Vision Systems for Planetary Landers and Drones with Larry Matthies - TWiML Talk #171

This week on the podcast we’re running a series of shows consisting of conversations with some of the impressive speakers from an event called the AI Summit in New York City. The theme of the conference, and the series, is AI in the Enterprise, and I think you’ll find it really interesting in that it includes a mix of both technical and case-study-oriented discussions. To close out our AI Summit New York Series, I speak with Sherif Mityas, head of Technology, Digital and Strategy at restaurant chain TGI Fridays. Sherif joins us to discuss how Fridays is utilizing conversational AI to enhance customer loyalty. Sherif wants Friday’s to be known as a tech company that happens to sell burgers and beer, and in this conversation we get an in-depth look at the technology landscape they’ve put in place to move the company in this direction. Sherif also shares some of the things on the horizon for Friday’s, as well as some of what they’ve learned along the way. Be sure to share your feedback or questions on the show notes page, which you’ll find at twimlai.com/talk/82.

8 Dec 201736min

This week on the podcast we’re running a series of shows consisting of conversations with some of the impressive speakers from an event called the AI Summit in New York City. The theme of the conference, and the series, is AI in the Enterprise, and I think you’ll find it really interesting in that it includes a mix of both technical and case-study-oriented discussions. Today’s show continues our discussion of enterprise AI, with a conversation with Thierry Derungs, Chief Digital Officer at BNP Paribas, a multinational bank headquartered in Paris. Thierry joined me to discuss how BNP uses AI and some of the opportunities that have arisen with the changing AI landscape. We also discuss the innovation process that BNP has used to introduce AI to the bank, via what they call innovation incubators or “factories”. The notes for this show can be found at twimlai.com/talk/81.

7 Dec 201740min

The show is part of a series that I’m really excited about, in part because I’ve been working to bring them to you for quite a while now. The focus of the series is a sampling of the interesting work being done over at OpenAI, the independent AI research lab founded by Elon Musk, Sam Altman and others. In this show I’m joined by Jonas Schneider, Robotics Technical Team Lead at OpenAI. This episode features Durk Kingma, a Research Scientist at OpenAI. Although Durk is probably best known for his pioneering work on variational autoencoders, he joined me this time to talk through his latest project on block sparse kernels, which OpenAI just published this week. Block sparsity is a property of certain neural network representations, and OpenAI’s work on developing block sparse kernels helps make it more computationally efficient to take advantage of them. In addition to covering block sparse kernels themselves and the background required to understand them, we also discuss why they’re important and walk through some examples of how they can be used. I’m happy to present another fine Nerd Alert show to close out this OpenAI Series, and I know you’ll enjoy it! To find the notes for this show, visit twimlai.com/talk/80 For more info on this series, visit twimlai.com/openai

7 Dec 201744min

This week on the podcast we’re running a series of shows consisting of conversations with some of the impressive speakers from an event called the AI Summit in New York City. The theme of the conference, and the series, is AI in the Enterprise, and I think you’ll find it really interesting in that it includes a mix of both technical and case-study-oriented discussions. Today I'm joined by Brian Gross, Head of Digital Innovation for the Mexico City-based airline AeroMexico. AeroMexico is using AI techniques like neural nets to build a chatbot that responds to its customer’s inquiries. In our conversation, Brian describes how he views the chatbot landscape, shares his thoughts on the platform requirements that established enterprises like AeroMexico have for chatbots, and describes how AeroMexico plans to stay ahead of the curve. Be sure post any feedback or questions you may have to the show notes page, which you’ll find at twimlai.com/talk/79. For more info on this series, visit twimlai.com/aisummit.

6 Dec 201729min

This week on the podcast we’re running a series of shows consisting of conversations with some of the impressive speakers from an event called the AI Summit in New York City. The theme of the conference, and the series, is AI in the Enterprise, and I think you’ll find it really interesting in that it includes a mix of both technical and case-study-oriented discussions. My guest this time around is Mazin Gilbert, vice president of advanced technology & architecture with AT&T. Mazin and I have a really interesting discussion on what’s really required to scale AI in the enterprise, and you’ll learn about a new open source project that AT&T is working on to allow any enterprise to do this. You already know by now that I geek out when it comes to talking about the intersection of machine learning and cloud computing, and this conversation is no exception. Be sure to let us know what you think by posting your comments or questions to the show notes page at twimlai.com/talk/78. For more info on this series, visit twimlai.com/aisummit

5 Dec 201749min

This week on the podcast we’re running a series of shows consisting of conversations with some of the impressive speakers from an event called the AI Summit in New York City. The theme of the conference, and the series, is AI in the Enterprise, and I think you’ll find it really interesting in that it includes a mix of both technical and case-study-oriented discussions. My guest for this first show in the series is, Hillery Hunter, IBM Fellow & Director of the Accelerated Cognitive Infrastructure group at IBM’s T.J. Watson Research Center. Hillery and I met a few weeks back in New York and I'm really glad that we were able to get her on the show. Hillery joins us to discuss her team's research into distributed deep learning, which was recently released as the PowerAI Distributed Deep Learning Communication Library or DDL. In my conversation with Hillery, we discuss the purpose and technical architecture of the DDL, it’s ability to offer fully synchronous distributed training of deep learning models, the advantages of its Multi-Ring Topology, and much more. This is for sure a nerd alert pod, especially for the performance and hardware geeks among us . Be sure post any feedback or questions you may have to the show notes page, which you’ll find at twimlai.com/talk/77. For more info on this series, visit twimlai.com/aisummit

4 Dec 201738min

The show is part of a series that I’m really excited about, in part because I’ve been working to bring them to you for quite a while now. The focus of the series is a sampling of the interesting work being done over at OpenAI, the independent AI research lab founded by Elon Musk, Sam Altman and others. In this show I’m joined by Jonas Schneider, Robotics Technical Team Lead at OpenAI. While in San Francisco a few months ago, I spent some time with Jonas at the OpenAI office, during which we covered a lot of interesting ground around OpenAI’s work in robotics. We discuss OpenAI Gym, which was the first project he worked on at OpenAI, as well as how they approach setting up the infrastructure for their experimental work, including how they’ve set up a Robots-as-a-Service environment for their researchers and how they use the open source Kubernetes project to manage their compute environment. Check it out and let us know what you think! To find the notes for this show, visit twimlai.com/talk/76 For more info on this series, visit twimlai.com/openai

1 Dec 201745min

The show is part of a series that I’m really excited about, in part because I’ve been working to bring them to you for quite a while now. The focus of the series is a sampling of the interesting work being done over at OpenAI, the independent AI research lab founded by Elon Musk, Sam Altman and others. In this episode i'm joined by Dario Amodei, Team Lead for Safety Research at OpenAI. While in San Francisco a few months ago, I spent some time at the OpenAI office, during which I sat down with Dario to chat about the work happening at OpenAI around AI safety. Dario and I dive into the two areas of AI safety that he and his team are focused on--robustness and alignment. We also touch on his research with the Google DeepMind team, the OpenAI Universe tool, and how human interactions can be incorporated into reinforcement learning models. This was a great conversation, and along with the other shows in this series, this is a nerd alert show! To find the notes for this show, visit twimlai.com/talk/75 For more info on this series, visit twimlai.com/openai

30 Nov 201736min