Practical AI

There are a lot of people trying to innovate in the area of specialized AI hardware, but most of them are doing it with traditional transistors. Lightmatter is doing something totally different. They’re building photonic computers that are more power efficient and faster for AI inference. Nick Harris joins us in this episode to bring us up to speed on all the details.

Sponsors:

• Fastly – Our bandwidth partner. Fastly powers fast, secure, and scalable digital experiences. Move beyond your content delivery network to their powerful edge cloud platform. Learn more at fastly.com
• LaunchDarkly / TrajectoryConf – Software powers the world. LaunchDarkly empowers all teams to deliver and control their software. DevOps and feature management are reimagining how we build and release new products. On November 9th and 10th, LaunchDarkly is hosting Trajectory Conference 2021 — a two-day event for software innovators who want to break orbit, not systems. Trajectory is a fully-virtual conference that focuses on the technology, people, and processes that continuously deliver better user experiences and more powerful software. Register for free at trajectoryconf.com
• Linode – Get $100 in free credit to get started on Linode – Linode is our cloud of choice and the home of Changelog.com. Head to linode.com/changelog OR text CHANGELOG to 474747 to get instant access to that $100 in free credit. 

Featuring:

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

Show Notes:

• Lightmatter

Upcoming Events: 

• Register for upcoming webinars here!

When is the last time you had a eureka moment? Chris had a chat with Nicholas Mohnacky, CEO and Cofounder of bundleIQ, where they use natural language processing algorithms like GPT-3 to connect your Google GSuite with other personal data sources to find deeper connections, go beyond the obvious, and create eureka moments.

Sponsors:

• Fastly – Our bandwidth partner. Fastly powers fast, secure, and scalable digital experiences. Move beyond your content delivery network to their powerful edge cloud platform. Learn more at fastly.com
• LaunchDarkly / TrajectoryConf – Software powers the world. LaunchDarkly empowers all teams to deliver and control their software. DevOps and feature management are reimagining how we build and release new products. On November 9th and 10th, LaunchDarkly is hosting Trajectory Conference 2021 — a two-day event for software innovators who want to break orbit, not systems. Trajectory is a fully-virtual conference that focuses on the technology, people, and processes that continuously deliver better user experiences and more powerful software. Register for free at trajectoryconf.com
• Linode – Get $100 in free credit to get started on Linode – Linode is our cloud of choice and the home of Changelog.com. Head to linode.com/changelog OR text CHANGELOG to 474747 to get instant access to that $100 in free credit. 

Featuring:

• Nicholas Mohnacky – GitHub, LinkedIn, X
• Chris Benson – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, X

Show Notes:

• bundleIQ
• bundleIQ | LinkedIn

Upcoming Events: 

• Register for upcoming webinars here!

This is the first episode in a special series we are calling the “Spotlight on AI in Africa”. To kick things off, Joyce and Mutembesa from Makerere University’s AI Lab join us to talk about their amazing work in computer vision, natural language processing, and data collection. Their lab seeks out problems that matter in African communities, pairs those problems with appropriate data/tools, and works with the end users to ensure that solutions create real value.

Sponsors:

• Fastly – Our bandwidth partner. Fastly powers fast, secure, and scalable digital experiences. Move beyond your content delivery network to their powerful edge cloud platform. Learn more at fastly.com
• LaunchDarkly – Ship fast. Rest easy. Deploy code at any time, even if a feature isn’t ready to be released to your users. Wrap code in feature flags to get the safety to test new features and infrastructure in prod without impacting the wrong end users. 
• Linode – Get $100 in free credit to get started on Linode – Linode is our cloud of choice and the home of Changelog.com. Head to linode.com/changelog OR text CHANGELOG to 474747 to get instant access to that $100 in free credit. 

Featuring:

• Joyce Nabende – X
• Mutembesa – X
• Chris Benson – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, X
• Daniel Whitenack – Website, GitHub, X

Show Notes:

• Makerere AI Lab
• Makerere AI Lab - projects
• Open for Good Alliance
• International Development Research Centre - Canada
• FAIR Forward – Artificial Intelligence for All - GIZ

Upcoming Events: 

• Register for upcoming webinars here!

Federated learning is increasingly practical for machine learning developers because of the challenges we face with model and data privacy. In this fully connected episode, Chris and Daniel dive into the topic and dissect the ideas behind federated learning, practicalities of implementing decentralized training, and current uses of the technique.

Sponsors:

• RudderStack – Smart customer data pipeline made for developers. RudderStack is the smart customer data pipeline. Connect your whole customer data stack. Warehouse-first, open source Segment alternative. 
• Changelog++ – You love our content and you want to take it to the next level by showing your support. We’ll take you closer to the metal with no ads, extended episodes, outtakes, bonus content, a deep discount in our merch store (soon), and more to come. Let’s do this! 
• Fastly – Our bandwidth partner. Fastly powers fast, secure, and scalable digital experiences. Move beyond your content delivery network to their powerful edge cloud platform. Learn more at fastly.com
• LaunchDarkly – Ship fast. Rest easy. Deploy code at any time, even if a feature isn’t ready to be released to your users. Wrap code in feature flags to get the safety to test new features and infrastructure in prod without impacting the wrong end users. 

Featuring:

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

Show Notes:

Learning:

• Google Federated Learning comic
• Federated Learning: A Step by Step Implementation in Tensorflow

Frameworks/ open source projects:

• TensorFlow Federated
• Intel Open Federated Learning
• PyGrid
• Flower

Example uses of Federated Learning:

• Federated Learning for Mobile Keyboard Prediction
• Your voice & audio data stays private while Google Assistant improves
• Facebook is rebuilding its ads to know a lot less about you
• Federated learning for predicting clinical outcomes in patients with COVID-19

Upcoming Events: 

• Register for upcoming webinars here!

Tivadar Danka is an educator and content creator in the machine learning space, and he is writing a book to help practitioners go from high school mathematics to mathematics of neural networks. His explanations are lucid and easy to understand. You have never had such a fun and interesting conversation about calculus, linear algebra, and probability theory before!

Sponsors:

• RudderStack – Smart customer data pipeline made for developers. RudderStack is the smart customer data pipeline. Connect your whole customer data stack. Warehouse-first, open source Segment alternative. 
• Changelog++ – You love our content and you want to take it to the next level by showing your support. We’ll take you closer to the metal with no ads, extended episodes, outtakes, bonus content, a deep discount in our merch store (soon), and more to come. Let’s do this! 
• Fastly – Our bandwidth partner. Fastly powers fast, secure, and scalable digital experiences. Move beyond your content delivery network to their powerful edge cloud platform. Learn more at fastly.com
• LaunchDarkly – Ship fast. Rest easy. Deploy code at any time, even if a feature isn’t ready to be released to your users. Wrap code in feature flags to get the safety to test new features and infrastructure in prod without impacting the wrong end users. 

Featuring:

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

Show Notes:

• Mathematics of Machine Learning - Roadmap Graphic | Twitter

Books

• “Mathematics of Machine Learning” by Tivadar Danka

Upcoming Events: 

• Register for upcoming webinars here!

Polarity Mapping is a framework to “help problems be solved in a realistic and multidimensional manner” (see here for more info). In this week’s fully connected episode, Chris and Daniel use this framework to help them discuss how an organization can strike a good balance between human intelligence and AI. AI can’t solve everything and humans need to be in-the-loop with many AI solutions.

Sponsors:

• SignalWire – Build what’s next in communications with video, voice, and messaging APIs powered by elastic cloud infrastructure. Try it today at signalwire.com and use code AI for $25 in developer credit. 
• Changelog++ – You love our content and you want to take it to the next level by showing your support. We’ll take you closer to the metal with no ads, extended episodes, outtakes, bonus content, a deep discount in our merch store (soon), and more to come. Let’s do this! 
• Fastly – Our bandwidth partner. Fastly powers fast, secure, and scalable digital experiences. Move beyond your content delivery network to their powerful edge cloud platform. Learn more at fastly.com
• LaunchDarkly – Ship fast. Rest easy. Deploy code at any time, even if a feature isn’t ready to be released to your users. Wrap code in feature flags to get the safety to test new features and infrastructure in prod without impacting the wrong end users. 

Featuring:

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

Show Notes:

• Polarity Mapping
• Barry Johnson’s paper “Reflections A Perspective on Paradox and Its Application to Modern Management”

Upcoming Events: 

• Register for upcoming webinars here!

As you start developing an AI/ML based solution, you quickly figure out that you need to run workflows. Not only that, you might need to run those workflows across various kinds of infrastructure (including GPUs) at scale. Ville Tuulos developed Metaflow while working at Netflix to help data scientists scale their work. In this episode, Ville tells us a bit more about Metaflow, his new book on data science infrastructure, and his approach to helping scale ML/AI work.

Sponsors:

• RudderStack – Smart customer data pipeline made for developers. RudderStack is the smart customer data pipeline. Connect your whole customer data stack. Warehouse-first, open source Segment alternative. 
• SignalWire – Build what’s next in communications with video, voice, and messaging APIs powered by elastic cloud infrastructure. Try it today at signalwire.com and use code AI for $25 in developer credit. 
• Fastly – Our bandwidth partner. Fastly powers fast, secure, and scalable digital experiences. Move beyond your content delivery network to their powerful edge cloud platform. Learn more at fastly.com

Featuring:

• Ville Tuulos – LinkedIn, X
• Daniel Whitenack – Website, GitHub, X

Show Notes:

• Metaflow

Books

• “Effective Data Science Infrastructure” by Ville Tuulos
  • Use code podpracticalAI19 for 40% off!

Upcoming Events: 

• Register for upcoming webinars here!

Any AI play that lacks an underlying data strategy is doomed to fail, and a big part of any data strategy is labeling. Michael, from Label Studio, joins us in this episode to discuss how the industry’s perception of data labeling is shifting. We cover open source tooling, validating labels, and integrating ML/AI models in the labeling loop.

Sponsors:

• RudderStack – Smart customer data pipeline made for developers. RudderStack is the smart customer data pipeline. Connect your whole customer data stack. Warehouse-first, open source Segment alternative. 
• SignalWire – Build what’s next in communications with video, voice, and messaging APIs powered by elastic cloud infrastructure. Try it today at signalwire.com and use code SHIPIT for $25 in developer credit. 
• Fastly – Our bandwidth partner. Fastly powers fast, secure, and scalable digital experiences. Move beyond your content delivery network to their powerful edge cloud platform. Learn more at fastly.com

Featuring:

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

Show Notes:

• Label Studio
• Heartex

Upcoming Events: 

• Register for upcoming webinars here!

Yonatan Geifman of Deci makes Daniel and Chris buckle up, and takes them on a tour of the ideas behind his amazing new inference platform. It enables AI developers to build, optimize, and deploy blazing-fast deep learning models on any hardware. Don’t blink or you’ll miss it!

Sponsors:

• RudderStack – Smart customer data pipeline made for developers. RudderStack is the smart customer data pipeline. Connect your whole customer data stack. Warehouse-first, open source Segment alternative. 
• SignalWire – Build what’s next in communications with video, voice, and messaging APIs powered by elastic cloud infrastructure. Try it today at signalwire.com and use code SHIPIT for $25 in developer credit. 
• Fastly – Our bandwidth partner. Fastly powers fast, secure, and scalable digital experiences. Move beyond your content delivery network to their powerful edge cloud platform. Learn more at fastly.com

Featuring:

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

Show Notes:

• Deci
• An Introduction to the Inference Stack and Inference Acceleration Techniques
• Deci and Intel Collaborate to Optimize Deep Learning Inference on Intel’s CPUs
• DeciNets: A New Efficient Frontier for Computer Vision Models
• White paper

Upcoming Events: 

• Register for upcoming webinars here!

In this episode, Peter Wang from Anaconda joins us again to go over their latest “State of Data Science” survey. The updated results include some insights related to data science work during COVID along with other topics including AutoML and model bias. Peter also tells us a bit about the exciting new partnership between Anaconda and Pyston (a fork of the standard CPython interpreter which has been extensively enhanced to improve the execution performance of most Python programs).

Sponsors:

• SignalWire – Build what’s next in communications with video, voice, and messaging APIs powered by elastic cloud infrastructure. Try it today at signalwire.com and use code SHIPIT for $25 in developer credit. 
• The Brave Browser – Browse the web up to 8x faster than Chrome and Safari, block ads and trackers by default, and reward your favorite creators with the built-in Basic Attention Token. Download Brave for free and give tipping a try right here on changelog.com. 
• Fastly – Our bandwidth partner. Fastly powers fast, secure, and scalable digital experiences. Move beyond your content delivery network to their powerful edge cloud platform. Learn more at fastly.com

Featuring:

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

Show Notes:

• Anaconda’s State of Data Science
• Pyston Team Joins Anaconda to Expand Open-Source Project Development

Upcoming Events: 

• Register for upcoming webinars here!