Advancements in Machine Learning with Sergey Levine - #355
Today we're joined by Sergey Levine, an Assistant Professor at UC Berkeley. We last heard from Sergey back in 2017, where we explored Deep Robotic Learning. Sergey and his lab’s recent efforts have been focused on contributing to a future where machines can be “out there in the real world, learning continuously through their own experience.” We caught up with Sergey at NeurIPS 2019, where Sergey and his team presented 12 different papers -- which means a lot of ground to cover!
9 Mar 202043min
Secrets of a Kaggle Grandmaster with David Odaibo - #354
Imagine spending years learning ML from the ground up, from its theoretical foundations, but still feeling like you didn’t really know how to apply it. That’s where David Odaibo found himself in 2015, after the second year of his PhD. David’s solution was Kaggle, a popular platform for data science competitions. Fast forward four years, and David is now a Kaggle Grandmaster, the highest designation, with particular accomplishment in computer vision competitions, and co-founder and CTO of Analytical
5 Mar 202041min
NLP for Mapping Physics Research with Matteo Chinazzi - #353
Predicting the future of science, particularly physics, is the task that Matteo Chinazzi, an associate research scientist at Northeastern University focused on in his paper Mapping the Physics Research Space: a Machine Learning Approach. In addition to predicting the trajectory of physics research, Matteo is also active in the computational epidemiology field. His work in that area involves building simulators that can model the spread of diseases like Zika or the seasonal flu at a global scale.
2 Mar 202035min
Metric Elicitation and Robust Distributed Learning with Sanmi Koyejo - #352
The unfortunate reality is that many of the most commonly used machine learning metrics don't account for the complex trade-offs that come with real-world decision making. This is one of the challenges that Sanmi Koyejo, assistant professor at the University of Illinois, has dedicated his research to address. Sanmi applies his background in cognitive science, probabilistic modeling, and Bayesian inference to pursue his research which focuses broadly on “adaptive and robust machine learning.”
27 Feb 202056min
High-Dimensional Robust Statistics with Ilias Diakonikolas - #351
Today we’re joined by Ilias Diakonikolas, faculty in the CS department at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and author of the paper Distribution-Independent PAC Learning of Halfspaces with Massart Noise, recipient of the NeurIPS 2019 Outstanding Paper award. The paper is regarded as the first progress made around distribution-independent learning with noise since the 80s. In our conversation, we explore robustness in ML, problems with corrupt data in high-dimensional settings, and of course, the paper.
24 Feb 202036min
How AI Predicted the Coronavirus Outbreak with Kamran Khan - #350
Today we’re joined by Kamran Khan, founder & CEO of BlueDot, and professor of medicine and public health at the University of Toronto. BlueDot has been the recipient of a lot of attention for being the first to publicly warn about the coronavirus that started in Wuhan. How did the company’s system of algorithms and data processing techniques help flag the potential dangers of the disease? In our conversation, Kamran talks us through how the technology works, its limits, and the motivation behind the wor
19 Feb 202051min
Turning Ideas into ML Powered Products with Emmanuel Ameisen - #349
Today we’re joined by Emmanuel Ameisen, machine learning engineer at Stripe, and author of the recently published book “Building Machine Learning Powered Applications; Going from Idea to Product.” In our conversation, we discuss structuring end-to-end machine learning projects, debugging and explainability in the context of models, the various types of models covered in the book, and the importance of post-deployment monitoring.
17 Feb 202042min
Algorithmic Injustices and Relational Ethics with Abeba Birhane - #348
Today we’re joined by Abeba Birhane, PhD Student at University College Dublin and author of the recent paper Algorithmic Injustices: Towards a Relational Ethics, which was the recipient of the Best Paper award at the 2019 Black in AI Workshop at NeurIPS. In our conversation, break down the paper and the thought process around AI ethics, the “harm of categorization,” how ML generally doesn’t account for the ethics of various scenarios and how relational ethics could solve the issue, and much more.
13 Feb 202041min
