Practical AI

While at EMNLP 2022, Daniel got a chance to sit down with an amazing group of researchers creating NLP technology that actually works for their local language communities. Just Zwennicker (Universiteit van Amsterdam) discusses his work on a machine translation system for Sranan Tongo, a creole language that is spoken in Suriname. Andiswa Bukula (SADiLaR), Rooweither Mabuya (SADiLaR), and Bonaventure Dossou (Lanfrica, Mila) discuss their work with Masakhane to strengthen and spur NLP research in African languages, for Africans, by Africans.

The group emphasized the need for more linguistically diverse NLP systems that work in scenarios of data scarcity, non-Latin scripts, rich morphology, etc. You don’t want to miss this one!

Featuring:

• Just Zwennicker – LinkedIn
• Andiswa Bukula – X
• Rooweither Mabuya – X
• Bonaventure Dossou – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, X
• Daniel Whitenack – Website, GitHub, X

Show Notes:

EMNLP 2022 papers from the guests:

• Towards a general purpose machine translation system for Sranantongo
• MasakhaNER 2.0: Africa-centric Transfer Learning for Named Entity Recognition
• AfroLM: A Self-Active Learning-based Multilingual Pretrained Language Model for 23 African Languages

Other links relevant to the discussion:

• Masakhane
• Lanfrica
• The South African Centre for Digital Language Resources (SADiLaR)

Upcoming Events: 

• Register for upcoming webinars here!

José and Ricardo joined Daniel at EMNLP 2022 to discuss state-of-the-art machine translation, the WMT shared tasks, and quality estimation. Among other things, they talk about Unbabel’s innovations in quality estimation including COMET, a neural framework for training multilingual machine translation (MT) evaluation models.

Featuring:

• Ricardo Rei – X
• José Souza – X
• Daniel Whitenack – Website, GitHub, X

Show Notes:

• Unbabel
• COMET
• The WMT workshop/ conference
• EMNLP

Upcoming Events: 

• Register for upcoming webinars here!

In this special episode, we interview some of the sponsors and teams from a recent case competition organized by Purdue University, Microsoft, INFORMS, and SIL International. 170+ teams from across the US and Canada participated in the competition, which challenged students to create AI-driven systems to caption images in three languages (Thai, Kyrgyz, and Hausa).

Featuring:

• Matthew Lanham – Website, X
• Mark Tabladillo – LinkedIn, X
• Daniel Whitenack – Website, GitHub, X

Show Notes:

• Purdue University’s Krannert School of Business
• Master the basics of Azure: AI Fundamentals
• Azure Architecture Center
• SIL International
• The bloom-captioning dataset

Books

• “Applied Machine Learning and AI for Engineers” by Jeff Prosise

Upcoming Events: 

• Register for upcoming webinars here!

There are some big AI-related controversies swirling, and it’s time we talk about them. A lawsuit has been filed against GitHub, Microsoft, and OpenAI related to Copilot code suggestions, and many people have been disturbed by the output of Meta AI’s Galactica model. Does Copilot violate open source licenses? Does Galactica output dangerous science-related content? In this episode, we dive into the controversies and risks, and we discuss the benefits of these technologies.

Featuring:

• Chris Benson – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, X
• Daniel Whitenack – Website, GitHub, X

Show Notes:

Related to Copilot:

• Article - “GitHub Copilot Isn’t Worth the Risk”
• Tabnine
• Big Code Project

Related to Galactica:

• Model website
• Article: “Galactica: the AI knowledge base that makes stuff up”

Books

• “Interpretable Machine Learning” by Christoph Molnar
• “Modeling Mindsets” by Christoph Molnar

Upcoming Events: 

• Register for upcoming webinars here!

Online platforms and their users are susceptible to a barrage of threats – from disinformation to extremism to terror. Daniel and Chris chat with Matar Haller, VP of Data at ActiveFence, a leader in identifying online harm – is using a combination of AI technology and leading subject matter experts to provide Trust & Safety teams with precise, real-time data, in-depth intelligence, and automated tools to protect users and ensure safe online experiences.

Featuring:

• Matar Haller – GitHub, LinkedIn
• Chris Benson – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, X
• Daniel Whitenack – Website, GitHub, X

Show Notes:

• ActiveFence

Upcoming Events: 

• Register for upcoming webinars here!

It’s been a while since we’ve touched on quantum computing. It’s time for an update! This week we talk with Yonatan from Quantum Machines about real progress being made in the practical construction of hybrid computing centers with a mix of classical processors, GPUs, and quantum processors. Quantum Machines is building both hardware and software to help control, program, and integrate quantum processors within a hybrid computing environment.

Featuring:

• Yonatan Cohen – GitHub, LinkedIn, X
• Chris Benson – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, X
• Daniel Whitenack – Website, GitHub, X

Show Notes:

Quantum Machines

Upcoming Events: 

• Register for upcoming webinars here!

Recently Chris and Daniel briefly discussed the Open RAIL-M licensing and model releases on Hugging Face. In this episode, Daniel follows up on this topic based on some recent practical experience. Also included is a discussion about graph neural networks, message passing, and tweaking synthesized voices!

Featuring:

• Chris Benson – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, X
• Daniel Whitenack – Website, GitHub, X

Show Notes:

• Daniel’s team license from recent work
• Graph Neural Network courses from Zak Jost
• Coqui voice studio

Upcoming Events: 

• Register for upcoming webinars here!

This panel discussion was recorded at a recent event hosted by a company, Aryballe, that we previously featured on the podcast (#120). We got a chance to discuss the AI-driven technology transforming the order/fragrance industries, and we went down the rabbit hole discussing how this technology is being adopted at large, well-established companies.

Featuring:

• Mary Fischer-Mullins – LinkedIn
• Yanis Caritu – LinkedIn
• Daniel Whitenack – Website, GitHub, X

Show Notes:

• Aryballe
• Cox Automotive
• Previous episode with Aryballe

Upcoming Events: 

• Register for upcoming webinars here!

People are starting to wake up to the fact that they have control and ownership over their data, and governments are moving quickly to legislate these rights. John K. Thompson has written a new book on the topic that is a must read! We talk about the new book in this episode along with how practitioners should be thinking about data exchanges, privacy, trust, and synthetic data.

Featuring:

• John K. Thompson – LinkedIn, X
• Chris Benson – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, X
• Daniel Whitenack – Website, GitHub, X

Show Notes:

Use the code podpracticalAI19 for 40% off of Data for All, along with all Manning products in all formats!!!

Books

• “Data for All” by John K. Thompson
• John’s other books: 
  • “Building Analytics Teams” by John K. Thompson
  • “Analytics” by John Thompson and Shawn Rogers

Upcoming Events: 

• Register for upcoming webinars here!

Chris sits down with Ankur Goyal to talk about DocQuery, Impira’s new open source ML model. DocQuery lets you ask questions about semi-structured data (like invoices) and unstructured documents (like contracts) using Large Language Models (LLMs). Ankur illustrates many of the ways DocQuery can help people tame documents, and references Chris’s real life tasks as a non-profit director to demonstrate that DocQuery is indeed practical AI.

Featuring:

• Ankur Goyal – LinkedIn, X
• Chris Benson – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, X

Show Notes:

• DocQuery
• DocQuery Announcement
• DocQuery Blog Announcement
• DocQuery | GitHub
• Impira

Upcoming Events: 

• Register for upcoming webinars here!