Predicting Cardiovascular Risk Factors from Eye Images with Ryan Poplin - TWiML Talk #122
In this episode, I'm joined by Google Research Scientist Ryan Poplin, who recently co-authored the paper “Prediction of cardiovascular risk factors from retinal fundus photographs via deep learning.” In our conversation, Ryan details his work training a deep learning model to predict various patient risk factors for heart disease, including some surprising ones like age and gender. We also dive into some interesting findings he discovered with regards to multi-task learning, as well as his use of an attention mechanisms to provide explainability. This was a really interesting discussion that I think you’ll really enjoy! The notes for this show can be found at twimlai.com/talk/122.
26 Mars 201842min
Reproducibility and the Philosophy of Data with Clare Gollnick - TWiML Talk #121
In this episode, i'm joined by Clare Gollnick, CTO of Terbium Labs, to discuss her thoughts on the “reproducibility crisis” currently haunting the scientific landscape. For a little background, a “Nature” survey in 2016 showed that "more than 70% of researchers have tried and failed to reproduce another scientist's experiments, and more than half have failed to reproduce their own experiments." Clare gives us her take on the situation, and how it applies to data science, along with some great nuggets about the philosophy of data and a few interesting use cases as well. We also cover her thoughts on Bayesian vs Frequentist techniques and while we’re at it, the Vim vs Emacs debate. No, actually I’m just kidding on that last one. But this was indeed a very fun conversation that I think you’ll enjoy! For the complete show notes, visit twimlai.com/talk/121.
22 Mars 201838min
Surveying the Connected Car Landscape with GK Senthil - TWiML Talk #120
In this episode, I’m joined by GK Senthil, director & chief product owner for innovation at Toyota Connected. GK and I spoke about some of the potential opportunities and challenges for smart cars. We discussed Toyota’s recently announced partnership with Amazon to embed Alexa in vehicles, and more generally the approach they’re taking to get connected car technology up to par with smartphones and other intelligent devices we use on a daily basis. We cover in-car voice recognition and touch on the ways ML & AI need to be developed to be useful in vehicles, as well as the approaches to getting there. The notes for this show can be found at twimlai.com/talk/120
19 Mars 201830min
Adversarial Attacks Against Reinforcement Learning Agents with Ian Goodfellow & Sandy Huang
In this episode, I’m joined by Ian Goodfellow, Staff Research Scientist at Google Brain and Sandy Huang, Phd Student in the EECS department at UC Berkeley, to discuss their work on the paper Adversarial Attacks on Neural Network Policies. If you’re a regular listener here you’ve probably heard of adversarial attacks, and have seen examples of deep learning based object detectors that can be fooled into thinking that, for example, a giraffe is actually a school bus, by injecting some imperceptible noise into the image. Well, Sandy and Ian’s paper sits at the intersection of adversarial attacks and reinforcement learning, another area we’ve discussed quite a bit on the podcast. In their paper, they describe how adversarial attacks can also be effective at targeting neural network policies in reinforcement learning. Sandy gives us an overview of the paper, including how changing a single pixel value can throw off performance of a model trained to play Atari games. We also cover a lot of interesting topics relating to adversarial attacks and RL individually, and some related areas such as hierarchical reward functions and transfer learning. This was a great conversation that I’m really excited to bring to you! For complete show notes, head over to twimlai.com/talk/119
15 Mars 201847min
Towards Abstract Robotic Understanding with Raja Chatila - TWiML Talk #118
In this episode, we're joined by Raja Chatila, director of Intelligent Systems and Robotics at Pierre and Marie Curie University in Paris, and executive committee chair of the IEEE global initiative on ethics of intelligent and autonomous systems. Raja and I had a great chat about his research, which deals with robotic perception and discovery. We discuss the relationship between learning and discovery, particularly as it applies to robots and their environments, and the connection between robotic perception and action. We also dig into the concepts of affordances, abstract teachings, meta-reasoning and self-awareness as they apply to intelligent systems. Finally, we touch on the issue of values and ethics of these systems. The notes for this show can be found at twimlai.com/talk/118.
12 Mars 201847min
Discovering Exoplanets w/ Deep Learning with Chris Shallue - TWiML Talk #117
Earlier this week, I had a chance to speak with Chris Shallue, Senior Software Engineer on the Google Brain Team, about his project and paper on “Exploring Exoplanets with Deep Learning.” This is a great story. Chris, inspired by a book he was reading, reached out on a whim to a Harvard astrophysics researcher, kicking off a collaboration and side project eventually leading to the discovery of two new planets outside our solar system. In our conversation, we walk through the entire process Chris followed to find these two exoplanets, including how he researched the domain as an outsider, how he sourced and processed his dataset, and how he built and evolved his models. Finally, we discuss the results of his project and his plans for future work in this area. This podcast is being published in parallel with Google’s release of the source code and data that Chris developed and used, which we’ll link to below, so if what you hear inspires you to dig into this area, you’ve got a nice head start. This was a really interesting conversation, and I'm excited to share it with you! The notes for this show can be found at twimlai.com/talk/117 The corresponding blog post for this project can be found at https://research.googleblog.com/2018/03/open-sourcing-hunt-for-exoplanets.html
8 Mars 201845min
Learning Active Learning with Ksenia Konyushkova - TWiML Talk #116
In this episode, I speak with Ksenia Konyushkova, Ph.D. student in the CVLab at Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne in Switzerland. Ksenia and I connected at NIPS in December to discuss her interesting research into ways we might apply machine learning to ease the challenge of creating labeled datasets for machine learning. The first paper we discuss is “Learning Active Learning from Data,” which suggests a data-driven approach to active learning that trains a secondary model to identify the unlabeled data points which, when labeled, would likely have the greatest impact on our primary model’s performance. We also discuss her paper “Learning Intelligent Dialogs for Bounding Box Annotation,” in which she trains an agent to guide the actions of a human annotator to more quickly produce bounding boxes. TWiML Online Meetup Update Join us Tuesday, March 13th for the March edition of the Online Meetup! Sean Devlin will be doing an in-depth review of reinforcement learning and presenting the Google DeepMind paper, "Playing Atari with Deep Reinforcement Learning." Head over to twimlai.com/meetup to learn more or register. Conference Update Be sure to check out some of the great names that will be at the AI Conference in New York, Apr 29–May 2, where you'll join the leading minds in AI, Peter Norvig, George Church, Olga Russakovsky, Manuela Veloso, and Zoubin Ghahramani. Explore AI's latest developments, separate what's hype and what's really game-changing, and learn how to apply AI in your organization right now. Save 20% on most passes with discount code PCTWIML. Early price ends February 2! The notes for this show can be found at https://twimlai.com/talk/116.
5 Mars 201831min
Machine Learning Platforms at Uber with Mike Del Balso - TWiML Talk #115
In this episode, I speak with Mike Del Balso, Product Manager for Machine Learning Platforms at Uber. Mike and I sat down last fall at the Georgian Partners Portfolio conference to discuss his presentation “Finding success with machine learning in your company.” In our discussion, Mike shares some great advice for organizations looking to get value out of machine learning. He also details some of the pitfalls companies run into, such as not have proper infrastructure in place for maintenance and monitoring, not managing their expectations, and not putting the right tools in place for data science and development teams. On this last point, we touch on the Michelangelo platform, which Uber uses internally to build, deploy and maintain ML systems at scale, and the open source distributed TensorFlow system they’ve created, Horovod. This was a very insightful interview, so get your notepad ready! Vote on our #MyAI Contest! Over the past few weeks, you’ve heard us talk quite a bit about our #MyAI Contest, which explores the role we see for AI in our personal lives! We received some outstanding entries, and now it’s your turn to check them out and vote for a winner. Do this by visiting our contest page at https://twimlai.com/myai. Voting remains open until Sunday, March 4th at 11:59 PM Eastern time. Be sure to check out some of the great names that will be at the AI Conference in New York, Apr 29–May 2, where you'll join the leading minds in AI, Peter Norvig, George Church, Olga Russakovsky, Manuela Veloso, and Zoubin Ghahramani. Explore AI's latest developments, separate what's hype and what's really game-changing, and learn how to apply AI in your organization right now. Save 20% on most passes with discount code PCTWIML at twimlai.com/ainy2018. The notes for this show can be found at twimlai.com/talk/115.
1 Mars 201849min
