Understanding Collective Insect Communication with ML, w/ Orit Peleg - #590

In this episode, I’m joined by Kiran Vajapey, a human-computer interaction developer at Figure Eight. In this interview, Kiran shares some of what he’s has learned through his work developing applications for data collection and annotation at Figure Eight and earlier in his career. We explore techniques like data augmentation, domain adaptation, and active and transfer learning for enhancing and enriching training datasets. We also touch on the use of Imagenet and other public datasets for real-world AI applications. If you like what you hear in this interview, Kiran will be speaking at my AI Summit April 30th and May 1st in Las Vegas and I’ll be joining Kiran at the upcoming Figure Eight TrainAI conference, May 9th&10th in San Francisco. The notes for this show can be found at twimlai.com/talk/130

23 Apr 201840min

Ok, In this episode, I'm joined by Christopher Lum, Research Assistant Professor in the University of Washington’s Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics. Chris also co-heads the University’s Autonomous Flight Systems Lab, where he and his students are working on the guidance, navigation, and control of unmanned systems. In our conversation, we discuss some of the technical and regulatory challenges of building and deploying Unmanned Autonomous Systems. We also talk about some interesting work he’s doing on evolutionary path planning systems as well as an Precision Agriculture use case. Finally, Chris shares some great starting places for those looking to begin a journey into autonomous systems research. The notes for this show can be found at twimlai.com/talk/129.

19 Apr 201852min

In this episode, I’m joined by Missy Cummings, head of Duke University’s Humans and Autonomy Lab and professor in the department of mechanical engineering. In addition to being an accomplished researcher, Missy also became one of the first female fighter pilots in the US Navy following the repeal of the Combat Exclusion Policy in 1993. We discuss Missy’s research into the infrastructural and operational challenges presented by autonomous vehicles, including cars, drones and unmanned aircraft. We also cover trust, explainability, and interactions between humans and AV systems. This was an awesome interview and i'm glad we’re able to bring it to you! The notes for this show can be found at twimlai.com/talk/128.

16 Apr 201843min

In this episode, we're joined by Rob Walker, Vice President of decision management and analytics at Pegasystems, a leading provider of software for customer engagement and operational excellence. Rob and I discuss what’s required for enterprises to fully realize the vision of providing a hyper-personalized customer experience, and how machine learning and AI can be used to determine the next best action an organization should take to optimize sales, service, retention, and risk at every step in the customer relationship. Along the way we dig into a couple of key areas, specifically some of the techniques his organization uses to allow customers to manage the tradeoff between model performance and transparency, particularly in light of new laws like GDPR, and how all this ties to an enterprise’s ability to manage bias and ethical issues when deploying ML. We cover a lot of ground in this one and I think you’ll find Rob’s perspective really interesting. The notes for this show can be found at twimlai.com/talk/127.

12 Apr 201841min

In this episode, I’m joined by David Rosenberg, data scientist in the office of the CTO at financial publisher Bloomberg, to discuss his work on “Extracting Data from Tables and Charts in Natural Document Formats.” Bloomberg is dealing with tons of financial and company data in pdfs and other unstructured document formats on a daily basis. To make meaning from this information more efficiently, David and his team have implemented a deep learning pipeline for extracting data from the documents. In our conversation, we dig into the information extraction process, including how it was built, how they sourced their training data, why they used LaTeX as an intermediate representation and how and why they optimize on pixel-perfect accuracy. There’s a lot of interesting info in this show and I think you’re going to enjoy it. The notes for this show can be found at twimlai.com/talk/126.

9 Apr 201845min

In this episode, I chat with Rob Munro, CTO of the newly branded Figure Eight, formerly known as CrowdFlower. Figure Eight’s Human-in-the-Loop AI platform supports data science & machine learning teams working on autonomous vehicles, consumer product identification, natural language processing, search relevance, intelligent chatbots, and more. Rob and I had a really interesting discussion covering some of the work he’s previously done applying machine learning to disaster response and epidemiology, including a use case involving text translation in the wake of the catastrophic 2010 Haiti earthquake. We also dig into some of the technical challenges that he’s encountered in trying to scale the human-in-the-loop side of machine learning since joining Figure Eight, including identifying more efficient approaches to image annotation as well as the use of zero shot machine learning to minimize training data requirements. Finally, we briefly discuss Figure Eight’s upcoming TrainAI conference, which takes place on May 9th & 10th in San Francisco. Train AI you can join me and Rob, along with a host of amazing speakers like Garry Kasparov, Andrej Karpathy, Marti Hearst and many more and receive hands-on AI, machine learning and deep learning training through real-world case studies on practical machine learning applications. For more information on TrainAI, head over to figure-eight.com/train-ai, and be sure to use code TWIMLAI for 30% off your registration! For those of you listening to this on or before April 6th, Figure Eight is offering an even better deal on event registration. Use the code figure-eight to register for only 88 dollars. The notes for this show can be found at twimlai.com/talk/125.

5 Apr 201848min

In this episode I’m joined by Jeff Dean, Google Senior Fellow and head of the company’s deep learning research team Google Brain, who I had a chance to sit down with last week at the Googleplex in Mountain View. As you’ll hear, I was very excited for this interview, because so many of Jeff’s contributions since he started at Google in ‘99 have touched my life and work. In our conversation, Jeff and I dig into a bunch of the core machine learning innovations we’ve seen from Google. Of course we discuss TensorFlow, and its origins and evolution at Google. We also explore AI acceleration hardware, including TPU v1, v2 and future directions from Google and the broader market in this area. We talk through the machine learning toolchain, including some things that Googlers might take for granted, and where the recently announced Cloud AutoML fits in. We also discuss Google’s process for mapping problems across a variety of domains to deep learning, and much, much more. This was definitely one of my favorite conversations, and I'm pumped to be able to share it with you. The notes for this show can be found at twimlai.com/talk/124.

2 Apr 201854min

In this episode I’m joined by Lyne Tchapmi, PhD student in the Stanford Computational Vision and Geometry Lab, to discuss her paper, “SEGCloud: Semantic Segmentation of 3D Point Clouds.” SEGCloud is an end-to-end framework that performs 3D point-level segmentation combining the advantages of neural networks, trilinear interpolation and fully connected conditional random fields. In our conversation, Lyne and I cover the ins and outs of semantic segmentation, starting from the sensor data that we’re trying to segment, 2d vs 3d representations of that data, and how we go about automatically identifying classes. Along the way we dig into some of the details, including how she obtained a more fine grain labeling of points from sensor data and the transition from point clouds to voxels. The notes for this show can be found at twimlai.com/talk/123.

29 Mars 201836min