Multimodal, Multi-Lingual NLP at Hugging Face with John Bohannon and Douwe Kiela - #589

Today we’re joined by Melanie Mitchell, Davis Professor at the Santa Fe Institute and author of Artificial Intelligence: A Guide for Thinking Humans.  While Melanie has had a long career with a myriad of research interests, we focus on a few, complex systems and the understanding of intelligence, complexity, and her recent work on getting AI systems to make analogies. We explore examples of social learning, and how it applies to AI contextually, and defining intelligence.  We discuss potential frameworks that would help machines understand analogies, established benchmarks for analogy, and if there is a social learning solution to help machines figure out analogy. Finally we talk through the overall state of AI systems, the progress we’ve made amid the limited concept of social learning, if we’re able to achieve intelligence with current approaches to AI, and much more! The complete show notes for this episode can be found at twimlai.com/go/464.

15 Mars 202132min

Today we’re joined by Adriana Kovashka, an Assistant Professor at the University of Pittsburgh. In our conversation with Adriana, we explore her visual commonsense research, and how it intersects with her background in media studies. We discuss the idea of shortcuts, or faults in visual question answering data sets that appear in many SOTA results, as well as the concept of masking, a technique developed to assist in context prediction. Adriana then describes how these techniques fit into her broader goal of trying to understand the rhetoric of visual advertisements.  Finally, Adriana shares a bit about her work on robust visual reasoning, the parallels between this research and other work happening around explainability, and the vision for her work going forward.  The complete show notes for this episode can be found at twimlai.com/go/463.

11 Mars 202141min

Today we’re joined by Nishan Subedi, VP of Algorithms at Overstock.com. In our conversation with Nishan, we discuss his interesting path to MLOps and how ML/AI is used at Overstock, primarily for search/recommendations and marketing/advertisement use cases. We spend a great deal of time exploring machine learning architecture and architectural patterns, how he perceives the differences between architectural patterns and algorithms, and emergent architectural patterns that standards have not yet been set for. Finally, we discuss how the idea of anti-patterns was innovative in early design pattern thinking and if those concepts are transferable to ML, if architectural patterns will bleed over into organizational patterns and culture, and Nishan introduces us to the concept of Squads within an organizational structure. The complete show notes for this episode can be found at https://twimlai.com/go/462.

8 Mars 202157min

Today we’re joined by Vered Shwartz, a Postdoctoral Researcher at both the Allen Institute for AI and the Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering at the University of Washington. In our conversation with Vered, we explore her NLP research, where she focuses on teaching machines common sense reasoning in natural language. We discuss training using GPT models and the potential use of multimodal reasoning and incorporating images to augment the reasoning capabilities. Finally, we talk through some other noteworthy research in this field, how she deals with biases in the models, and Vered's future plans for incorporating some of the newer techniques into her future research. The complete show notes for this episode can be found at https://twimlai.com/go/461.

4 Mars 202137min

Today we’re joined by returning guest and newly appointed Dean of the College of Engineering at The Ohio State University, Ayanna Howard.  Our conversation with Dr. Howard focuses on her recently released book, Sex, Race, and Robots: How to Be Human in the Age of AI, which is an extension of her research on the relationships between humans and robots. We continue to explore this relationship through the themes of socialization introduced in the book, like associating genders to AI and robotic systems and the “self-fulfilling prophecy” that has become search engines.  We also discuss a recurring conversation in the community around AI  being biased because of data versus models and data, and the choices and responsibilities that come with the ethical aspects of building AI systems. Finally, we discuss Dr. Howard’s new role at OSU, how it will affect her research, and what the future holds for the applied AI field.  The complete show notes for this episode can be found at https://twimlai.com/go/460.

1 Mars 202135min

Today we’re joined by returning guest and newly appointed Dean of the College of Engineering at The Ohio State University, Ayanna Howard.  Our conversation with Dr. Howard focuses on her recently released book, Sex, Race, and Robots: How to Be Human in the Age of AI, which is an extension of her research on the relationships between humans and robots. We continue to explore this relationship through the themes of socialization introduced in the book, like associating genders to AI and robotic systems and the “self-fulfilling prophecy” that has become search engines.  We also discuss a recurring conversation in the community around AI  being biased because of data versus models and data, and the choices and responsibilities that come with the ethical aspects of building AI systems. Finally, we discuss Dr. Howard’s new role at OSU, how it will affect her research, and what the future holds for the applied AI field.  The complete show notes for this episode can be found at https://twimlai.com/go/460.

1 Mars 202136min

Today we’re joined by Penousal Machado, Associate Professor and Head of the Computational Design and Visualization Lab in the Center for Informatics at the University of Coimbra.  In our conversation with Penousal, we explore his research in Evolutionary Computation, and how that work coincides with his passion for images and graphics. We also discuss the link between creativity and humanity, and have an interesting sidebar about the philosophy of Sci-Fi in popular culture.  Finally, we dig into Penousals evolutionary machine learning research, primarily in the context of the evolution of various animal species mating habits and practices. The complete show notes for this episode can be found at twimlai.com/go/459.

25 Feb 202157min

Today we’re joined by Arul Menezes, a Distinguished Engineer at Microsoft.  Arul, a 30 year veteran of Microsoft, manages the machine translation research and products in the Azure Cognitive Services group. In our conversation, we explore the historical evolution of machine translation like breakthroughs in seq2seq and the emergence of transformer models.  We also discuss how they’re using multilingual transfer learning and combining what they’ve learned in translation with pre-trained language models like BERT. Finally, we explore what they’re doing to experience domain-specific improvements in their models, and what excites Arul about the translation architecture going forward.  The complete show notes for this series can be found at twimlai.com/go/458.

22 Feb 202144min