Machine Learning Platforms at Uber with Mike Del Balso - TWiML Talk #115

This week on the show my guest is Deep Varma, Vice President of Data Engineering at real estate startup Trulia. Deep has run data engineering teams in silicon valley for well over a decade, and is now responsible for the engineering efforts supporting Trulia’s Big Data Technology Platform, which encompasses everything from Data acquisition & management to Data Science & Algorithms. In the show we discuss all of that, with an emphasis on Trulia’s data engineering pipeline and their personalization platform, as well how they use computer vision, deep learning and natural language generation to deliver their product. Along the way, Deep offers great insights into what he calls offensive vs defensive data science, and the difference between data-driven decision making vs products. Another great interview, and i'm sure you’ll enjoy it. The notes for this show can be found at twimlai.com/talk/25 Subscribe! iTunes ➙ https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/this-week-in-machine-learning/id1116303051?mt=2 Soundcloud ➙ https://soundcloud.com/twiml Google Play ➙ http://bit.ly/2lrWlJZ Stitcher ➙ http://www.stitcher.com/s?fid=92079&refid=stpr RSS ➙ https://twimlai.com/feed Lets Connect! Twimlai.com ➙ https://twimlai.com/contact Twitter ➙ https://twitter.com/twimlai Facebook ➙ https://Facebook.com/Twimlai Medium ➙ https://medium.com/this-week-in-machine-learning-ai

26 Maj 201753min

My guest on the show this week is Danny Lange, VP for Machine Learning & AI at video game technology developer Unity Technologies. Danny is well traveled in the world of ML and AI, and has had a hand in developing machine learning platforms at companies like Uber, Amazon and Microsoft. In this conversation we cover a bunch of topics, including How ML & AI are being used in gaming, the importance of reinforcement learning in the future of game development, the intersection between AI and AR/VR and the next steps in natural character interaction. The notes for this show can be found at twimlai.com/talk/24

20 Maj 201754min

I think you’re really going to enjoy today’s show. Our guest this week is Dominique Simmons, Applied research Scientist at AI tools vendor Dimensional Mechanics. Dominique brings an interesting background in Cognitive Psychology and psycholinguistics to her work and research in AI and, well, to this podcast. In our conversation, we cover the implications of cognitive psychology for neural networks and AI systems, and in particular how an understanding of human cognition impacts the development of AI models for media applications. We also discuss her research into multimodal training of AI models, and how our understanding of the human brain has influenced this work. We also explore the debate around the biological plausibility of machine learning and AI models. It was a great conversation. The show notes can be found at twimlai.com/talk/23.

12 Maj 20171h

Today we bring you our final interview from backstage at the NYU FutureLabs AI Summit. Our guest this week is Matt Zeiler. Matt graduated from the University of Toronto where he worked with deep learning researcher Geoffrey Hinton and went on to earn his PhD in machine learning at NYU, home of Yann Lecun. In 2013 Matt’s founded Clarifai, a startup whose cloud-based visual recognition system gives developers a way to integrate visual identification into their own products, and whose initial image classification algorithm achieved top 5 results in that year’s ImageNet competition. I caught up with Matt after his talk “From Research to the Real World”. Our conversation focused on the birth and growth of Clarifai, as well as the underlying deep neural network architectures that enable it. If you’ve been listening to the show for a while, you’ve heard me ask several guests how they go about evolving the architectures of their deep neural networks to enhance performance. Well, in this podcast Matt gives the most satisfying answer I’ve received to date by far. Check it out. I think you’ll enjoy it. The show notes can be found at twimlai.com/talk/22.

5 Maj 201722min

Today we bring you the second of three interviews we did backstage from the NYU FutureLabs AI Summit, this time with Ruchir Puri. Ruchir is the Chief Architect at IBM Watson as well as an IBM Fellow. I caught up with Ruchir after his talk on “engineering the Future of AI for Businesses”. Our conversation focused on cognition and reasoning, and we explored what these concepts represent, how enterprises really want to consume them, and how IBM Watson seeks to deliver them. The show notes can be found at twimlai.com/talk/21.

28 Apr 201720min

This week's guest is Kathryn Hume. Kathryn is the President of Fast Forward Labs, which is an independent machine intelligence research company that helps organizations accelerate their data science and machine intelligence capabilities. If Fast Forward Labs sounds familiar, that's because we had their founder, Hilary Mason on a few months ago. We’ll link to that in the show notes. My discussion with Kathryn focused on AI adoption within the enterprise. She shared several really interesting examples of the kinds of things she’s seeing enterprises do with machine learning and AI, and we discussed a few of the various challenges enterprises face and some of the lessons her company has learned in helping them. I really enjoyed our conversation and I know you will too! You can find the notes for todays show here: https://twimlai.com/talk/20

21 Apr 201723min

This week my guest is Scott Stephenson. Scott is co-Founder & CEO of Deepgram, which has developed an AI-based platform for indexing and searching audio and video. Scott and I cover a ton of interesting topics including applying machine learning techniques to particle physics, his time in a lab 2 miles below the surface of the earth, applying neural networks to audio, and the Deep Learning Framework Kur that his company open-sourced. The show notes can be found at twimlai.com/talk/19.

14 Apr 201756min

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 AlphaVertex, a FinTech startup creating a worldwide financial knowledge graph to help investors predict stock prices. The notes for this series can be found at twimlai.com/nexuslab. Thanks to Future Labs at NYU Tandon and ffVenture Capital for sponsoring the series!

7 Apr 201726min