Cell Exploration with ML at the Allen Institute w/ Jianxu Chen - #383

This week on the podcast we’re featuring a series of conversations from the NIPs conference in Long Beach, California. I attended a bunch of talks and learned a ton, organized an impromptu roundtable on Building AI Products, and met a bunch of great people, including some former TWiML Talk guests. In this episode I sit down with Timnit Gebru, postdoctoral researcher at Microsoft Research in the Fairness, Accountability, Transparency and Ethics in AI, or FATE, group. Timnit is also one of the organizers behind the Black in AI group, which held a very interesting symposium and poster session at NIPS. I’ll link to the group’s page in the show notes. I’ve been following Timnit’s work for a while now and was really excited to get a chance to sit down with her and pick her brain. We packed a ton into this conversation, especially keying in on her recently released paper “Using Deep Learning and Google Street View to Estimate the Demographic Makeup of the US”. Timnit describes the pipeline she developed for this research, and some of the challenges she faced building and end-to-end model based on google street view images, census data and commercial car vendor data. We also discuss the role of social awareness in her work, including an explanation of how domain adaptation and fairness are related and her view of the major research directions in the domain of fairness. The notes for this show can be found at twimlai.com/talk/88 For series information, visit twimlai.com/nips2017

19 Dec 201732min

This week on the podcast we’re featuring a series of conversations from the AWS re:Invent conference in Las Vegas. I had a great time at this event getting caught up on the latest and greatest machine learning and AI products and services announced by AWS and its partners. Today we’re joined by Aaron Ames, Professor of Mechanical & Civil Engineering at Caltech. Aaron joined me before his talk at the Deep Learning Summit “Eye, Robot: Computer Vision and Autonomous Robotics” and I had a ton of questions for him. While he considers himself a “hardware guy”, we got into a great discussion centered around the intersection of Robotics and ML Inference. We cover a range of topics, including Boston Dynamics backflipping robot (If you haven't seen it, check out the show notes), Humanoid Robotics, His work on motion primitives and transitions and he even gives us a few predictions on the future of robotics.

15 Dec 201747min

This week on the podcast we’re featuring a series of conversations from the AWS re:Invent conference in Las Vegas. I had a great time at this event getting caught up on the latest and greatest machine learning and AI products and services announced by AWS and its partners. In this episode we’re joined by Chris Adzima, Senior Information Analyst for the Washington County Sheriff’s Department. While Chris is not a traditional data scientist, he comes to us with a very interesting use case using AWS’s Rekognition. Chris is using Rekognition to identify suspects in the Portland area by running their mugshots through the software. In our conversation, he details how he is using Rekognition, while giving us few use cases along the way. We discuss how bias affects the work he is doing, and how they try to remove it from their process, not only from a software developer standpoint, but from a law enforcement standpoint and what his next steps are with the Rekognition software. This was a pretty interesting discussion, i’m sure you’ll enjoy it!

14 Dec 201735min

This week on the podcast we’re featuring a series of conversations from the AWS re:Invent conference in Las Vegas. I had a great time at this event getting caught up on the latest and greatest machine learning and AI products and services announced by AWS and its partners. This time around we’re joined by Kristen Grauman, a professor in the department of computer science at UT Austin. Kristen specializes in Computer Vision and joined me leading up to her talk at the Deep Learning Summit “Learning where to look in video”. Kristen & I cover the details from her talk, like exploring how a vision system can learn how to move and where to look. Kristen considers how an embodied vision system can internalize the link between “how I move” and “what I see”, explore policies for learning to look around actively, and learn to mimic human videographer tendencies, automatically deciding where to look in unedited 360 degree video. The notes for this show can be found at twimlai.com/talk/85. For series details, visit twimlai.com/reinvent.

13 Dec 201739min

This week on the podcast we’re featuring a series of conversations from the AWS re:Invent conference in Las Vegas. I had a great time at this event getting caught up on the latest and greatest machine learning and AI products and services announced by AWS and its partners. In this episode, I’ll be speaking with Nikita Shamgunov, co-founder and CEO of MemSQL, a company offering a distributed, memory-optimized data warehouse of the same name. Nikita and I take a deep dive into some of the features of their recently released 6.0 version, which supports built-in vector operations like dot product and euclidean distance to enable machine learning use cases like real-time image recognition, visual search and predictive analytics for IoT. We also discuss how to architect enterprise machine learning solutions around the data warehouse by including components like data lakes and Spark. Finally, we touch on some of the performance advantages MemSQL has seen by implementing vector operations using Intel’s latest AVX2 and AVX512 instruction sets. Make sure you check out the show notes at twimlai.com/talk/84

12 Dec 201739min

This week on the podcast we’re featuring a series of conversations from the AWS re:Invent conference in Las Vegas. I had a great time at this event getting caught up on the latest and greatest machine learning and AI products and services announced by AWS and its partners. If you missed the news coming out of re:Invent and want to know more about what one of the biggest AI platform providers is up to, you’ll want to say tuned, because we’ll discuss many of their new offerings in this episode, a Roundtable discussion I held with Dave McCrory VP of Software Engineering at Wise.io at GE Digital and Lawrence Chung, engagement lead at ThingLogix. We cover all of AWS’ most important news, including the new SageMaker and DeepLens, their Rekognition and Transcription services, Alexa for Business, GreenGrass ML and more. This kind of discussion is something a little new for the show, and is a bit reminiscent of my days covering news here on the podcast, so I hope you enjoy it!

11 Dec 20171h 6min

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