Data Skeptic26 Joulu 2025

Video Recommendations in Industry

In this episode, Kyle Polich sits down with Cory Zechmann, a content curator working in streaming television with 16 years of experience running the music blog "Silence Nogood." They explore the intersection of human curation and machine learning in content discovery, discussing the concept of "algatorial" curation—where algorithms and editorial expertise work together. Key topics include the cold start problem, why every metric is just a "proxy metric" for what users actually want, the challenge of filter bubbles, and the importance of balancing familiarity with discovery. Cory shares insights on why TikTok's algorithm works so well (clean data and massive interaction volume), the crucial role of homepage curation, and how human curators help by contextualizing content, cleaning data, and identifying positive feedback loops that algorithms might miss.

The conversation covers practical challenges like measuring "surprise and delight," the content deluge created by democratized creation tools, and why trust in tech companies is essential for better personalization. Cory emphasizes that discovery is "a good type of friction" and explains how the CODE framework (Capture, Organize, Distill, Express, plus Analysis) guides professional curation work. Looking to the future, they discuss the need for systems thinking that creates narrative connections between content, the potential for conversational AI to help users articulate preferences, and why diverse perspectives beyond engineering are crucial for building effective discovery systems. Resources mentioned include the newsletter "Top Information Retrieval Papers of the Week" and Notebook LM for synthesizing research.

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Eugene Goostman

In this episode, Kyle shares his perspective on the chatbot Eugene Goostman which (some claim) "passed" the Turing Test. As a second topic Kyle also does an intro of the Winograd Schema Challenge.

13 Huhti 201817min

The Theory of Formal Languages

In this episode, Kyle and Linhda discuss the theory of formal languages. Any language can (theoretically) be a formal language. The requirement is that the language can be rigorously described as a se...

6 Huhti 201823min

The Loebner Prize

The Loebner Prize is a competition in the spirit of the Turing Test. Participants are welcome to submit conversational agent software to be judged by a panel of humans. This episode includes intervi...

30 Maalis 201833min

Chatbots

In this episode, Kyle chats with Vince from iv.ai and Heather Shapiro who works on the Microsoft Bot Framework. We solicit their advice on building a good chatbot both creatively and technically. Our ...

23 Maalis 201827min

The Master Algorithm

In this week's episode, Kyle Polich interviews Pedro Domingos about his book, The Master Algorithm: How the quest for the ultimate learning machine will remake our world. In the book, Domingos describ...

16 Maalis 201846min

The No Free Lunch Theorems

What's the best machine learning algorithm to use? I hear that XGBoost wins most of the Kaggle competitions that aren't won with deep learning. Should I just use XGBoost all the time? That might work ...

9 Maalis 201827min

ML at Sloan Kettering Cancer Center

For a long time, physicians have recognized that the tools they have aren't powerful enough to treat complex diseases, like cancer. In addition to data science and models, clinicians also needed actua...

2 Maalis 201838min

Optimal Decision Making with POMDPs

In a previous episode, we discussed Markov Decision Processes or MDPs, a framework for decision making and planning. This episode explores the generalization Partially Observable MDPs (POMDPs) which a...

23 Helmi 201818min