Linear Digressions

Not sure if you heard, but there's an election going on right now. Polls, surveys, and projections about, as far as the eye can see. How to make sense of it all? How are the projections made? Whic...

1 Aug 201628min

Genomics data is some of the biggest #bigdata, and doing machine learning on it is unlocking new ways of thinking about evolution, genomic diseases like cancer, and what really makes each of us differ...

25 Jul 201620min

Hot enough for you? Climate models suggest that it's only going to get warmer in the coming years. This episode unpacks those models, so you understand how they work. A lot of the episodes we do ...

18 Jul 201619min

Last week’s episode on artificial intelligence gets a huge payoff this week—we’ll explore a wonderful couple of papers about all the ways that artificial intelligence can go wrong. Malevolent actors?...

11 Jul 201628min

There’s a ton of excitement about reinforcement learning, a form of semi-supervised machine learning that underpins a lot of today’s cutting-edge artificial intelligence algorithms. Here’s a crash co...

3 Jul 201618min

Apple wants to study iPhone users' activities and use it to improve performance. Google collects data on what people are doing online to try to improve their Chrome browser. Do you like the idea of ...

27 Jun 201618min

Something a little different in this episode--we'll be talking about the technical plumbing that gets our podcast from our brains to your ears. As it turns out, it's a multi-step bucket brigade proce...

20 Jun 201629min

Machine learning on imbalanced classes: surprisingly tricky. Many (most?) algorithms tend to just assign the majority class label to all the data and call it a day. SMOTE is an algorithm for manufac...

13 Jun 201614min