Applying RL to Real-World Robotics with Abhishek Gupta - #466

Today we’re joined by Gurdeep Pall, Corporate Vice President at Microsoft. Gurdeep, who we had the pleasure of speaking with on his 31st anniversary at the company, has had a hand in creating quite a few influential projects, including Skype for business (and Teams) and being apart of the first team that shipped wifi as a part of a general-purpose operating system. In our conversation with Gurdeep, we discuss Microsoft’s acquisition of Bonsai and how they fit in the toolchain for creating brains for autonomous systems with “machine teaching,” and other practical applications of machine teaching in autonomous systems. We also explore the challenges of simulation, and how they’ve evolved to make the problems that the physical world brings more tenable. Finally, Gurdeep shares concrete use cases for autonomous systems, and how to get the best ROI on those investments, and of course, what’s next in the very broad space of autonomous systems. The complete show notes for this episode can be found at twimlai.com/go/450.

25 Jan 202153min

Today we’re joined by Bryan Carstens, a professor in the Department of Evolution, Ecology, and Organismal Biology & Head of the Tetrapod Division in the Museum of Biological Diversity at The Ohio State University. In our conversation with Bryan, who comes from a traditional biology background, we cover a ton of ground, including a foundational layer of understanding for the vast known unknowns in species and biodiversity, and how he came to apply machine learning to his lab’s research. We explore a few of his lab’s projects, including applying ML to genetic data to understand the geographic and environmental structure of DNA, what factors keep machine learning from being used more frequently used in biology, and what’s next for his group. The complete show notes for this episode can be found at twimlai.com/go/449.

21 Jan 202135min

Today we’re joined by Jason Gauci, a Software Engineering Manager at Facebook AI. In our conversation with Jason, we explore their Reinforcement Learning platform, Re-Agent (Horizon). We discuss the role of decision making and game theory in the platform and the types of decisions they’re using Re-Agent to make, from ranking and recommendations to their eCommerce marketplace. Jason also walks us through the differences between online/offline and on/off policy model training, and where Re-Agent sits in this spectrum. Finally, we discuss the concept of counterfactual causality, and how they ensure safety in the results of their models. The complete show notes for this episode can be found at twimlai.com/go/448.

18 Jan 20211h 1min

Today we’re joined by Saiph Savage, a Visiting professor at the Human-Computer Interaction Institute at CMU, director of the HCI Lab at WVU, and co-director of the Civic Innovation Lab at UNAM. We caught up with Saiph during NeurIPS where she delivered an insightful invited talk “A Future of Work for the Invisible Workers in A.I.”. In our conversation with Saiph, we gain a better understanding of the “Invisible workers,” or the people doing the work of labeling for machine learning and AI systems, and some of the issues around lack of economic empowerment, emotional trauma, and other issues that arise with these jobs. We discuss ways that we can empower these workers, and push the companies that are employing these workers to do the same. Finally, we discuss Saiph’s participatory design work with rural workers in the global south. The complete show notes for this episode can be found at twimlai.com/go/447.

14 Jan 202138min

Today we’re back with the final episode of AI Rewind joined by Michael Bronstein, a professor at Imperial College London and the Head of Graph Machine Learning at Twitter. In our conversation with Michael, we touch on his thoughts about the year in Machine Learning overall, including GPT-3 and Implicit Neural Representations, but spend a major chunk of time on the sub-field of Graph Machine Learning.  We talk through the application of Graph ML across domains like physics and bioinformatics, and the tools to look out for. Finally, we discuss what Michael thinks is in store for 2021, including graph ml applied to molecule discovery and non-human communication translation.

11 Jan 20211h 14min

Today we continue the 2020 AI Rewind series, joined by friend of the show Sameer Singh, an Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science at UC Irvine.  We last spoke with Sameer at our Natural Language Processing office hours back at TWIMLfest, and was the perfect person to help us break down 2020 in NLP. Sameer tackles the review in 4 main categories, Massive Language Modeling, Fundamental Problems with Language Models, Practical Vulnerabilities with Language Models, and Evaluation.  We also explore the impact of GPT-3 and Transformer models, the intersection of vision and language models, and the injection of causal thinking and modeling into language models, and much more. The complete show notes for this episode can be found at twimlai.com/go/445.

7 Jan 20211h 21min

AI Rewind continues today as we’re joined by Pavan Turaga, Associate Professor in both the Departments of Arts, Media, and Engineering & Electrical Engineering, and the Interim Director of the School of Arts, Media, and Engineering at Arizona State University. Pavan, who joined us back in June to talk through his work from CVPR ‘20, Invariance, Geometry and Deep Neural Networks, is back to walk us through the trends he’s seen in Computer Vision last year. We explore the revival of physics-based thinking about scenes, differential rendering, the best papers, and where the field is going in the near future. We want to hear from you! Send your thoughts on the year that was 2020 below in the comments, or via Twitter at @samcharrington or @twimlai. The complete show notes for this episode can be found at twimlai.com/go/444

4 Jan 20211h 9min

Today we kick off our annual AI Rewind series joined by friend of the show Pablo Samuel Castro, a Staff Research Software Developer at Google Brain. Pablo joined us earlier this year for a discussion about Music & AI, and his Geometric Perspective on Reinforcement Learning, as well our RL office hours during the inaugural TWIMLfest. In today’s conversation, we explore some of the latest and greatest RL advancements coming out of the major conferences this year, broken down into a few major themes, Metrics/Representations, Understanding and Evaluating Deep Reinforcement Learning, and RL in the Real World. This was a very fun conversation, and we encourage you to check out all the great papers and other resources available on the show notes page.

30 Dec 20201h 26min