Chris and Daniel take the opportunity to catch up on some recent AI news. Among other things, they discuss the increasing impact of AI on studies of the ancient world and “good” uses of GANs. They also provide some more learning resources to help you level up your AI and machine learning game.

We’re talking with Joel Grus, author of Data Science from Scratch, 2nd Edition, senior research engineer at the Allen Institute for AI (AI2), and maintainer of AllenNLP. We discussed Joel’s book, which has become a personal favorite of the hosts, and why he decided to approach data science and AI “from scratch.” Joel also gives us a glimpse into AI2, an introduction to AllenNLP, and some tips for writing good research code. This episode is packed full of reproducible AI goodness!

Woo hoo! As we celebrate reaching episode 50, we come full circle to discuss the basics of neural networks. If you are just jumping into AI, then this is a great primer discussion with which to take that leap.

Our commitment to making artificial intelligence practical, productive, and accessible to everyone has never been stronger, so we invite you to join us for the next 50 episodes!

This week we bend reality to expose the deceptions of deepfake videos. We talk about what they are, why they are so dangerous, and what you can do to detect and resist their insidious influence. In a political environment rife with distrust, disinformation, and conspiracy theories, deepfakes are being weaponized and proliferated as the latest form of state-sponsored information warfare. Join us for an episode scarier than your favorite horror movie, because this AI bogeyman is real!

Interpreting complicated models is a hot topic. How can we trust and manage AI models that we can’t explain? In this episode, Janis Klaise, a data scientist with Seldon, joins us to talk about model interpretation and Seldon’s new open source project called Alibi. Janis also gives some of his thoughts on production ML/AI and how Seldon addresses related problems.

Daniel and Chris explore three potentially confusing topics - generative adversarial networks (GANs), deep reinforcement learning (DRL), and transfer learning. Are these types of neural network architectures? Are they something different? How are they used? Well, If you have ever wondered how AI can be creative, wished you understood how robots get their smarts, or were impressed at how some AI practitioners conquer big challenges quickly, then this is your episode!

Andreas Madsen, a freelance ML/AI engineer and Distill.pub author, joins us to discuss his work visualizing neural networks and recurrent neural units. Andreas discusses various neural unites, RNNs in general, and the “why” of neural network visualization. He also gives us his perspective on ML/AI freelancing and moving from web development to AI research.

Chris and Daniel take you on a tour of local and global AI events, and discuss how to get the most out of your experiences. From access to experts to developing new industry relationships, learn how to get your foot in the door and make connections that help you grow as an AI practitioner.

Then drawing from their own wealth of experience as speakers, they dive into what it takes to give a memorable world-class talk that your audience will love. They break down how to select the topic, write the abstract, put the presentation together, and deliver the narrative with impact!

Can AI help quantum physicists? Can quantum physicists help the AI community? The answers are yes and yes! Dr. Shohini Ghose from Wilfrid Laurier University and Marcus Edwards from the University of Waterloo join us to discuss ML/AI’s impact on physics and quantum computing potential for ML/AI.

This week Daniel and Chris discuss the announcements made recently at TensorFlow Dev Summit 2019. They kick it off with the alpha release of TensorFlow 2.0, which features eager execution and an improved user experience through Keras, which has been integrated into TensorFlow itself. They round out the list with TensorFlow Datasets, TensorFlow Addons, TensorFlow Extended (TFX), and the upcoming inaugural O’Reilly TensorFlow World conference.

No, this isn’t science fiction! CTRL-labs is using neural signals and AI to build neural interfaces. Adam Berenzweig, from CTRL-labs R&D, joins us to explain how this works and how they have made it practical.

Longtime listeners know that we’re always advocating for ‘AI for good’, but this week we have taken it to a whole new level. We had the privilege of chatting with James Hodson, Director of the AI for Good Foundation, about ways they have used artificial intelligence to positively-impact the world - from food production to climate change. James inspired us to find our own ways to use AI for good, and we challenge our listeners to get out there and do some good!

GIPHY’s head of R&D, Nick Hasty, joins us to discuss their recently released celebrity detector project. He gives us all of the details about that project, but he also tells us about GIPHY’s origins, AI in general at GIPHY, and more!

Being that this is “practical” AI, we decided that it would be good to take time to discuss various aspects of AI infrastructure. In this full-connected episode, we discuss our personal/local infrastructure along with trends in AI, including infra for training, serving, and data management.

Clément Delangue, the co-founder & CEO of Hugging Face, joined us to discuss fun, social, and conversational AI. Clem explained why social AI is important, what products they are building (social AIs who learn to chit-chat, talk sassy and trades selfies with you), and how this intersects with the latest research in AI for natural language. He also shared his vision for how AI for natural language with develop over the next few years.

The White House recently published an “Executive Order on Maintaining American Leadership in Artificial Intelligence.” In this fully connected episode, we discuss the executive order in general and criticism from the AI community. We also draw some comparisons between this US executive order and other national strategies for leadership in AI.

This week we discuss GPT-2, a new transformer-based language model from OpenAI that has everyone talking. It’s capable of generating incredibly realistic text, and the AI community has lots of concerns about potential malicious applications. We help you understand GPT-2 and we discuss ethical concerns, responsible release of AI research, and resources that we have found useful in learning about language models.

Fully Connected – a series where Chris and Daniel keep you up to date with everything that’s happening in the AI community.

If you’re anything like us, your New Year’s resolutions probably included an AI section, so this week we explore some of the learning resources available for artificial intelligence and deep learning. Where you go with it depends upon what you want to achieve, so we discuss academic versus industry career paths, and try to set you on the Practical AI path that will help you level up.

Ajay Royyuru and Guillermo Cecchi from IBM Healthcare join Chris and Daniel to discuss the emerging field of computational psychiatry. They talk about how researchers at IBM are applying AI to measure mental and neurological health based on speech, and they give us their perspectives on things like bias in healthcare data, AI augmentation for doctors, and encodings of language structure.

Fully Connected – a series where Chris and Daniel keep you up to date with everything that’s happening in the AI community.

This week we look back at 2018 - from the GDPR and the Cambridge Analytica scandal, to advances in natural language processing and new open source tools. Then we offer our predications for what we expect in the year ahead, touching on just about everything in the world of AI.