Nhung Ho joins Daniel and Chris to discuss how data science creates insights into financial operations and economic conditions. They delve into topics ranging from predictive forecasting to aid small businesses, to learning about the economic fallout from the COVID-19 Pandemic.

Dave Lacey takes Daniel and Chris on a journey that connects the user interfaces that we already know - TensorFlow and PyTorch - with the layers that connect to the underlying hardware. Along the way, we learn about Poplar Graph Framework Software. If you are the type of practitioner who values ‘under the hood’ knowledge, then this is the episode for you.

Nikola Mrkšić, CEO & Co-Founder of PolyAI, takes Daniel and Chris on a deep dive into conversational AI, describing the underlying technologies, and teaching them about the next generation of voice assistants that will be capable of handling true human-level conversations. It’s an episode you’ll be talking about for a long time!

Chris has the privilege of talking with Stanford Professor Margot Gerritsen, who co-leads the Women in Data Science (WiDS) Worldwide Initiative. This is a conversation that everyone should listen to. Professor Gerritsen’s profound insights into how we can all help the women in our lives succeed - in data science and in life - is a ‘must listen’ episode for everyone, regardless of gender.

David Sweet, author of “Tuning Up: From A/B testing to Bayesian optimization”, introduces Dan and Chris to system tuning, and takes them from A/B testing to response surface methodology, contextual bandit, and finally bayesian optimization. Along the way, we get fascinating insights into recommender systems and high-frequency trading!

Elad Walach of Aidoc joins Chris to talk about the use of AI for medical imaging interpretation. Starting with the world’s largest annotated training data set of medical images, Aidoc is the radiologist’s best friend, helping the doctor to interpret imagery faster, more accurately, and improving the imaging workflow along the way. Elad’s vision for the transformative future of AI in medicine clearly soothes Chris’s concern about managing his aging body in the years to come. ;-)

John Myers of Gretel puts on his apron and rolls up his sleeves to show Dan and Chris how to cook up some synthetic data for automated data labeling, differential privacy, and other purposes. His military and intelligence community background give him an interesting perspective that piqued the interest of our intrepid hosts.

Daniel and Chris sniff out the secret ingredients for collecting, displaying, and analyzing odor data with Terri Jordan and Yanis Caritu of Aryballe. It certainly smells like a good time, so join them for this scent-illating episode!

Braden Hancock joins Chris to discuss Snorkel Flow and the Snorkel open source project. With Flow, users programmatically label, build, and augment training data to drive a radically faster, more flexible, and higher quality end-to-end AI development and deployment process.

At this year’s Government & Public Sector R Conference (or R|Gov) our very own Daniel Whitenack moderated a panel on how AI practitioners can engage with governments on AI for good projects. That discussion is being republished in this episode for all our listeners to enjoy!

The panelists were Danya Murali from Arcadia Power and Emily Martinez from the NYC Department of Health and Mental Hygiene. Danya and Emily gave some great perspectives on sources of government data, ethical uses of data, and privacy.

Bharat Sandhu, Director of Azure AI and Mixed Reality at Microsoft, joins Chris and Daniel to talk about how Microsoft is making AI accessible and productive for users, and how AI solutions can address real world challenges that customers face. He also shares Microsoft’s research-to-product process, along with the advances they have made in computer vision, image captioning, and how researchers were able to make AI that can describe images as well as people do.

Unsplash has released the world’s largest open library dataset, which includes 2M+ high-quality Unsplash photos, 5M keywords, and over 250M searches. They have big ideas about how the dataset might be used by ML/AI folks, and there have already been some interesting applications. In this episode, Luke and Tim discuss why they released this data and what it take to maintain a dataset of this size.

Lucy D’Agostino McGowan, cohost of the Casual Inference Podcast and a professor at Wake Forest University, joins Daniel and Chris for a deep dive into causal inference. Referring to current events (e.g. misreporting of COVID-19 data in Georgia) as examples, they explore how we interact with, analyze, trust, and interpret data - addressing underlying assumptions, counterfactual frameworks, and unmeasured confounders (Chris’s next Halloween costume).

Rajiv Shah teaches Daniel and Chris about data leakage, and its major impact upon machine learning models. It’s the kind of topic that we don’t often think about, but which can ruin our results. Raj discusses how to use activation maps and image embedding to find leakage, so that leaking information in our test set does not find its way into our training set.

We’re partnering with the upcoming R Conference, because the R Conference is well… amazing! Tons of great AI content, and they were nice enough to connect us to Daniel Chen for this episode. He discusses data science in Computational Biology and his perspective on data science project organization.

In anticipation of the upcoming NVIDIA GPU Technology Conference (GTC), Will Ramey joins Daniel and Chris to talk about education for artificial intelligence practitioners, and specifically the role that the NVIDIA Deep Learning Institute plays in the industry. Will’s insights from long experience are shaping how we all stay on top of AI, so don’t miss this ‘must learn’ episode.

So, you trained a great AI model and deployed it in your app? It’s smooth sailing from there right? Well, not in most people’s experience. Sometimes things goes wrong, and you need to know how to respond to a real life AI incident. In this episode, Andrew and Patrick from BNH.ai join us to discuss an AI incident response plan along with some general discussion of debugging models, discrimination, privacy, and security.

Waymo’s mission is to make it safe and easy for people and things to get where they’re going.
After describing the state of the industry, Drago Anguelov - Principal Scientist and Head of Research at Waymo - takes us on a deep dive into the world of AI-powered autonomous driving. Starting with Waymo’s approach to autonomous driving, Drago then delights Daniel and Chris with a tour of the algorithmic tools in the autonomy toolbox.

Hilary Mason is building a new way for kids and families to create stories with AI. It’s called Hidden Door, and in her first interview since founding it, Hilary reveals to Chris and Daniel what the experience will be like for kids. It’s the first Practical AI episode in which some of the questions came from Chris’s 8yo daughter Athena.

Hilary also shares her insights into various topics, like how to build data science communities during the COVID-19 Pandemic, reasons why data science goes wrong, and how to build great data-based products. Don’t miss this episode packed with hard-won wisdom!

We’re so excited to see Chris and Daniel take this show to 100 episodes, and that’s exactly why we’re rebroadcasting Practical AI #100 here on The Changelog. They’ve had so many great guests and discussions about everything from AGI to GPUs to AI for good. In this episode, we circle back to the beginning when Jerod and I joined the first episode to help kick off the podcast. We discuss how our perspectives have changed over time, what it has been like to host an AI podcast, and what the future of AI might look like. (GIVEAWAY!)

We made it to 100 episodes of Practical AI! It has been a privilege to have had so many great guests and discussions about everything from AGI to GPUs to AI for good. In this episode, we circle back to the beginning when Jerod and Adam from The Changelog helped us kick off the podcast. We discuss how our perspectives have changed over time, what it has been like to host an AI podcast, and what the future of AI might look like. (GIVEAWAY!)

Come hang with the bad boys of natural language processing (NLP)! Jack Morris joins Daniel and Chris to talk about TextAttack, a Python framework for adversarial attacks, data augmentation, and model training in NLP. TextAttack will improve your understanding of your NLP models, so come prepared to rumble with your own adversarial attacks!

The multidisciplinary field of AI Ethics is brand new, and is currently being pioneered by a relatively small number of leading AI organizations and academic institutions around the world. AI Ethics focuses on ensuring that unexpected outcomes from AI technology implementations occur as rarely as possible. Daniel and Chris discuss strategies for how to arrive at AI ethical principles suitable for your own organization, and what is involved in implementing those strategies in the real world. Tune in for a practical AI primer on AI Ethics!

Daniel and Chris get you Fully-Connected with open source software for artificial intelligence.
In addition to defining what open source is, they discuss where to find open source tools and data, and how you can contribute back to the open source AI community.

Daniel and Chris go beyond the current state of the art in deep learning to explore the next evolutions in artificial intelligence. From Yoshua Bengio’s NeurIPS keynote, which urges us forward towards System 2 deep learning, to DARPA’s vision of a 3rd Wave of AI, Chris and Daniel investigate the incremental steps between today’s AI and possible future manifestations of artificial general intelligence (AGI).