A Technical Deep Dive on Stanley, the First Self-Driving Car
This is a re-release of an episode that first ran on April 9, 2017. In our follow-up episode to last week's introduction to the first self-driving car, we will be doing a technical deep dive this wee...
12 Aug 201941min
An Introduction to Stanley, the First Self-Driving Car
In October 2005, 23 cars lined up in the desert for a 140 mile race. Not one of those cars had a driver. This was the DARPA grand challenge to see if anyone could build an autonomous vehicle capable...
5 Aug 201914min
Putting the "science" in data science: the scientific method, the null hypothesis, and p-hacking
The modern scientific method is one of the greatest (perhaps the greatest?) system we have for discovering knowledge about the world. It’s no surprise then that many data scientists have found their s...
29 Jul 201924min
Interleaving
If you’re Google or Netflix, and you have a recommendation or search system as part of your bread and butter, what’s the best way to test improvements to your algorithm? A/B testing is the canonical a...
22 Jul 201916min
Federated Learning
This is a re-release of an episode first released in May 2017. As machine learning makes its way into more and more mobile devices, an interesting question presents itself: how can we have an algorit...
14 Jul 201915min
Endogenous Variables and Measuring Protest Effectiveness
This is a re-release of an episode first released in February 2017. Have you been out protesting lately, or watching the protests, and wondered how much effect they might have on lawmakers? It's a t...
7 Jul 201917min
Deepfakes
Generative adversarial networks (GANs) are producing some of the most realistic artificial videos we’ve ever seen. These videos are usually called “deepfakes”. Even to an experienced eye, it can be a ...
1 Jul 201915min
Revisiting Biased Word Embeddings
The topic of bias in word embeddings gets yet another pass this week. It all started a few years ago, when an analogy task performed on Word2Vec embeddings showed some indications of gender bias aroun...
24 Jun 201918min
