experts on robotic learning systems. In this episode, Pieter talks about robot memories and the prospect of robots with personalities eventually assisting in the home. Listen and learn about your future.

This week I talk to the Bengio brothers, Samy and Yoshua, in their first interview together. Yoshua recently won the Turing Award with Geoff Hinton and Yann Lecun, while Samy leads a team of researchers at Google Brain. The brothers are well known to people who work in machine learning, but few know how intertwined their professional lives have been. They talked about their unconventional parents and their early collaboration on neural network research, as well as what they see as the challenges ahead.

In this week's episode, I talk to Pedro Domingos, author of the bestselling book, The Master Algorithm, which is about the ongoing effort to unify machine-learning paradigms in a single model. But the conversation was much broader than that. Pedro believes strongly that the great powers are engaged in an AI arms race with America's Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or Darpa, pitted against China's military and industrial dynamo. We also talked about the future of democracy and authoritarianism in an AI-driven world.

Resurrecting the Tower of Babel with machine learning: In this week's episode, we talk to Liang Huang, principal scientist at Baidu Research in Silicon Valley about his breakthrough in simultaneous translation technology, which promises to erase language barriers. Baidu's system can already translate speech to text with as little as a three-second delay. Soon, Liang says, the technology will translate speech to speech, enabling a future in which people from different languages can speak fluidly with each other.

In this episode of Eye on AI, I continue my review of AI research in different regions of the world with a focus on Europe. Europe, with its strong academic tradition, faces unique challenges in scientific research because of the continent's fragmentation and the weakening of the European Union. Given the growing dominance of North America and China, Europe risks being left behind. To understand what Europe is doing to avoid this, I talk to Bernhard Schölkopf and Matthias Bethge, two machine learning researchers from Tübingen, Germany, who have been working to bring machine learning research in Europe under one umbrella. I hope you find Bernhard and Matthias as interesting as I did.

In this episode of Eye on AI, I talk to Ben Rosman, who runs Africa's largest machine learning lab at the University of Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa, where he is focused on reinforcement learning. Ben has been instrumental in unifying and upgrading the continent's machine-learning capabilities in hopes of making Africa a player in the artificial intelligence revolution. If you wanted to know what's going on with AI in Africa, Ben will fill you in. I hope you find him as interesting as I did.

In this episode of Eye on AI, I talk to Julian Togelius, perhaps the most prolific researcher at the intersection of video games and artificial intelligence. Julian works on AI for games and games for AI. Some of his most significant work is in training deep neural networks to play video games and generalize what they have learned, a critical step toward artificial general intelligence. For those of you who don't understand the importance of video games to artificial intelligence research, Julian will enlighten you. For those of you who do his recent work will surprise you. I hope you find Julian as interesting as I did.

In this episode of Eye on AI, I talk to Miles Brundage, who studies the societal impacts of artificial intelligence and works on the policy team of OpenAI, the nonprofit A.I. research company founded by Elon Musk. When I spoke to Miles, he was a research fellow at the University of Oxford's Future of Humanity Institute, where he remains an associate. We talked about the policy side of AI security and whether he is optimistic that regulations can steer machine learning applications away from the nightmare scenarios popularly imagined. I hope you find Miles as interesting as I did.