
A Quantum Computing Primer and Implications for AI with Davide Venturelli - TWiML Talk #93
Today, I'm joined by Davide Venturelli, science operations manager and quantum computing team lead for the Universities Space Research Association’s Institute for Advanced Computer Science at NASA Ames. Davide joined me backstage at the NYU Future Labs AI Summit a while back to give me some insight into a topic that I’ve been curious about for some time now, quantum computing. We kick off our discussion about the core ideas behind quantum computing, including what it is, how it’s applied and the ways it relates to computing as we know it today. We discuss the practical state of quantum computers and what their capabilities are, and the kinds of things you can do with them. And of course, we explore the intersection between AI and quantum computing, how quantum computing may one day accelerate machine learning, and how interested listeners can get started down the quantum rabbit hole. The notes for this show can be found at twimlai.com/talk/93
8 Tammi 201834min

Learning State Representations with Yael Niv - TWiML Talk #92
This week on the podcast we’re featuring a series of conversations from the NIPs conference in Long Beach, California. I attended a bunch of talks and learned a ton, organized an impromptu roundtable on Building AI Products, and met a bunch of great people, including some former TWiML Talk guests. In this episode I speak with Yael Niv, professor of neuroscience and psychology at Princeton University. Yael joined me after her invited talk on “Learning State Representations.” In this interview Yael and I explore the relationship between neuroscience and machine learning. In particular, we discusses the importance of state representations in human learning, some of her experimental results in this area, and how a better understanding of representation learning can lead to insights into machine learning problems such as reinforcement and transfer learning. Did I mention this was a nerd alert show? I really enjoyed this interview and I know you will too. Be sure to send over any thoughts or feedback via the show notes page at twimlai.com/talk/92.
22 Joulu 201747min

Philosophy of Intelligence with Matthew Crosby - TWiML Talk #91
This week on the podcast we’re featuring a series of conversations from the NIPs conference in Long Beach, California. I attended a bunch of talks and learned a ton, organized an impromptu roundtable on Building AI Products, and met a bunch of great people, including some former TWiML Talk guests.This time around i'm joined by Matthew Crosby, a researcher at Imperial College London, working on the Kinds of Intelligence Project. Matthew joined me after the NIPS Symposium of the same name, an event that brought researchers from a variety of disciplines together towards three aims: a broader perspective of the possible types of intelligence beyond human intelligence, better measurements of intelligence, and a more purposeful analysis of where progress should be made in AI to best benefit society. Matthew’s research explores intelligence from a philosophical perspective, exploring ideas like predictive processing and controlled hallucination, and how these theories of intelligence impact the way we approach creating artificial intelligence. This was a very interesting conversation, i'm sure you’ll enjoy.
21 Joulu 201729min

Geometric Deep Learning with Joan Bruna & Michael Bronstein - TWiML Talk #90
This week on the podcast we’re featuring a series of conversations from the NIPs conference in Long Beach, California. I attended a bunch of talks and learned a ton, organized an impromptu roundtable on Building AI Products, and met a bunch of great people, including some former TWiML Talk guests. This time around I'm joined by Joan Bruna, Assistant Professor at the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences and the Center for Data Science at NYU, and Michael Bronstein, associate professor at Università della Svizzera italiana (Switzerland) and Tel Aviv University. Joan and Michael join me after their tutorial on Geometric Deep Learning on Graphs and Manifolds. In our conversation we dig pretty deeply into the ideas behind geometric deep learning and how we can use it in applications like 3D vision, sensor networks, drug design, biomedicine, and recommendation systems. This is definitely a Nerd Alert show, and one that will get your multi-dimensional neurons firing. Enjoy!
20 Joulu 201740min

AI at the NASA Frontier Development Lab with Sara Jennings, Timothy Seabrook and Andres Rodriguez
This week on the podcast we’re featuring a series of conversations from the NIPs conference in Long Beach, California. I attended a bunch of talks and learned a ton, organized an impromptu roundtable on Building AI Products, and met a bunch of great people, including some former TWiML Talk guests. In this episode i'm joined by Sara Jennings, Timothy Seabrook and Andres Rodriguez to discuss NASA’s Frontier Development Lab or FDL. The FDL is an intense 8-week applied AI research accelerator, focused on tackling knowledge gaps useful to the space program. In our discussion, Sara, producer at the FDL, provides some insight into its goals and structure. Timothy, a researcher at FDL, describes his involvement with the program, including some of the projects he worked on while on-site. He also provides a look into some of this year’s FDL projects, including Planetary Defense, Solar Storm Prediction, and Lunar Water Location. Last but not least, Andres, Sr. Principal Engineer at Intel's AIPG, joins us to detail Intel’s support of the FDL, and how the various elements of the Intel AI stack supported the FDL research. This is a jam packed conversation, so be sure to check the show notes page at twimlai.com/talk/89 for all the links and tidbits from this episode.
19 Joulu 201736min

Using Deep Learning and Google Street View to Estimate Demographics with Timnit Gebru
This week on the podcast we’re featuring a series of conversations from the NIPs conference in Long Beach, California. I attended a bunch of talks and learned a ton, organized an impromptu roundtable on Building AI Products, and met a bunch of great people, including some former TWiML Talk guests. In this episode I sit down with Timnit Gebru, postdoctoral researcher at Microsoft Research in the Fairness, Accountability, Transparency and Ethics in AI, or FATE, group. Timnit is also one of the organizers behind the Black in AI group, which held a very interesting symposium and poster session at NIPS. I’ll link to the group’s page in the show notes. I’ve been following Timnit’s work for a while now and was really excited to get a chance to sit down with her and pick her brain. We packed a ton into this conversation, especially keying in on her recently released paper “Using Deep Learning and Google Street View to Estimate the Demographic Makeup of the US”. Timnit describes the pipeline she developed for this research, and some of the challenges she faced building and end-to-end model based on google street view images, census data and commercial car vendor data. We also discuss the role of social awareness in her work, including an explanation of how domain adaptation and fairness are related and her view of the major research directions in the domain of fairness. The notes for this show can be found at twimlai.com/talk/88 For series information, visit twimlai.com/nips2017
19 Joulu 201732min

Integrative Learning for Robotic Systems with Aaron Ames - TWiML Talk #87
This week on the podcast we’re featuring a series of conversations from the AWS re:Invent conference in Las Vegas. I had a great time at this event getting caught up on the latest and greatest machine learning and AI products and services announced by AWS and its partners. Today we’re joined by Aaron Ames, Professor of Mechanical & Civil Engineering at Caltech. Aaron joined me before his talk at the Deep Learning Summit “Eye, Robot: Computer Vision and Autonomous Robotics” and I had a ton of questions for him. While he considers himself a “hardware guy”, we got into a great discussion centered around the intersection of Robotics and ML Inference. We cover a range of topics, including Boston Dynamics backflipping robot (If you haven't seen it, check out the show notes), Humanoid Robotics, His work on motion primitives and transitions and he even gives us a few predictions on the future of robotics.
15 Joulu 201747min

Visual Recognition in the Cloud for Law Enforcement with Chris Adzima - TWiML Talk #86
This week on the podcast we’re featuring a series of conversations from the AWS re:Invent conference in Las Vegas. I had a great time at this event getting caught up on the latest and greatest machine learning and AI products and services announced by AWS and its partners. In this episode we’re joined by Chris Adzima, Senior Information Analyst for the Washington County Sheriff’s Department. While Chris is not a traditional data scientist, he comes to us with a very interesting use case using AWS’s Rekognition. Chris is using Rekognition to identify suspects in the Portland area by running their mugshots through the software. In our conversation, he details how he is using Rekognition, while giving us few use cases along the way. We discuss how bias affects the work he is doing, and how they try to remove it from their process, not only from a software developer standpoint, but from a law enforcement standpoint and what his next steps are with the Rekognition software. This was a pretty interesting discussion, i’m sure you’ll enjoy it!
14 Joulu 201735min