Practical AI

Daniel and Chris hang out with Mike McCourt from Invoca to learn about the natural language processing model architectures underlying Signal AI. Mike shares how they process conversational data, the challenges they have to overcome, and the types of insights that can be harvested.

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• Brain Science – For the curious! Brain Science is our new podcast exploring the inner-workings of the human brain to understand behavior change, habit formation, mental health, and being human. It’s Brain Science applied — not just how does the brain work, but how do we apply what we know about the brain to transform our lives. 

Featuring:

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

Show Notes:

• Mike McCourt | Invoca Employee Spotlight
• Invoca
• Signal AI
• Zipf’s law
• Meet the Data Scientists Behind Invoca’s Conversational Analytics Algorithms
  -Invoca raises $56 million to apply AI and analytics to voice calls
  -Invoca’s Signal Discovery uses machine learning to conduct conversational analysis on inbound calls
  -Invoca - What Will You Discover?

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Daniel and Chris explore Semantic Scholar with Doug Raymond of the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence. Semantic Scholar is an AI-backed search engine that uses machine learning, natural language processing, and machine vision to surface relevant information from scientific papers.

Featuring:

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

Show Notes:

• Semantic Scholar
• Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence
• ELMo
• SciBERT: A Pretrained Language Model for Scientific Text
• Semantic Scholar API

Upcoming Events: 

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Daniel and Chris do a deep dive into The AI Index 2019 Annual Report, which provides unbiased rigorously-vetted data that one can use “to develop intuitions about the complex field of AI”. Analyzing everything from R&D and technical advancements to education, the economy, and societal considerations, Chris and Daniel lay out this comprehensive report’s key insights about artificial intelligence.

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. 
• 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. 

Featuring:

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

Show Notes:

• The AI Index 2019 Annual Report
• Stanford Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence

Upcoming Events: 

• Register for upcoming webinars here!

Production ML systems include more than just the model. In these complicated systems, how do you ensure quality over time, especially when you are constantly updating your infrastructure, data and models? Tania Allard joins us to discuss the ins and outs of testing ML systems. Among other things, she presents a simple formula that helps you score your progress towards a robust system and identify problem areas.

Featuring:

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

Show Notes:

• “What’s your ML score” talk
• “Jupyter Notebooks: Friends or Foes?” talk
• Joel Grus’s episode: “AI code that facilitates good science”
• Papermill
• nbdev
• nbval

Books

• “DevOps For Dummies” by Emily Freeman

Upcoming Events: 

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One of the things people most associate with AI is automation, but how is AI actually shaping automation in manufacturing? Costas Boulis from Bright Machines joins us to talk about how they are using AI in various manufacturing processes and in their “microfactories.” He also discusses the unique challenges of developing AI models based on manufacturing data.

Sponsors:

• Linode – Our cloud server of choice. Deploy a fast, efficient, native SSD cloud server for only $5/month. Get 4 months free using the code changelog2019. Start your server - head to linode.com/changelog. 
• 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. 

Featuring:

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

Show Notes:

• Bright Machines
• Bright Machines’ Microfactories
• Digital twins
• Other relevant Practical AI episodes: 
  • Deep Reinforcement Learning
  • Robot hands solving Rubik’s cubes

Upcoming Events: 

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Chris and Daniel talk with Greg Allen, Chief of Strategy and Communications at the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) Joint Artificial Intelligence Center (JAIC). The mission of the JAIC is “to seize upon the transformative potential of artificial intelligence technology for the benefit of America’s national security… The JAIC is the official focal point of the DoD AI Strategy.” So if you want to understand how the U.S. military thinks about artificial intelligence, then this is the episode for you!

Sponsors:

• DigitalOcean – The simplest cloud platform for developers and teams Whether you’re running one virtual machine or ten thousand, makes managing your infrastructure too easy. Get started for free with a $50 credit. Learn more at do.co/changelog. 
• 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. 

Featuring:

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

Show Notes:

• U.S. Department of Defense Joint Artificial Intelligence Center
• Summary of the 2018 Department of Defense Artificial Intelligence Strategy
• Fact Sheet: 2018 DoD Artificial Intelligence Strategy
• White House AI Website
• Practical AI – Episode #47 - GANs, RL, and transfer learning oh my!
• AlphaGo
• Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency - DARPA
• Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity - IARPA
• Law of War

Upcoming Events: 

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Wow, 2019 was an amazing year for AI! In this fully connected episode, Chris and Daniel discuss their list of top 5 notable AI things from 2019. They also discuss the “state of AI” at the end of 2019, and they make some predictions for 2020.

Sponsors:

• DigitalOcean – The simplest cloud platform for developers and teams Whether you’re running one virtual machine or ten thousand, makes managing your infrastructure too easy. Get started for free with a $50 credit. Learn more at do.co/changelog. 
• Brain Science – For the curious! Brain Science is our new podcast exploring the inner-workings of the human brain to understand behavior change, habit formation, mental health, and being human. It’s Brain Science applied — not just how does the brain work, but how do we apply what we know about the brain to transform our lives. 

Featuring:

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

Show Notes:

• Google search and BERT
• Better Language Models and Their Implications
• Write with Transformer
• Hugging Face Transformers
• Hugging Face receives 15M in funding
• Solving Rubik’s Cube with a Robot Hand
• Training a single AI model can emit as much carbon as five cars in their lifetimes

Other relevant Practical AI episodes:

• Robot hands and Rubik’s cubes
• BERT: one NLP model to rule them all 
• OpenAI’s new “dangerous” GPT-2 language model
• Social AI with Hugging Face

Upcoming Events: 

• Register for upcoming webinars here!

We have all used web and product search technologies for quite some time, but how do they actually work and how is AI impacting search? Andrew Stanton from Etsy joins us to dive into AI-based search methods and to talk about neuroevolution. He also gives us an introduction to Rust for production ML/AI and explains how that community is developing.

Sponsors:

• DigitalOcean – The simplest cloud platform for developers and teams Whether you’re running one virtual machine or ten thousand, makes managing your infrastructure too easy. Get started for free with a $50 credit. Learn more at do.co/changelog. 
• 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. 

Featuring:

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

Show Notes:

• Yahoo learning to rank challenge
• NEAT approach to neuroevolution
• OpenAI evolutionary strategies for Atari
• Rust
• PyO3, Rust binding for the Python interpreter
• Buzzsaw: A System for High Speed Feature Engineering
• LinkedIn at KDD

Upcoming Events: 

• Register for upcoming webinars here!

Evan Sparks, from Determined AI, helps us understand why many are still stuck in the “dark ages” of AI infrastructure. He then discusses how we can build better systems by leveraging things like fault tolerant training and AutoML. Finally, Evan explains his optimistic outlook on AI’s economic and environmental health impact.

Sponsors:

• DigitalOcean – The simplest cloud platform for developers and teams Whether you’re running one virtual machine or ten thousand, makes managing your infrastructure too easy. Get started for free with a $50 credit. Learn more at do.co/changelog. 

Featuring:

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

Show Notes:

• Determined AI
• Previous episode on Alpha pilot
• Blog post - AI Leadership And The Positive Impacts On Economy, Privacy, Environmental Health
• Blog post - Announcing the future of AI infrastructure
• Apache Spark
• MLlib
• Antique Candle Co.
• Joel Grus on AI code that facilitates good science

Upcoming Events: 

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SpaCy is awesome for NLP! It’s easy to use, has widespread adoption, is open source, and integrates the latest language models. Ines Montani and Matthew Honnibal (core developers of spaCy and co-founders of Explosion) join us to discuss the history of the project, its capabilities, and the latest trends in NLP. We also dig into the practicalities of taking NLP workflows to production. You don’t want to miss this episode!

Featuring:

• Ines Montani – GitHub, X
• Matthew Honnibal – GitHub, X
• Chris Benson – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, X
• Daniel Whitenack – Website, GitHub, X

Show Notes:

• SpaCy
• Advanced NLP with SpaCy course
• Thinc
• Explosion AI
• Prodigy
• Fast.ai
• Machine learning yearning

Upcoming Events: 

• Register for upcoming webinars here!