NVIDIA AI Podcast

National Pothole Day is Jan. 15. Its timing is no accident. All over the Northern hemisphere, potholes are at their suspension-wrecking, spine-shaking worst this month. Thanks to AI, one startup is working all year long to alleviate this menace. Benjamin Schmidt, president and co-founder of RoadBotics, is using the tech to pave the way to better roads.

Spell, founded by Serkan Piantino, is making machine learning as easy as ABC. Piantino, CEO of the New York-based startup and former director of engineering for Facebook AI Research, explained to AI Podcast host Noah Kravitz how he’s bringing compute power to those that don’t have easy access to GPU clusters.

You can’t have an AI podcast and not interview someone using AI to make podcasts better. That’s why we reached out to serial entrepreneur Andrew Mason to talk to him about what he’s doing now. His company, Descript Podcast Studio, uses AI, natural language processing and automatic speech synthesis to make podcast editing easier and more collaborative.

At Oracle, customer service chatbots use conversational AI to respond to consumers with more speed and complexity. Suhas Uliyar, vice president of bots, AI and mobile product management at Oracle, stopped by to talk to AI Podcast host Noah Kravitz about how the newest wave of conversational AI can keep up with the nuances of human conversation.

Doina Precup is applying Romanian wisdom to the gender gap in the fields of AI and computer science.

The associate professor at McGill University and research team lead at AI startup DeepMind spoke with AI Podcast host Noah Kravitz about her personal experiences, along with the AI4Good Lab she co-founded to give women more access to machine learning training.

Growing up in Romania, Precup attended a high school that specialized in computer science and a technical university. She didn’t experience gender disparity in these learning environments.

“If anything, programming was considered a very good job for women, because you did not need to be working in the fields,” she explained.

It made the gap in Canadian universities and companies even more noticeable. At McGill, Precup saw that female students were hesitant to speak up or pursue graduate studies.

Together with Angelique Mannella, CEO of AM Consulting and an Amazon employee, Precup was inspired to start the AI4Good Lab in 2017.

When your appliances break, the last thing you want to do is spend an hour on the phone trying to reach a customer service representative.

Using computer vision, Drishyam.AI is eliminating service lines to help consumers more quickly.

Satish Mandalika, the CEO and founder of the deep learning-based image recognition platform, spoke with AI Podcast host Noah Kravitz about the company.

“Customer support is ripe for disruption,” Mandalika said. Drishyam.AI is changing the game by giving customers an app that they use to take a picture of the product they need help with at any time of day or night, rather than calling a help line.

Using computer vision, Drishyam.AI analyzes the issue and communicates directly with manufacturers, rather than going through retail outlets. This is more efficient because a product’s lifetime warranty is usually held by the company that made it, rather than the stores selling it like Home Depot and Lowe’s.

Though creating an autonomous robot that can tidy a room seems like enough of an achievement, Tokyo-based Preferred Networks goes one step further. By integrating natural language processing (NLP) into their technology, their robots respond to commands and adjust their actions. Jun Hatori, a software engineer at Preferred Networks, stopped to talk with AI Podcast host Noah Kravitz about the company’s latest developments.

AI is still young, but software is available to help even relatively unsophisticated users harness it. That’s according to Ian Buck, general manager of NVIDIA’s accelerated computing group, who shared his views in our latest AI Podcast. Buck, who helped lay the foundation for GPU computing as a Stanford doctoral candidate, will deliver the keynote address at GTC DC on Nov. 5. To sign up for GTC DC, visit https://nvda.ws/2Jzg7T1 and use the 'GMPOD' promo code for a 20% discount.

Have you ever wondered what it takes to produce the complex imagery in films like Star Wars or Transformers? The man behind the magic, Colie Wertz, is here to explain.

Wertz is a conceptual artist and modeler who works on film, television and video games. He sat down with AI Podcast host Noah Kravitz to explain his specialty in hard modeling, in which he produces digital models of objects with hard surfaces like vehicles, robots and computers.

To make these images, Wertz has taken to using AI art tools such as GauGAN, a real-time painting web app that allows users to create realistic landscapes using generative adversarial networks.

In the future imagined by Pinar Yanardag, a postdoctoral research associate at MIT Media Lab, AI will collaborate with humans, not replace them. This is the concept behind her project, “How to Generate (Almost) Anything,” which she created with other students from the MIT Media Lab and professionals in the Boston area. Yanardag sat down with AI Podcast host Noah Kravitz to talk about this project, along with her other new creations.