In the fourth “AI in Africa” spotlight episode, we welcome Leonida Mutuku and Godliver Owomugisha, two experts in applying advanced technology in agriculture. We had a great discussion about ending poverty, hunger, and inequality in Africa via AI innovation. The discussion touches on open data, relevant models, ethics, and more.

Abubakar Abid joins Daniel and Chris for a tour of Gradio and tells them about the project joining Hugging Face. What’s Gradio? The fastest way to demo your machine learning model with a friendly web interface, allowing non-technical users to access, use, and give feedback on models.

This last week has been a big week for AI news. BigScience is training a huge language model (while the world watches), and NVIDIA announced their latest “Hopper” GPUs. Chris and Daniel discuss these and other topics on this fully connected episode!

The term “foundation” model has been around since about the middle of last year when a research group at Stanford published the comprehensive report On the Opportunities and Risks of Foundation Models. The naming of these models created some strong reactions, both good and bad. In this episode, Chris and Daniel dive into the ideas behind the report.

What happens when your data operations grow to Internet-scale? How do thousands or millions of data producers and consumers efficiently, effectively, and productively interact with each other? How are varying formats, protocols, security levels, performance criteria, and use-case specific characteristics meshed into one unified data fabric? Chris and Daniel explore these questions in this illuminating and Fully-Connected discussion that brings this new data technology into the light.

Daniel and Chris talk with Lukas Egger, Head of Innovation Office and Strategic Projects at SAP Business Process Intelligence. Lukas describes what it takes to bring a culture of innovation into an organization, and how to infuse product development with that innovation culture. He also offers suggestions for how to mitigate challenges and blockers.

Alon from Greeneye and Moses from ClearML blew us away when they said that they are training 1000’s of models a year that get deployed to Kubernetes clusters on tractors. Yes… we said tractors, as in farming! This is a super cool discussion about MLOps solutions at scale for interesting use cases in agriculture.

From MIT researchers who have an AI system that rapidly predicts how two proteins will attach, to Facebook’s first high-performance self-supervised algorithm that works for speech, vision, and text, Daniel and Chris survey the AI landscape for notable milestones in the application of AI in industry and research.

In the third of the “AI in Africa” spotlight episodes, we welcome Kathleen Siminyu, who is building Kiswahili voice tools at Mozilla. We had a great discussion with Kathleen about creating more diverse voice and language datasets, involving local language communities in NLP work, and expanding grassroots ML/AI efforts across Africa.

In addition to being a Developer Advocate at Hugging Face, Thomas Simonini is building next-gen AI in games that can talk and have smart interactions with the player using Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) and Natural Language Processing (NLP). He also created a Deep Reinforcement Learning course that takes a DRL beginner to from zero to hero. Natalie and Chris explore what’s involved, and what the implications are, with a focus on the development path of the new AI data scientist.

From drug discovery at the Quebec AI Institute to improving capabilities with low-resourced languages at the Masakhane Research Foundation and Google AI, Bonaventure Dossou looks for opportunities to use his expertise in natural language processing to improve the world - and especially to help his homeland in the Benin Republic in Africa.

You might know about MLPerf, a benchmark from MLCommons that measures how fast systems can train models to a target quality metric. However, MLCommons is working on so much more! David Kanter joins us in this episode to discuss two new speech datasets that are democratizing machine learning for speech via data scale and language/speaker diversity.

We have all seen how AI models fail, sometimes in spectacular ways. Yaron Singer joins us in this episode to discuss model vulnerabilities and automatic prevention of bad outcomes. By separating concerns and creating a “firewall” around your AI models, it’s possible to secure your AI workflows and prevent model failure.

In the second of the “AI in Africa” spotlight episodes, we welcome guests from Radiant Earth to talk about machine learning for earth observation. They give us a glimpse into their amazing data and tooling for working with satellite imagery, and they talk about use cases including crop identification and tropical storm wind speed estimation.

The time has come! OpenAI’s API is now available with no waitlist. Chris and Daniel dig into the API and playground during this episode, and they also discuss some of the latest tool from Hugging Face (including new reinforcement learning environments). Finally, Daniel gives an update on how he is building out infrastructure for a new AI team.

This episode is a follow up to our recent Fully Connected show discussing federated learning. In that previous discussion, we mentioned Flower (a “friendly” federated learning framework). Well, one of the creators of Flower, Daniel Beutel, agreed to join us on the show to discuss the project (and federated learning more broadly)! The result is a really interesting and motivating discussion of ML, privacy, distributed training, and open source AI.

Here’s a bonus episode this week from our friends behind Me, Myself, and AI — a podcast on artificial intelligence and business, and produced by MIT Sloan Management Review and Boston Consulting Group. We partnered with them to help promote their awesome podcast.

We hand picked this full-length episode to share with you because of its focus on using technology as a force for good, something we’re very passionate about. This episode features, Paula Goldman, Chief Ethical and Humane Use Officer at Salesforce, and the conversation touches on some interesting topics around the role tech companies play in society at large.

Recently, GitHub released Copilot, which is an amazing AI pair programmer powered by OpenAI’s Codex model. In this episode, Natalie Pistunovich tells us all about Codex and helps us understand where it fits in our development workflow. We also discuss MLOps and how AI is influencing software engineering more generally.

In this Fully-Connected episode, Daniel and Chris ponder whether in-person AI conferences are on the verge of making a post-pandemic comeback. Then on to BigScience from Hugging Face, a year-long research workshop on large multilingual models and datasets. Specifically they dive into the T0, a series of natural language processing (NLP) AI models specifically trained for researching zero-shot multitask learning. Daniel provides a brief tour of the possible with the T0 family. They finish up with a couple of new learning resources.

Each year we discuss the latest insights from the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence (HAI), and this year is no different. Daniel and Chris delve into key findings and discuss in this Fully-Connected episode. They also check out a study called ‘Delphi: Towards Machine Ethics and Norms’, about how to integrate ethics and morals into AI models.

There are a lot of people trying to innovate in the area of specialized AI hardware, but most of them are doing it with traditional transistors. Lightmatter is doing something totally different. They’re building photonic computers that are more power efficient and faster for AI inference. Nick Harris joins us in this episode to bring us up to speed on all the details.

When is the last time you had a eureka moment? Chris had a chat with Nicholas Mohnacky, CEO and Cofounder of bundleIQ, where they use natural language processing algorithms like GPT-3 to connect your Google GSuite with other personal data sources to find deeper connections, go beyond the obvious, and create eureka moments.

This is the first episode in a special series we are calling the “Spotlight on AI in Africa”. To kick things off, Joyce and Mutembesa from Makerere University’s AI Lab join us to talk about their amazing work in computer vision, natural language processing, and data collection. Their lab seeks out problems that matter in African communities, pairs those problems with appropriate data/tools, and works with the end users to ensure that solutions create real value.

Federated learning is increasingly practical for machine learning developers because of the challenges we face with model and data privacy. In this fully connected episode, Chris and Daniel dive into the topic and dissect the ideas behind federated learning, practicalities of implementing decentralized training, and current uses of the technique.

Tivadar Danka is an educator and content creator in the machine learning space, and he is writing a book to help practitioners go from high school mathematics to mathematics of neural networks. His explanations are lucid and easy to understand. You have never had such a fun and interesting conversation about calculus, linear algebra, and probability theory before!

Polarity Mapping is a framework to “help problems be solved in a realistic and multidimensional manner” (see here for more info). In this week’s fully connected episode, Chris and Daniel use this framework to help them discuss how an organization can strike a good balance between human intelligence and AI. AI can’t solve everything and humans need to be in-the-loop with many AI solutions.

As you start developing an AI/ML based solution, you quickly figure out that you need to run workflows. Not only that, you might need to run those workflows across various kinds of infrastructure (including GPUs) at scale. Ville Tuulos developed Metaflow while working at Netflix to help data scientists scale their work. In this episode, Ville tells us a bit more about Metaflow, his new book on data science infrastructure, and his approach to helping scale ML/AI work.

Any AI play that lacks an underlying data strategy is doomed to fail, and a big part of any data strategy is labeling. Michael, from Label Studio, joins us in this episode to discuss how the industry’s perception of data labeling is shifting. We cover open source tooling, validating labels, and integrating ML/AI models in the labeling loop.

Yonatan Geifman of Deci makes Daniel and Chris buckle up, and takes them on a tour of the ideas behind his amazing new inference platform. It enables AI developers to build, optimize, and deploy blazing-fast deep learning models on any hardware. Don’t blink or you’ll miss it!

In this episode, Peter Wang from Anaconda joins us again to go over their latest “State of Data Science” survey. The updated results include some insights related to data science work during COVID along with other topics including AutoML and model bias. Peter also tells us a bit about the exciting new partnership between Anaconda and Pyston (a fork of the standard CPython interpreter which has been extensively enhanced to improve the execution performance of most Python programs).