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…

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Catherine Breslin of Cobalt joins Daniel and Chris to do a deep dive on speech recognition. She also discusses how the technology is integrated into virtual assistants (like Alexa) and is used in other non-assistant contexts (like transcription and captioning). Along the way, she teaches us how to assemble a lexicon, acoustic model, and language model to bring speech recognition to life.

In this episode Jaana and Mat are joined by Daniel and Miriah to dive into AI in Go. Why has python historically had a bigger foothold in the AI scene? Is machine learning in Go growing? What libraries and tools are out there for someone looking to get started with AI? And where do you start if you don’t have enough data for your own models?

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.

Daniel and Chris explore Semantic Scholar with Doug Raymond of the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence. Semantic Scholar is an AI-backed search engine that uses machine learning, natural language processing, and machine vision to surface relevant information from scientific papers.

Daniel and Chris do a deep dive into The AI Index 2019 Annual Report, which provides unbiased rigorously-vetted data that one can use “to develop intuitions about the complex field of AI”. Analyzing everything from R&D and technical advancements to education, the economy, and societal considerations, Chris and Daniel lay out this comprehensive report’s key insights about artificial intelligence.

Production ML systems include more than just the model. In these complicated systems, how do you ensure quality over time, especially when you are constantly updating your infrastructure, data and models? Tania Allard joins us to discuss the ins and outs of testing ML systems. Among other things, she presents a simple formula that helps you score your progress towards a robust system and identify problem areas.

One of the things people most associate with AI is automation, but how is AI actually shaping automation in manufacturing? Costas Boulis from Bright Machines joins us to talk about how they are using AI in various manufacturing processes and in their “microfactories.” He also discusses the unique challenges of developing AI models based on manufacturing data.

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!

We have all used web and product search technologies for quite some time, but how do they actually work and how is AI impacting search? Andrew Stanton from Etsy joins us to dive into AI-based search methods and to talk about neuroevolution. He also gives us an introduction to Rust for production ML/AI and explains how that community is developing.

Evan Sparks, from Determined AI, helps us understand why many are still stuck in the “dark ages” of AI infrastructure. He then discusses how we can build better systems by leveraging things like fault tolerant training and AutoML. Finally, Evan explains his optimistic outlook on AI’s economic and environmental health impact.

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.

Streamlit recently burst onto the scene with their intuitive, open source solution for building custom ML/AI tools. It allows data scientists and ML engineers to rapidly build internal or external UIs without spending time on frontend development. In this episode, Adrien Treuille joins us to discuss ML/AI app development in general and Streamlit. We talk about the practicalities of working with Streamlit along with its seemingly instant adoption by AI2, Stripe, Stitch Fix, Uber, and Twitter.

We’ve mentioned ML/AI in the browser and in JS a bunch on this show, but we haven’t done a deep dive on the subject… until now! Victor Dibia helps us understand why people are interested in porting models to the browser and how people are using the functionality. We discuss TensorFlow.js and some applications built using TensorFlow.js

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.

We’re talking with Sherol Chen, a machine learning developer, about AI at Google and AutoML methods. Sherol explains how the various AI groups within Google work together and how AutoML fits into that puzzle. She also explains how to get started with AutoML step-by-step (this is “practical” AI after all).

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.

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.