The TWIML AI Podcast (formerly This Week in Machine Learning & Artificial Intelligence)

Today we’re joined by Stevie Chancellor, an Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Minnesota.

In our conversation with Stevie, we explore her work at the intersection of human-centered computing, machine learning, and high-risk mental illness behaviors. We discuss how her background in HCC helps shapes her perspective, how machine learning helps with understanding severity levels of mental illness, and some recent work where convolutional graph neural networks are applied to identify and discover new kinds of behaviors for people who struggle with opioid use disorder.

We also explore the role of computational linguistics and NLP in her research, issues in using social media data being used as a data source, and finally, how people who are interested in an introduction to human-centered computing can get started.

The complete show notes for this episode can be found at twimlai.com/go/472.

In this episode, we’re joined by Dataiku’s Director of Data Science, Conor Jensen. In our conversation, we explore the panel he lead at TWIMLcon “AI Operationalization: Where the AI Rubber Hits the Road for the Enterprise,” discussing the ML journey of each panelist’s company, and where Dataiku fits in the equation.

The complete show notes for this episode can be found at https://twimlai.com/go/471. 

In this episode, we’re joined by Diego Oppenheimer, Founder and CEO of Algorithmia. In our conversation, we discuss Algorithmia’s involvement with TWIMLcon, as well as an exploration of the results of their recently conducted survey on the state of the AI market.

The complete show notes for this episode can be found at twimlai.com/go/470.

In this episode, we’re joined by Santiago Giraldo, Director Of Product Marketing for Data Engineering & Machine Learning at Cloudera. In our conversation, we discuss Cloudera’s talks at TWIMLcon, as well as their various research efforts from their Fast Forward Labs arm.

The complete show notes for this episode can be found at twimlai.com/sponsorseries.

In this episode, we’re joined by Paul van der Boor, Senior Director of Data Science at Prosus, to discuss his TWIMLcon experience and how they’re using ML platforms to manage machine learning at a global scale.

The complete show notes for this episode can be found at twimlai.com/sponsorseries.

Today we’re joined by Emily M. Bender, Professor at the University of Washington, and AI Researcher, Margaret Mitchell. 

Emily and Meg, as well as Timnit Gebru and Angelina McMillan-Major, are co-authors on the paper On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots: Can Language Models Be Too Big? 🦜. As most of you undoubtedly know by now, there has been much controversy surrounding, and fallout from, this paper. In this conversation, our main priority was to focus on the message of the paper itself. We spend some time discussing the historical context for the paper, then turn to the goals of the paper, discussing the many reasons why the ever-growing datasets and models are not necessarily the direction we should be going. 

We explore the cost of these training datasets, both literal and environmental, as well as the bias implications of these models, and of course the perpetual debate about responsibility when building and deploying ML systems. Finally, we discuss the thin line between AI hype and useful AI systems, and the importance of doing pre-mortems to truly flesh out any issues you could potentially come across prior to building models, and much much more. 

The complete show notes for this episode can be found at twimlai.com/go/467.

Today we’re joined by Abhishek Gupta, a PhD Student at UC Berkeley. 

Abhishek, a member of the BAIR Lab, joined us to talk about his recent robotics and reinforcement learning research and interests, which focus on applying RL to real-world robotics applications. We explore the concept of reward supervision, and how to get robots to learn these reward functions from videos, and the rationale behind supervised experts in these experiments. 

We also discuss the use of simulation for experiments, data collection, and the path to scalable robotic learning. Finally, we discuss gradient surgery vs gradient sledgehammering, and his ecological RL paper, which focuses on the “phenomena that exist in the real world” and how humans and robotics systems interface in those situations. 

The complete show notes for this episode can be found at https://twimlai.com/go/466.

Today we’re joined by David Carmona, General Manager of Artificial Intelligence & Innovation at Microsoft. 

In our conversation with David, we focus on his work on AI at Scale, an initiative focused on the change in the ways people are developing AI, driven in large part by the emergence of massive models. We explore David’s thoughts about the progression towards larger models, the focus on parameters and how it ties to the architecture of these models, and how we should assess how attention works in these models.

We also discuss the different families of models (generation & representation), the transition from CV to NLP tasks, and an interesting point of models “becoming a platform” via transfer learning.

The complete show notes for this episode can be found at twimlai.com/go/465.

Today we’re joined by Melanie Mitchell, Davis Professor at the Santa Fe Institute and author of Artificial Intelligence: A Guide for Thinking Humans. 

While Melanie has had a long career with a myriad of research interests, we focus on a few, complex systems and the understanding of intelligence, complexity, and her recent work on getting AI systems to make analogies. We explore examples of social learning, and how it applies to AI contextually, and defining intelligence. 

We discuss potential frameworks that would help machines understand analogies, established benchmarks for analogy, and if there is a social learning solution to help machines figure out analogy. Finally we talk through the overall state of AI systems, the progress we’ve made amid the limited concept of social learning, if we’re able to achieve intelligence with current approaches to AI, and much more!

The complete show notes for this episode can be found at twimlai.com/go/464.

Today we’re joined by Adriana Kovashka, an Assistant Professor at the University of Pittsburgh.

In our conversation with Adriana, we explore her visual commonsense research, and how it intersects with her background in media studies. We discuss the idea of shortcuts, or faults in visual question answering data sets that appear in many SOTA results, as well as the concept of masking, a technique developed to assist in context prediction. Adriana then describes how these techniques fit into her broader goal of trying to understand the rhetoric of visual advertisements. 

Finally, Adriana shares a bit about her work on robust visual reasoning, the parallels between this research and other work happening around explainability, and the vision for her work going forward. 

The complete show notes for this episode can be found at twimlai.com/go/463.