Relational, Object-Centric Agents for Completing Simulated Household Tasks with Wilka Carvalho - #402

This week I'm on location at NYU/ffVC AI NexusLab startup accelerator, speaking with founders from the 5 companies in the program's inaugural batch. This interview is with HelloVera, a company applying artificial intelligence to the challenge of automating customer support experiences. The notes for this series can be found at https://twimlai.com/nexuslab. Thanks to Future Labs at NYU Tandon and ffVenture Capital for sponsoring the series!

7 Apr 201725min

This week my guest is Alekh Agarwal. Alekh is a researcher with Microsoft Research whose research is focused on Interactive Machine Learning. In our discussion, Alekh and I discuss various aspects of this exciting area of research such as active learning, reinforcement learning, contextual bandits and more.

31 Mar 201730min

This week my guest is Evan Wright, principal data scientist at cybersecurity startup Anomali. In my interview with Evan, he and I discussed about a number of topics surrounding the use of machine learning in cybersecurity. If Evan’s name sounds familiar, it’s because Evan was the winner of the O’Reilly Strata+Hadoop World ticket giveaway earlier this month. We met up at the conference last week and took advantage of the opportunity to record this show. Our conversation covers, among other topics, the three big problems in cybersecurity that ML can help out with, the challenges of acquiring ground truth in cybersecurity and some ways to accomplish it, and the use of decision trees, generative adversarial networks, and other algorithms in the field. The show notes can be found at twimlai.com/talk/16.

24 Mar 20171h 4min

My guest this week is Stefano Ermon, Assistant Professor of Computer Science at Stanford University, and Fellow at Stanford’s Woods Institute for the Environment. Stefano and I met at the Re-Work Deep Learning Summit earlier this year, where he gave a presentation on Machine Learning for Sustainability. Stefano and I spoke about a wide range of topics, including the relationship between fundamental and applied machine learning research, incorporating domain knowledge in machine learning models, dimensionality reduction, and his interest in applying ML & AI to addressing sustainability issues such as poverty, food security and the environment. The show notes can be found at twimlai.com/talk/15.

17 Mar 201754min

This week my guest is Shubho Sengupta, Research Scientist at Baidu. I had the pleasure of meeting Shubho at the Rework Deep Learning Summit earlier this year, where he delivered a presentation on Systems Challenges for Deep Learning. We dig into this topic in the interview, and discuss a variety of issues including network architecture, productionalization, operationalization and hardware. The show notes can be found at twimlai.com/talk/14.

10 Mar 20171h 12min

My guest this week is Dr. James McCaffrey, research engineer at Microsoft Research. James and I cover a ton of ground in this conversation, including recurrent neural nets (RNNs), convolutional neural nets (CNNs), long short term memory (LSTM) networks, residual networks (ResNets), generative adversarial networks (GANs), and more. We also discuss neural network architecture and promising alternative approaches such as symbolic computation and particle swarm optimization. The show notes can be found at twimlai.com/talk/13.

3 Mar 20171h 16min

My guest this week is Brendan Frey, Professor of Engineering and Medicine at the University of Toronto and Co-Founder and CEO of the startup Deep Genomics. Brendan and I met at the Re-Work Deep Learning Summit in San Francisco last month, where he delivered a great presentation called “Reprogramming the Human Genome: Why AI is Needed.” In this podcast we discuss the application of AI to healthcare. In particular, we dig into how Brendan’s research lab and company are applying machine learning and deep learning to treating and preventing human genetic disorders. The show notes can be found at twimlai.com/talk/12

24 Feb 20171h

My guest this time is Hilary Mason. Hilary was one of the first “famous” data scientists. I remember hearing her speak back in 2011 at the Strange Loop conference in St. Louis. At the time she was Chief Scientist for bit.ly. Nowadays she’s running Fast Forward Labs, which helps organizations accelerate their data science and machine intelligence capabilities through a variety of research and consulting offerings. Hilary presented at the O'Reilly AI conference on “practical AI product development” and she shares a lot of wisdom on that topic in our discussion. The show notes can be found at twimlai.com/talk/11.

25 Jan 201717min