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

Today we’re joined by Professor of Computer Science at UC Berkeley, Dawn Song. Dawn’s research is centered at the intersection of AI, deep learning, security, and privacy. She’s currently focused on bringing these disciplines together with her startup, Oasis Labs. 

In our conversation, we explore their goals of building a ‘platform for a responsible data economy,’ which would combine techniques like differential privacy, blockchain, and homomorphic encryption. The platform would give consumers more control of their data, and enable businesses to better utilize data in a privacy-preserving and responsible way. 

We also discuss how to privatize and anonymize data in language models like GPT-3, real-world examples of adversarial attacks and how to train against them, her work on program synthesis to get towards AGI, and her work on privatizing coronavirus contact tracing data.

The complete show notes for this episode can be found twimlai.com/go/403.

Today we’re joined by Wilka Carvalho, a PhD student at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. In our conversation, we focus on his paper ‘ROMA: A Relational, Object-Model Learning Agent for Sample-Efficient Reinforcement Learning.’ In the paper, Wilka explores the challenge of object interaction tasks, focusing on every day, in-home functions. We discuss how he’s addressing the challenge of ‘object-interaction’ tasks, the biggest obstacles he’s run into along the way.

Today we bring you the latest Discussion Series: The Model Explainability Forum. Our group of experts and researchers explore the current state of explainability and discuss the key emerging ideas shaping the field. Each guest shares their unique perspective and contributions to thinking about model explainability in a practical way. We explore concepts like stakeholder-driven explainability, adversarial attacks on explainability methods, counterfactual explanations, legal and policy implications, and more.

Today we’re joined by Johannes Eichstaedt, an Assistant Professor of Psychology at Stanford University. In our conversation, we explore how Johannes applies his physics background to a career as a computational social scientist, some of the major patterns in the data that emerged over the first few months of lockdown, including mental health, social norms, and political patterns. We also explore how Johannes built the process, and the techniques he’s using to collect, sift through, and understand the da

Today we’re joined by Devi Parikh, Associate Professor at the School of Interactive Computing at Georgia Tech, and research scientist at Facebook AI Research (FAIR). In our conversation, we touch on Devi’s definition of creativity, explore multiple ways that AI could impact the creative process for artists, and help humans become more creative. We investigate tools like casual creator for preference prediction, neuro-symbolic generative art, and visual journaling.

Today we’re joined by Max Welling, Vice President of Technologies at Qualcomm Netherlands, and Professor at the University of Amsterdam. In our conversation, we explore Max’s work in neural augmentation, and how it’s being deployed. We also discuss his work with federated learning and incorporating the technology on devices to give users more control over the privacy of their personal data. Max also shares his thoughts on quantum mechanics and the future of quantum neural networks for chip design.

Today we're joined by Iordanis Kerenidis, Research Director CNRS Paris and Head of Quantum Algorithms at QC Ware.

Iordanis was an ICML main conference Keynote speaker on the topic of Quantum ML, and we focus our conversation on his presentation, exploring the prospects and challenges of quantum machine learning, as well as the field’s history, evolution, and future. We’ll also discuss the foundations of quantum computing, and some of the challenges to consider for breaking into the field.

Today we continue our ICML series with Elaine Nsoesie, assistant professor at Boston University. In our conversation, we discuss the different ways that machine learning applications can be used to address global health issues, including infectious disease surveillance, and tracking search data for changes in health behavior in African countries. We also discuss COVID-19 epidemiology and the importance of recognizing how the disease is affecting people of different races and economic backgrounds.

Today we’re joined by Hal Daume III, professor at the University of Maryland and Co-Chair of the 2020 ICML Conference. We had the pleasure of catching up with Hal ahead of this year's ICML to discuss his research at the intersection of bias, fairness, NLP, and the effects language has on machine learning models, exploring language in two categories as they appear in machine learning models and systems: (1) How we use language to interact with the world, and (2) how we “do” language.

Today we’re excited to be joined by return guest Michael Bronstein, Head of Graph Machine Learning at Twitter. In our conversation, we discuss the evolution of the graph machine learning space, his new role at Twitter, and some of the research challenges he’s faced, including scalability and working with dynamic graphs. Michael also dives into his work on differential graph modules for graph CNNs, and the various applications of this work.