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.

Many people are excited about creating usable speech technology. However, most of the audio data used by large companies isn’t available to the majority of people, and that data is often biased in terms of language, accent, and gender. Jenny, Josh, and Remy from Mozilla join us to discuss how Mozilla is building an open-source voice database that anyone can use to make innovative apps for devices and the web (Common Voice). They also discuss efforts through Mozilla fellowship program to develop speech tech for African languages and understand bias in data sets.

A formalization and continuation of this old Quora question about the most important research papers which all NLP students “should definitely read”.

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!

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!

Sash Rush, of Cornell Tech and Hugging Face, catches us up on all the things happening with Hugging Face and transformers. Last time we had Clem from Hugging Face on the show (episode 35), their transformers library wasn’t even a thing yet. Oh how things have changed! This time Sasha tells us all about Hugging Face’s open source NLP work, gives us an intro to the key components of transformers, and shares his perspective on the future of AI research conferences.

If you say… “Hey, computer, play me some music” and then it starts playing you some music, there’s a number of things that have to have happened for that to come true.

So many AI developers are coming up with creative, useful COVID-19 applications during this time of crisis. Among those are Timo from Deepset-AI and Tony from Intel. They are working on a question answering system for pandemic-related questions called COVID-QA. In this episode, they describe the system, related annotation of the CORD-19 data set, and ways that you can contribute!

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.

Expanding AI technology to the local languages of emerging markets presents huge challenges. Good data is scarce or non-existent. Users often have bandwidth or connectivity issues. Existing platforms target only a small number of high-resource languages.

Our own Daniel Whitenack (data scientist at SIL International) and Dan Jeffries (from Pachyderm) discuss how these and related problems will only be solved when AI technology and resources from industry are combined with linguistic expertise from those on the ground working with local language communities. They have illustrated this approach as they work on pushing voice technology into emerging markets.

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.

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.

Congrats to Clément and the Hugging Face team on this milestone!

The company first built a mobile app that let you chat with an artificial BFF, a sort of chatbot for bored teenagers. More recently, the startup released an open-source library for natural language processing applications. And that library has been massively successful.

The library mentioned is called Transformers, which is dubbed as ‘state-of-the-art Natural Language Processing for TensorFlow 2.0 and PyTorch.’

If any of these things ring a bell to you, it may be because Practical AI co-host Daniel Whitenack has been a huge supporter of Hugging Face for a long time and mentions them often on the show. We even had Clément on the show back in March of this year.

SpaCy is awesome for NLP! It’s easy to use, has widespread adoption, is open source, and integrates the latest language models. Ines Montani and Matthew Honnibal (core developers of spaCy and co-founders of Explosion) join us to discuss the history of the project, its capabilities, and the latest trends in NLP. We also dig into the practicalities of taking NLP workflows to production. You don’t want to miss this episode!

The goal of this repository is to build a comprehensive set of tools and examples that leverage recent advances in NLP algorithms, neural architectures, and distributed machine learning systems. The content is based on our past and potential future engagements with customers as well as collaboration with partners, researchers, and the open source community.

Kick Olivia’s tires (mixed metaphor alert!) by chatting with her online or start with the docs if you’d like to set up and host your own instance.

A little ingenuity paired with changes to ReCaptcha’s audio challenge allowed this hacker to create a Python ‘robot’ that defeats the ‘not a robot’ test with 90% accuracy. The approach is brilliant:

1. Navigate to Google’s ReCaptcha Demo site
2. Navigate to audio challenge for ReCaptcha
3. Download audio challenge
4. Submit audio challenge to Speech To Text
5. Parse response and type answer
6. Press submit and check if successful

The code is small enough to grok in 5-10 minutes. Love it!

Flair allows you to apply our state-of-the-art natural language processing (NLP) models to your text, such as named entity recognition (NER), part-of-speech tagging (PoS), sense disambiguation and classification.

Multilingual and built on PyTorch.

Tobias Macey, on why this particular episode of Podcast.__init__ is worth a listen:

Tools for natural language processing are often limited in the number of human languages that they support. This was an interesting discussion on some of the work being done to make it easier to analyse text in multiple languages.

CV Compiler is an online resume analysis tool designed exclusively for software engineers.

The review technology scans for keywords from the world of programming and how they are used in the resume, relative to the best practices in the industry.

CV Compiler was built using Python with libraries NLTK and spaCy for tokenization, lemmatization, and POS-tagging.

The internal analysis engine for large datasets (resumes, job descriptions) was built upon a Seq2Seq model in TensorFlow.