Practical AI

By Daniel Whitenack and Chris BensonTechnology

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Practical AI episodes

December 14, 2020Engaging with governments on AI for good
At this year’s Government & Public Sector R Conference (or R|Gov) our very own Daniel Whitenack moderated a panel on how AI practitioners can engage with governments on AI for good projects. That discussion is being republished in this episode for all our listeners to enjoy!
The panelists were Danya Murali from Arcadia Power and Emily Martinez from the NYC Department of Health and Mental Hygiene. Danya and Emily gave some great perspectives on sources of government data, ethical uses of data, and privacy.

Featuring:
Danya Murali – GitHub, LinkedIn, X
Emily Martinez – X
Daniel Whitenack – Website, GitHub, X
Show Notes:
The Government & Public Sector R Conference, or R|Gov for short, is returning in Fall of 2021 and the R Conference New York is returning in 2021 as well and you can learn more at rstats.ai, twitter.com/rstatsnyc and twitter.com/rstatsdc.

Upcoming Events:
Register for upcoming webinars here!
26 min
December 07, 2020From research to product at Azure AI
Bharat Sandhu, Director of Azure AI and Mixed Reality at Microsoft, joins Chris and Daniel to talk about how Microsoft is making AI accessible and productive for users, and how AI solutions can address real world challenges that customers face. He also shares Microsoft’s research-to-product process, along with the advances they have made in computer vision, image captioning, and how researchers were able to make AI that can describe images as well as people do.

Sponsors:
Linode – Get $100 in free credit to get started on Linode – 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.
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 – Power experimentation at any scale. Fast and reliable feature management for the modern enterprise.
Featuring:
Bharat Sandu – LinkedIn
Chris Benson – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, X
Daniel Whitenack – Website, GitHub, X
Show Notes:
What’s that? Microsoft’s latest breakthrough, now in Azure AI, describes images as well as people do
From search to translation, AI research is improving Microsoft products
Azure AI: Build mission-critical AI apps with new Cognitive Services capabilities
Upcoming Events:
Register for upcoming webinars here!
50 min
December 01, 2020The world's largest open library dataset
Unsplash has released the world’s largest open library dataset, which includes 2M+ high-quality Unsplash photos, 5M keywords, and over 250M searches. They have big ideas about how the dataset might be used by ML/AI folks, and there have already been some interesting applications. In this episode, Luke and Tim discuss why they released this data and what it take to maintain a dataset of this size.

Sponsors:
Linode – Get $100 in free credit to get started on Linode – 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.
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!
LaunchDarkly – Power experimentation at any scale. Fast and reliable feature management for the modern enterprise.
Featuring:
Luke Chesser – Website, X
Timothy Carbone – GitHub, X
Chris Benson – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, X
Daniel Whitenack – Website, GitHub, X
Show Notes:
Unsplash
The world’s largest open library dataset from Unsplash
The Unsplash dataset on GitHub
Upcoming Events:
Register for upcoming webinars here!
44 min
November 24, 2020A casual conversation concerning causal inference
Lucy D’Agostino McGowan, cohost of the Casual Inference Podcast and a professor at Wake Forest University, joins Daniel and Chris for a deep dive into causal inference. Referring to current events (e.g. misreporting of COVID-19 data in Georgia) as examples, they explore how we interact with, analyze, trust, and interpret data - addressing underlying assumptions, counterfactual frameworks, and unmeasured confounders (Chris’s next Halloween costume).

Sponsors:
Linode – Get $100 in free credit to get started on Linode – our cloud of choice and the home of Changelog.com. Head to linode.com/changelog
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 – Power experimentation at any scale. Fast and reliable feature management for the modern enterprise.
Featuring:
Lucy D'Agostino McGowan – Website, LinkedIn, X
Chris Benson – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, X
Daniel Whitenack – Website, GitHub, X
Show Notes:
Casual Inference Podcast
Casual Inference Podcast | Twitter
Communicating Complex Statistics (video)
Communicating Complex Statistics (slides)
Practical AI is a “Media Sponsor” of the R Conference | Government & Public Sector, where Lucy D’Agostino McGowan is giving the talk with Malcolm Barrett called “Causal Inference in R”, as well as a workshop with the same title.
This will be the first ever R Conference focused on data science work in government, defense, and the public sector.
Practical AI listeners get a special discount code valid for 20% off all ticket types, General & Academic Admission and workshops:
PRACTICALAI20

Upcoming Events:
Register for upcoming webinars here!
52 min
November 17, 2020Building a deep learning workstation
What’s it like to try and build your own deep learning workstation? Is it worth it in terms of money, effort, and maintenance? Then once built, what’s the best way to utilize it? Chris and Daniel dig into questions today as they talk about Daniel’s recent workstation build. He built a workstation for his NLP and Speech work with two GPUs, and it has been serving him well (minus a few things he would change if he did it again).

Sponsors:
Linode – Get $100 in free credit to get started on Linode – our cloud of choice and the home of Changelog.com. Head to linode.com/changelog
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.
Featuring:
Chris Benson – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, X
Daniel Whitenack – Website, GitHub, X
Show Notes:
Daniel’s workstation components:
CPU - AMD YD292XA8AFWOF Ryzen Threadripper 2920X
CPU cooler - Noctua NH-U12S TR4-SP3, Premium-Grade CPU Cooler for AMD sTRX4/TR4/SP3
Motherboard - GIGABYTE X399 AORUS PRO
Memory - Corsair Vengeance LPX 16GB (2x 2 packs), total 64GB
Storage 1 - Samsung (MZ-V7S1T0B/AM) 970 EVO Plus SSD 1TB
GPU 1 - RTX 2080 Ti
GPU 2 - Titan RTX
Case - Lian Li PC-O11AIR
Power Supply - Rosewill Hercules
Case fan(s) - Coolmaster 8mm
Daniel’s NUC 9 Extreme machine
References:
How to build the perfect Deep Learning Computer and save thousands of dollars
Curtis Northcut’s blog posts
Upcoming Events:
Register for upcoming webinars here!
50 min
November 09, 2020Killer developer tools for machine learning
Weights & Biases is coming up with some awesome developer tools for AI practitioners! In this episode, Lukas Biewald describes how these tools were a direct result of pain points that he uncovered while working as an AI intern at OpenAI. He also shares his vision for the future of machine learning tooling and where he would like to see people level up tool-wise.

Featuring:
Lukas Biewald – Website, GitHub, X
Chris Benson – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, X
Daniel Whitenack – Website, GitHub, X
Show Notes:
Weights & Biases
Blueriver case study from W&B
W&B gallery
Upcoming Events:
Register for upcoming webinars here!
51 min
October 26, 2020Reinforcement Learning for search
Hamish from Sajari blows our mind with a great discussion about AI in search. In particular, he talks about Sajari’s quest for performant AI implementations and extensive use of Reinforcement Learning (RL). We’ve been wanting to make this one happen for a while, and it was well worth the wait.

Featuring:
Hamish Ogilvy – X
Chris Benson – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, X
Daniel Whitenack – Website, GitHub, X
Show Notes:
Sajari
Blog post: “Reinforcement Learning Assisted Search Ranking”
Blog post: “Query Understanding 101”
Blog post: “The Inevitable Collision of Search and AI Tech”
Special offer from Sajari for Changelog listeners
Upcoming Events:
Register for upcoming webinars here!
48 min
October 20, 2020When data leakage turns into a flood of trouble
Rajiv Shah teaches Daniel and Chris about data leakage, and its major impact upon machine learning models. It’s the kind of topic that we don’t often think about, but which can ruin our results. Raj discusses how to use activation maps and image embedding to find leakage, so that leaking information in our test set does not find its way into our training set.

Sponsors:
DigitalOcean – DigitalOcean’s developer cloud makes it simple to launch in the cloud and scale up as you grow. They have an intuitive control panel, predictable pricing, team accounts, worldwide availability with a 99.99% uptime SLA, and 24/7/365 world-class support to back that up. Get your $100 credit at do.co/changelog.
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.
Featuring:
Rajiv Shah – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, X
Chris Benson – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, X
Daniel Whitenack – Website, GitHub, X
Show Notes:
Rajiv Shah | University of Illinois at Chicago
Rajiv Shah | DataRobot Blog
DataRobot
Upcoming Events:
Register for upcoming webinars here!
49 min
October 13, 2020Productionizing AI at LinkedIn
Suju Rajan from LinkedIn joined us to talk about how they are operationalizing state-of-the-art AI at LinkedIn. She sheds light on how AI can and is being used in recruiting, and she weaves in some great explanations of how graph-structured data, personalization, and representation learning can be applied to LinkedIn’s candidate search problem. Suju is passionate about helping people deal with machine learning technical debt, and that gives this episode a good dose of practicality.

Sponsors:
DigitalOcean – DigitalOcean’s developer cloud makes it simple to launch in the cloud and scale up as you grow. They have an intuitive control panel, predictable pricing, team accounts, worldwide availability with a 99.99% uptime SLA, and 24/7/365 world-class support to back that up. Get your $100 credit at do.co/changelog.
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.
Rollbar – We move fast and fix things because of Rollbar. Resolve errors in minutes. Deploy with confidence. Learn more at rollbar.com/changelog.
Featuring:
Suju Rajan – LinkedIn
Chris Benson – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, X
Daniel Whitenack – Website, GitHub, X
Show Notes:
The AI behind LinkedIn’s recruiter search
TensorFlow Extended (TFX)
Paper: “Hidden Technical Debt in Machine Learning Systems”
Upcoming Events:
Register for upcoming webinars here!
56 min
October 06, 2020R, Data Science, & Computational Biology
We’re partnering with the upcoming R Conference, because the R Conference is well… amazing! Tons of great AI content, and they were nice enough to connect us to Daniel Chen for this episode. He discusses data science in Computational Biology and his perspective on data science project organization.

Sponsors:
DigitalOcean – DigitalOcean’s developer cloud makes it simple to launch in the cloud and scale up as you grow. They have an intuitive control panel, predictable pricing, team accounts, worldwide availability with a 99.99% uptime SLA, and 24/7/365 world-class support to back that up. Get your $100 credit at do.co/changelog.
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.
Featuring:
Daniel Chen – Website, GitHub, X
Chris Benson – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, X
Daniel Whitenack – Website, GitHub, X
Show Notes:
R Conference:
Website
Twitter: @rstatsdc
Tickets
Discount code PRACTICALAI20 is good for 20% off every ticket type, including the conference & all workshops
Links relevant to the show:
William Stafford Noble 2009 - A Quick Guide to Organizing Computational Biology Projects
Greg Wilson, et al. 2014: “Best Practices for Scientific Computing”
Greg Wilson, et al. 2017: “Good enough practices in scientific computing”
Jenny Bryan’s code smells: link 1 and link2
Jenny Bryan on naming things
JD Long’s talk at rstudio::conf this year about being empathetic
python’s version of pyprojroot
“Be kind: all else is details”. – Greg Wilson, Teaching Teach Together – The Rules
Books
“Pandas for Everyone” by Daniel Chen
“Advanced R” by Hadley Wickham
Upcoming Events:
Register for upcoming webinars here!
55 min

About Practical AI

From the publisher's feed

Making artificial intelligence practical, productive & accessible to everyone. Practical AI is a show in which technology professionals, business people, students, enthusiasts, and expert guests engage in lively discussions about Artificial Intelligence and related topics (Machine Learning, Deep Learning, Neural Networks, GANs, MLOps, AIOps, LLMs & more).