AI for Enterprise Decisioning at Scale with Rob Walker - #573

My guest for this show is Rana el Kaliouby. Rana is co-founder and CEO of Affectiva. Affectiva, as Rana puts it, "is on a mission to humanize technology by bringing in artificial emotional intelligence". If you liked my conversation about Emotional AI with Pascale Fung from last year’s O’Reilly AI conference, you’re going to love this one. My conversation with Rana kind of picks up where the previous one left off, with a focus on how her company is bringing Artificial Emotional Intelligence services to market. Rana and her team have developed a machine learning / computer vision platform that can use the camera on any device to read your facial expressions in real time, then maps it to an emotional state. Using data science to mine the world’s largest emotion repository, Affectiva has collected over 5.5 million pieces of emotional expression data to date, from laptop, driving, cellular interactions. Understanding the importance of personal privacy, Rana and her Co-Founder Rosalind Wright Picard have vowed to shy away from partnerships that would subject consumers to unknowing surveillance, a commendable effort. The notes for this show can be found at https://twimlai.com/talk/35

5 Juli 201733min

Our guest this week is Zornitsa Kozareva, Manager of Machine Learning with Amazon Web Services Deep Learning, where she leads a group focused on natural language processing and dialogue systems for products like Alexa and Lex, the latter of which we introduce in the podcast. We spend most of our time talking through the architecture of modern Natural Language Understanding systems, including the role of deep learning, and some of the various ways folks are working to overcome the challenges in this field, such as understanding human intent. If you’re interested in this field she mentions the AWS Chatbot Challenge, which you’ve still got a couple more weeks to participate in. The notes for this show can be found at twimlai.com/talk/30.

29 Juni 201755min

This week we continue our series on industrial applications of machine learning and AI with a conversation with Chelsea Finn, a PhD student at UC Berkeley. Chelsea’s research is focused on machine learning for robotic perception and control. Despite being early in her career, Chelsea is an accomplished researcher with more than 14 published papers in the past 2 years, on subjects like Deep Visual Foresight , Model-Agnostic Meta-Learning and Visuomotor Learning to name a few, all of which we discuss in the show, along with topics like zero-shot, one-shot and few-shot learning. I’d also like to give a shout out to Shreyas, a listener who wrote in to request that we interview a current PhD student about their journey and experiences. Chelsea and I spend some time at the end of the interview talking about this, and she has some great advice for current and prospective PhD students but also independent learners in the field. During this part of the discussion I wonder out loud if any listeners would be interested in forming a virtual paper reading club of some sort. I’m not sure yet exactly what this would look like, but please drop a comment in the show notes if you’re interested. I'm going to once again deploy the Nerd Alert for this episode; Chelsea and I really dig deep into these learning methods and techniques, and this conversation gets pretty technical at times, to the point that I had a tough time keeping up myself. The notes for this page can be found at twimlai.com/talk/29

23 Juni 201754min

This week our guest is Pieter Abbeel, Assistant Professor at UC Berkeley, Research Scientist at OpenAI, and Cofounder of Gradescope. Pieter has an extensive background in AI research, going way back to his days as Andrew Ng’s first PhD student at Stanford. His research today is focused on deep learning for robotics. During this conversation, Pieter and I really dig into reinforcement learning, a technique for allowing robots (or AIs) to learn through their own trial and error. Nerd alert!! This conversation explores cutting edge research with one of the leading researchers in the field and, as a result, it gets pretty technical at times. I try to uplevel it when I can keep up myself, so hang in there. I promise that you’ll learn a ton if you keep with it. The notes for this show can be found at twimlai.com/talk/28

17 Juni 201752min

Our first guest in the Industrial AI series is Ilia Baranov, engineering manager at Clearpath Robotics. Ilia is responsible for setting the engineering direction for all of Clearpath’s research platforms. Ilia likes to describe his role at the company as “both enabling and preventing the robot revolution.” He’s a longtime contributor to the Open Source Robotics Community and ROS, an open source robotic operating system. He is the also the managing engineer of the PR2 support team at Clearpath and leads the technical demonstration group. In our conversation we cover a lot of ground, including what it really means to field autonomous robots, the use of autonomous robots in research and industrial environments, the different approaches and challenges to achieving autonomy, and much more! The notes for this show are available at twimlai.com/talk/27, and for more information on the Industrial AI Series, visit twimlai.com/IndustrialAI.

9 Juni 201753min

This week I’ve invited my friend Ben Lorica onto the show. Ben is Chief Data Scientist for O’Reilly Media, and Program Director of Strata Data & the O'Reilly A.I. conference. Ben has worked on analytics and machine learning in the finance and retail industries, and serves as an advisor for nearly a dozen startups. In his role at O’Reilly he’s responsible for the content for 7 major conferences around the world each year. In the show we discuss all of that, touching on how publishers can take advantage of machine learning and data mining, how the role of “data scientist” is evolving and the emergence of the machine learning engineer, and a few of the hot technologies, trends and companies that he’s seeing arise around the world. The notes for this show can be found at twimlai.com/talk/26

2 Juni 201754min

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