Chandler McCann tells Daniel and Chris about how DataRobot engaged in a project to develop sustainable water solutions with the Global Water Challenge (GWC). They analyzed over 500,000 data points to predict future water point breaks. This enabled African governments to make data-driven decisions related to budgeting, preventative maintenance, and policy in order to promote and protect people’s access to safe water for drinking and washing. From this effort sprang DataRobot’s larger AI for Good initiative.

Daniel and Chris get you Fully-Connected with AI questions from listeners and online forums:

• What do you think is the next big thing?
• What are CNNs?
• How does one start developing an AI-enabled business solution?
• What tools do you use every day?
• What will AI replace?
• And more…

In the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, Daniel and Chris have a timely conversation with Lucy Lu Wang of the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence about COVID-19 Open Research Dataset (CORD-19). She relates how CORD-19 was created and organized, and how researchers around the world are currently using the data to answer important COVID-19 questions that will help the world through this ongoing crisis.

AI legend Stuart Russell, the Berkeley professor who leads the Center for Human-Compatible AI, joins Chris to share his insights into the future of artificial intelligence. Stuart is the author of Human Compatible, and the upcoming 4th edition of his perennial classic Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach, which is widely regarded as the standard text on AI. After exposing the shortcomings inherent in deep learning, Stuart goes on to propose a new practitioner approach to creating AI that avoids harmful unintended consequences, and offers a path forward towards a future in which humans can safely rely of provably beneficial AI.

Daniel Wilson and Rob Fletcher of ESRI hang with Chris and Daniel to chat about how AI powered modern geographic information systems (GIS) and location intelligence. They illuminate the various models used for GIS, spatial analysis, remote sensing, real-time visualization, and 3D analytics. You don’t want to miss the part about their work for the DoD’s Joint AI Center in humanitarian assistance / disaster relief.

Practical AI is a weekly podcast that’s marking artificial intelligence practical, productive, and accessible to everyone. If world of AI affects your daily life, this show is for you.

From the practitioner wanting to keep up with the latest tools & trends…

(clip from episode #68)

To the AI curious trying to understand the concepts at play and their implications on our lives…

(clip from episode #39)

Expert hosts Chris Benson and Daniel Whitenack are here to keep you fully-connected with the world of machine learning and data science.

Please listen to a recent episode that interests you and subscribe today. We’d love to have you as a listener!

Emily Robinson, co-author of the book Build a Career in Data Science, gives us the inside scoop about optimizing the data science job search. From creating one’s resume, cover letter, and portfolio to knowing how to recognize the right job at a fair compensation rate.

Emily’s expert guidance takes us from the beginning of the process to conclusion, including being successful during your early days in that fantastic new data science position.

Matt Brems from General Assembly joins us to explain what “data science” actually means these days and how that has changed over time. He also gives us some insight into how people are going about data science education, how AI fits into the data science workflow, and how to differentiate yourself career-wise.

Daniel and Chris hang out with Mike McCourt from Invoca to learn about the natural language processing model architectures underlying Signal AI. Mike shares how they process conversational data, the challenges they have to overcome, and the types of insights that can be harvested.

Yetunde Dada from QuantumBlack joins Jerod for a deep dive on Kedro, a workflow tool that helps structure reproducible, scaleable, deployable, robust, and versioned data pipelines. They discuss what Kedro’s all about and how it’s “changing the landscape of data pipelines in Python”, the ins/outs of open sourcing Kedro, and how they found early success by sweating the details. Finally, Jerod asks Yetunde about her passion project: a virtual reality film which debuted at the Sundance Film Festival in January.

Chris and Daniel talk with Greg Allen, Chief of Strategy and Communications at the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) Joint Artificial Intelligence Center (JAIC). The mission of the JAIC is “to seize upon the transformative potential of artificial intelligence technology for the benefit of America’s national security… The JAIC is the official focal point of the DoD AI Strategy.” So if you want to understand how the U.S. military thinks about artificial intelligence, then this is the episode for you!

GANs are at the center of AI hype. However, they are also starting to be extremely practical and be used to develop solutions to real problems. Jakub Langr and Vladimir Bok join us for a deep dive into GANs and their application. We discuss the basics of GANs, their various flavors, and open research problems.

Chris and Daniel talk with Keith Lynn, AlphaPilot Program Manager at Lockheed Martin. AlphaPilot is an open innovation challenge, developing artificial intelligence for high-speed racing drones, created through a partnership between Lockheed Martin and The Drone Racing League (DRL).

AlphaPilot challenged university teams from around the world to design AI capable of flying a drone without any human intervention or navigational pre-programming. Autonomous drones will race head-to-head through complex, three-dimensional tracks in DRL’s new Artificial Intelligence Robotic Racing (AIRR) Circuit. The winning team could win up to $2 million in prizes.

Keith shares the incredible story of how AlphaPilot got started, just prior to its debut race in Orlando, which will be broadcast on NBC Sports.

David Yakobovitch joins the show to talk about the evolution of data science tools and techniques, the work he’s doing to teach these things at Galvanize, what his HumAIn Podcast is all about, and more.

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!

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!

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!

At the recent O’Reilly AI Conference in New York City, Chris met up with O’Reilly Chief Data Scientist Ben Lorica, the Program Chair for Strata Data, the AI Conference, and TensorFlow World.

O’Reilly’s ‘AI Adoption in the Enterprise’ report had just been released, so naturally Ben and Chris wanted to do a deep dive into enterprise AI adoption to discuss strategy, execution, and implications.

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.

While attending the NVIDIA GPU Technology Conference in Silicon Valley, Chris met up with Adam Stooke, a speaker and PhD student at UC Berkeley who is doing groundbreaking work in large-scale deep reinforcement learning and robotics. Adam took Chris on a tour of deep reinforcement learning - explaining what it is, how it works, and why it’s one of the hottest technologies in artificial intelligence!

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!

While at the NVIDIA GPU Technology Conference 2019 in Silicon Valley, Chris enjoyed an inspiring conversation with Anima Anandkumar. Clearly a role model - not only for women - but for anyone in the world of AI, Anima relayed how her lifelong passion for mathematics and engineering started when she was only 3 years old in India, and ultimately led to her pioneering deep learning research at Amazon Web Services, CalTech, and NVIDIA.

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.