Data Skeptic
533 episodes - English - Latest episode: about 6 hours ago - ★★★★★ - 477 ratingsThe Data Skeptic Podcast features interviews and discussion of topics related to data science, statistics, machine learning, artificial intelligence and the like, all from the perspective of applying critical thinking and the scientific method to evaluate the veracity of claims and efficacy of approaches.
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Episodes
Behavioral Genetics
April 30, 2024 13:57 - 47 minutes - 55.1 MBIt’s almost impossible to think about animal behavior without thinking of dogs! Our canine friends are a subspecies of wolf that has been co-evolving with us for tens of thousands of years. The transition from wolf to pet has required intense natural and artificial selection for behaviors that allow dogs to live alongside humans, but behavior is not so simple. Join us for a discussion with Dr. Jessica Hekman and learn about dog welfare, behavioral genetics, and the quest to understand the do...
Signal in the Noise
April 25, 2024 00:03 - 41 minutes - 38.2 MBIn this episode, we are joined by Barbara Webb and Anna Hadjitofi. Barbara runs the Insect Robotics lab at the University of Edinburgh, and Anna is a PhD student at the School of Informatics at the university. She is interested in studying and understanding the neural mechanism of the honeybee waggle dance. They join us to discuss the paper: Dynamic antennal positioning allows honeybee followers to decode the dance.
Pose Tracking
April 16, 2024 06:59 - 50 minutes - 45.8 MBMany researchers and students have painstakingly labeled precise details about the body positions of the creatures they study. Can AI be used for this labeling? Of course it can! Today's episode discusses Social LEAP Estimates Animal Poses (SLEAP), a software solution to train AI to perform this tedious but important labeling work.
Modeling Group Behavior
April 08, 2024 13:00 - 40 minutes - 49.7 MBOur guest in this episode is Sebastien Motsch, an assistant professor at Arizona State University, working in the School of Mathematical and Statistical Science. He works on modeling self-organized biological systems to understand how complex patterns emerge.
Advances in Data Loggers
March 25, 2024 13:04 - 35 minutes - 40.9 MBOur guest in this episode is Ryan Hanscom. Ryan is a Ph.D. candidate in a joint doctoral evolution program at San Diego State University and the University of California, Riverside. He is a terrestrial ecologist with a focus on herpetology and mammalogy. Ryan discussed how the behavior of rattlesnakes is studied in the natural world, particularly with an increase in temperature.
What You Know About Intelligence is Wrong (fixed)
March 20, 2024 06:31 - 41 minutes - 48.2 MBWe are joined by Hank Schlinger, a professor of psychology at California State University, Los Angeles. His research revolves around theoretical issues in psychology and behavioral analysis. Hank establishes that words have references and questions the reference for intelligence. He discussed how intelligence can be observed in animals. He also discussed how intelligence is measured in a given context.
Animal Decision Making
March 12, 2024 21:55 - 37 minutes - 44.7 MBOn today’s episode, we are joined by Aimee Dunlap. Aimee is an assistant professor at the University of Missouri–St. Louis and the interim director at the Whitney R. Harris World Ecology Center. Aimee discussed how animals perceive information and what they use it for. She discussed the connection between their environment and learning for decision-making. She also discussed the costs required for learning and factors that affect animal learning.
Octopus Cognition
March 08, 2024 00:50 - 38 minutes - 48.1 MBWe are joined by Tamar Gutnick, a visiting professor at the University of Naples Federico II, Napoli, Italy. She studies the octopus nervous system and their behavior, focusing on cognition and learning behaviors. Tamar gave a background to the kind of research she does — lab research. She discussed some challenges with observing octopuses in the lab. She discussed some patterns observed by the octopus lifestyle in a controlled setting. Tamar discussed what they know about octopus intell...
Optimal Foraging
February 28, 2024 23:02 - 38 minutes - 46.9 MBClaire Hemmingway, an assistant professor in the Department of Psychology and Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville, is our guest today. Her research is on decision-making in animal cognition, focusing on neotropical bats and bumblebees. Claire discussed how bumblebees make foraging decisions and how they communicate when foraging. She discussed how they set up experiments in the lab to address questions about bumblebees foraging. She also discussed s...
Memory in Chess
February 12, 2024 17:33 - 48 minutes - 58.8 MBOn today’s show, we are joined by our co-host, Becky Hansis-O’Neil. Becky is a Ph.D. student at the University of Missouri, St Louis, where she studies bumblebees and tarantulas to understand their learning and cognitive work. She joins us to discuss the paper: Perception in Chess. The paper aimed to understand how chess players perceive the positions of chess pieces on a chess board. She discussed the findings paper. She spoke about situations where grandmasters had better recall of c...
OpenWorm
February 05, 2024 23:38 - 34 minutes - 31.4 MBOn this episode, we are joined by Stephen Larson, the CEO of MetaCell and an affiliate of the OpenWorm foundation. Stephen discussed what the Openworm project is about. They hope to use a digital C. elegans nematode (C. elegans for short) to study the basics of life. Stephen discussed why C. elegans is an ideal organism for studying life in the lab. He also discussed the steps involved in simulating a digital organism. He mentioned the constraints on the cellular scale that informed their ...
What the Antlion Knows
January 30, 2024 00:13 - 41 minutes - 47.8 MBOur guest is Becky Hansis-O’Neil, a Ph.D. student at the University of Missouri, St Louis, and our co-host for the new "Animal Intelligence" season. Becky shares her background on how she got into the field of behavioral intelligence and biology.
AI Roundtable
January 17, 2024 21:52 - 50 minutes - 57.9 MBKyle is joined by friends and former guests Pramit Choudhary and Frank Bell to have an open discussion of the impacts LLMs and machine learning have had in the past year on industry, and where things may go in the current year.
Uncontrollable AI Risks
December 27, 2023 19:05 - 38 minutes - 46 MBWe are joined by Darren McKee, a Policy Advisor and the host of Reality Check — a critical thinking podcast. Darren gave a background about himself and how he got into the AI space. Darren shared his thoughts on AGI's achievements in the coming years. He defined AGI and discussed how to differentiate an AGI system. He also shared whether AI needs consciousness to be AGI. Darren discussed his worry about AI surpassing human understanding of the universe and potentially causing harm to hum...
I LLM and You Can Too
December 23, 2023 19:51 - 23 minutes - 27.3 MBIt took a massive financial investment for the first large language models (LLMs) to be created. Did their corporate backers lock these tools away for all but the richest? No. They provided comodity priced API options for using them. Anyone can talk to Chat GPT or Bing. What if you want to go a step beyond that and do something programatic? Kyle explores your options in this episode.
Q&A with Kyle
December 19, 2023 04:55 - 40 minutes - 46.2 MBWe celebrate episode 1000000000 with some Q&A from host Kyle Polich. We boil this episode down to four key questions: 1) How do you find guests 2) What is Data Skeptic all about? 3) What is Kyle all about? 4) What are Kyle's thoughts on AGI? Thanks to our sponsors dataannotation.tech/programmers https://www.webai.com/dataskeptic
LLMs for Data Analysis
December 12, 2023 06:03 - 29 minutes - 35.8 MBIn this episode, we are joined by Amir Netz, a Technical Fellow at Microsoft and the CTO of Microsoft Fabric. He discusses how companies can use Microsoft's latest tools for business intelligence. Amir started by discussing how business intelligence has progressed in relevance over the years. Amir gave a brief introduction into what Power BI and Fabric are. He also discussed how Fabric distinguishes from other BI tools by building an end-to-end tool for the data journey. Amir spoke about...
AI Platforms
December 04, 2023 14:33 - 33 minutes - 39 MBOur guest today is Eric Boyd, the Corporate Vice President of AI at Microsoft. Eric joins us to share how organizations can leverage AI for faster development. Eric shared the benefits of using natural language to build products. He discussed the future of version control and the level of AI background required to get started with Azure AI. He mentioned some foundational models in Azure AI and their capabilities. Follow Eric on LinkedIn to learn more about his work. Visit today's sponsor...
Deploying LLMs
November 27, 2023 18:28 - 35 minutes - 40.3 MBWe are excited to be joined by Aaron Reich and Priyanka Shah. Aaron is the CTO at Avanade, while Priyanka leads their AI/IoT offering for the SEA Region. Priyanka is also the MVP for Microsoft AI. They join us to discuss how LLMs are deployed in organizations.
A Survey Assessing Github Copilot
November 20, 2023 19:11 - 26 minutes - 30.5 MBIn this episode, we are joined by Jenny Liang, a PhD student at Carnegie Mellon University, where she studies the usability of code generation tools. She discusses her recent survey on the usability of AI programming assistants. Jenny discussed the method she used to gather people to complete her survey. She also shared some questions in her survey alongside vital takeaways. She shared the major reasons for developers not wanting to us code-generation tools. She stressed that the code-gene...
Program Aided Language Models
November 13, 2023 15:00 - 32 minutes - 37.3 MBWe are joined by Aman Madaan and Shuyan Zhou. They are both PhD students at the Language Technology Institute at Carnegie Mellon University. They join us to discuss their latest published paper, PAL: Program-aided Language Models. Aman and Shuyan started by sharing how the application of LLMs has evolved. They talked about the performance of LLMs on arithmetic tasks in contrast to coding tasks. Aman introduced their PAL model and how it helps LLMs improve at arithmetic tasks. He shared exa...
Which Programming Language is ChatGPT Best At
November 06, 2023 14:00 - 40 minutes - 46.8 MBIn this episode, we have Alessio Buscemi, a software engineer at Lifeware SA. Alessio was a post-doctoral researcher at the University of Luxembourg. He joins us to discuss his paper, A Comparative Study of Code Generation using ChatGPT 3.5 across 10 Programming Languages. Alessio shared his thoughts on whether ChatGPT is a threat to software engineers. He discussed how LLMs can help software engineers become more efficient.
GraphText
October 31, 2023 18:33 - 30 minutes - 35.4 MBOn the show today, we are joined by Jianan Zhao, a Computer Science student at Mila and the University of Montreal. His research focus is on graph databases and natural language processing. He joins us to discuss how to use graphs with LLMs efficiently.
arXiv Publication Patterns
October 23, 2023 17:20 - 28 minutes - 32.8 MBToday, we are joined by Rajiv Movva, a PhD student in Computer Science at Cornell Tech University. His research interest lies in the intersection of responsible AI and computational social science. He joins to discuss the findings of this work that analyzed LLM publication patterns. He shared the dataset he used for the survey. He also discussed the conditions for determining the papers to analyze. Rajiv shared some of the trends he observed from his analysis. For one, he observed there ha...
Do LLMs Make Ethical Choices
October 16, 2023 13:00 - 29 minutes - 40.4 MBWe are excited to be joined by Josh Albrecht, the CTO of Imbue. Imbue is a research company whose mission is to create AI agents that are more robust, safer, and easier to use. He joins us to share findings of his work; Despite "super-human" performance, current LLMs are unsuited for decisions about ethics and safety.
Emergent Deception in LLMs
October 09, 2023 15:26 - 27 minutes - 31.7 MBOn today’s show, we are joined by Thilo Hagendorff, a Research Group Leader of Ethics of Generative AI at the University of Stuttgart. He joins us to discuss his research, Deception Abilities Emerged in Large Language Models. Thilo discussed how machine psychology is useful in machine learning tasks. He shared examples of cognitive tasks that LLMs have improved at solving. He shared his thoughts on whether there’s a ceiling to the tasks ML can solve.
Agents with Theory of Mind Play Hanabi
October 02, 2023 13:58 - 38 minutes - 43.8 MBNieves Montes, a Ph.D. student at the Artificial Intelligence Research Institute in Barcelona, Spain, joins us. Her PhD research revolves around value-based reasoning in relation to norms. She shares her latest study, Combining theory of mind and abductive reasoning in agent‑oriented programming.
LLMs for Evil
September 25, 2023 14:00 - 26 minutes - 30.2 MBWe are joined by Maximilian Mozes, a PhD student at the University College, London. His PhD research focuses on Natural Language Processing (NLP), particularly the intersection of adversarial machine learning and NLP. He joins us to discuss his latest research, Use of LLMs for Illicit Purposes: Threats, Prevention Measures, and Vulnerabilities.
The Defeat of the Winograd Schema Challenge
September 11, 2023 13:33 - 31 minutes - 36 MBOur guest today is Vid Kocijan, a Machine Learning Engineer at Kumo AI. Vid has a Ph.D. in Computer Science at the University of Oxford. His research focused on common sense reasoning, pre-training in LLMs, pretraining in knowledge-based completion, and how these pre-trainings impact societal bias. He joins us to discuss how he built a BERT model that solved the Winograd Schema Challenge.
LLMs in Social Science
September 04, 2023 16:25 - 34 minutes - 39.8 MBToday, We are joined by Petter Törnberg, an Assistant Professor in Computational Social Science at the University of Amsterdam and a Senior Researcher at the University of Neuchatel. His research is centered on the intersection of computational methods and their applications in social sciences. He joins us to discuss findings from his research papers, ChatGPT-4 Outperforms Experts and Crowd Workers in Annotating Political Twitter Messages with Zero-Shot Learning, and How to use LLMs for Text...
LLMs in Music Composition
August 28, 2023 13:45 - 33 minutes - 38.9 MBIn this episode, we are joined by Carlos Hernández Oliván, a Ph.D. student at the University of Zaragoza. Carlos’s interest focuses on building new models for symbolic music generation. Carlos shared his thoughts on whether these models are genuinely creative. He revealed situations where AI-generated music can pass the Turing test. He also shared some essential considerations when constructing models for music composition.
Cuttlefish Model Tuning
August 21, 2023 14:38 - 27 minutes - 35.2 MBHongyi Wang, a Senior Researcher at the Machine Learning Department at Carnegie Mellon University, joins us. His research is in the intersection of systems and machine learning. He discussed his research paper, Cuttlefish: Low-Rank Model Training without All the Tuning, on today’s show. Hogyi started by sharing his thoughts on whether developers need to learn how to fine-tune models. He then spoke about the need to optimize the training of ML models, especially as these models grow bigger....
Which Professions Are Threatened by LLMs
August 15, 2023 12:00 - 38 minutes - 46.1 MBOn today’s episode, we have Daniel Rock, an Assistant Professor of Operations Information and Decisions at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. Daniel’s research focuses on the economics of AI and ML, specifically how digital technologies are changing the economy. Daniel discussed how AI has disrupted the job market in the past years. He also explained that it had created more winners than losers. Daniel spoke about the empirical study he and his coauthors did to quantif...
Why Prompting is Hard
August 08, 2023 17:13 - 48 minutes - 56.5 MBWe are excited to be joined by J.D. Zamfirescu-Pereira, a Ph.D. student at UC Berkeley. He focuses on the intersection of human-computer interaction (HCI) and artificial intelligence (AI). He joins us to share his work in his paper, Why Johnny can’t prompt: how non-AI experts try (and fail) to design LLM prompts. The discussion also explores lessons learned and achievements related to BotDesigner, a tool for creating chat bots.
Automated Peer Review
July 31, 2023 14:00 - 36 minutes - 41.7 MBIn this episode, we are joined by Ryan Liu, a Computer Science graduate of Carnegie Mellon University. Ryan will begin his Ph.D. program at Princeton University this fall. His Ph.D. will focus on the intersection of large language models and how humans think. Ryan joins us to discuss his research titled "ReviewerGPT? An Exploratory Study on Using Large Language Models for Paper Reviewing"
Prompt Refusal
July 24, 2023 13:00 - 44 minutes - 51.1 MBThe creators of large language models impose restrictions on some of the types of requests one might make of them. LLMs commonly refuse to give advice on committing crimes, producting adult content, or respond with any details about a variety of sensitive subjects. As with any content filtering system, you have false positives and false negatives. Today's interview with Max Reuter and William Schulze discusses their paper "I'm Afraid I Can't Do That: Predicting Prompt Refusal in Black-Bo...
A Long Way Till AGI
July 18, 2023 11:00 - 37 minutes - 43.5 MBOur guest today is Maciej Świechowski. Maciej is affiliated with QED Software and QED Games. He has a Ph.D. in Systems Research from the Polish Academy of Sciences. Maciej joins us to discuss findings from his study, Deep Learning and Artificial General Intelligence: Still a Long Way to Go.
Brain Inspired AI
July 11, 2023 00:45 - 36 minutes - 41.8 MBToday on the show, we are joined by Lin Zhao and Lu Zhang. Lin is a Senior Research Scientist at United Imaging Intelligence, while Lu is a Ph.D. candidate at the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Texas. They both shared findings from their work When Brain-inspired AI Meets AGI. Lin and Lu began by discussing the connections between the brain and neural networks. They mentioned the similarities as well as the differences. They also shared whether there is ...
Computable AGI
July 03, 2023 13:00 - 36 minutes - 41.9 MBOn today’s show, we are joined by Michael Timothy Bennett, a Ph.D. student at the Australian National University. Michael’s research is centered around Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), specifically the mathematical formalism of AGIs. He joins us to discuss findings from his study, Computable Artificial General Intelligence.
AGI Can Be Safe
June 26, 2023 20:09 - 45 minutes - 53 MBWe are joined by Koen Holtman, an independent AI researcher focusing on AI safety. Koen is the Founder of Holtman Systems Research, a research company based in the Netherlands. Koen started the conversation with his take on an AI apocalypse in the coming years. He discussed the obedience problem with AI models and the safe form of obedience. Koen explained the concept of Markov Decision Process (MDP) and how it is used to build machine learning models. Koen spoke about the problem of A...
AI Fails on Theory of Mind Tasks
June 19, 2023 16:35 - 52 minutes - 60.4 MBAn assistant professor of Psychology at Harvard University, Tomer Ullman, joins us. Tomer discussed the theory of mind and whether machines can indeed pass it. Using variations of the Sally-Anne test and the Smarties tube test, he explained how LLMs could fail the theory of mind test.
AI for Mathematics Education
June 12, 2023 13:00 - 35 minutes - 33.7 MBThe application of LLMs cuts across various industries. Today, we are joined by Steven Van Vaerenbergh, who discussed the application of AI in mathematics education. He discussed how AI tools have changed the landscape of solving mathematical problems. He also shared LLMs' current strengths and weaknesses in solving math problems.
Evaluating Jokes with LLMs
June 06, 2023 16:06 - 43 minutes - 49.9 MBFabricio Goes, a Lecturer in Creative Computing at the University of Leicester, joins us today. Fabricio discussed what creativity entails and how to evaluate jokes with LLMs. He specifically shared the process of evaluating jokes with GPT-3 and GPT-4. He concluded with his thoughts on the future of LLMs for creative tasks.
Why Machines Will Never Rule the World
May 29, 2023 22:17 - 55 minutes - 63.4 MBBarry Smith and Jobst Landgrebe, authors of the book “Why Machines will never Rule the World,” join us today. They discussed the limitations of AI systems in today’s world. They also shared elaborate reasons AI will struggle to attain the level of human intelligence.
A Psychopathological Approach to Safety in AGI
May 23, 2023 06:59 - 49 minutes - 56.7 MBWhile the possibilities with AGI emergence seem great, it also calls for safety concerns. On the show, Vahid Behzadan, an Assistant Professor of Computer Science and Data Science, joins us to discuss the complexities of modeling AGIs to accurately achieve objective functions. He touched on tangent issues such as abstractions during training, the problem of unpredictability, communications among agents, and so on.
The NLP Community Metasurvey
May 15, 2023 13:00 - 49 minutes - 45.1 MBJulian Michael, a postdoc at the Center for Data Science, New York University, joins us today. Julian’s conversation with Kyle was centered on the NLP community metasurvey: a survey aimed at understanding expert opinions on controversial NLP issues. He shared the process of preparing the survey as well as some shocking results.
Skeptical Survey Interpretation
May 10, 2023 00:10 - 21 minutes - 25 MBKyle shares his own perspectives on challenges getting insight from surveys. The discussion ranges from commentary on the market research industry to specific advice for detecting disingenuous or fraudulent responses and filtering them from your analysis. Finally, he shares some quick thoughts on the usage of the Chi-Square test for interpreting cross tab results in survey analysis.
The Gallup Poll
May 01, 2023 16:49 - 40 minutes - 46.3 MBJeff Jones, a Senior Editor at Gallup, joins us today. His conversation with Kyle spanned a range of topics on Gallup’s poll creation process. He discussed how Gallup generates unbiased questionnaires, gets respondents, analyzes results, and everything in between.
Inclusive Study Group Formation at Scale
April 25, 2023 04:34 - 32 minutes - 36.9 MBGireeja Ranade, a University of California at Berkeley professor, speaks with us today. She presented her study on implementing inclusive study groups at scale and shared the observed student performance improvements after the intervention.
The PhilPapers Survey
April 21, 2023 18:51 - 31 minutes - 36.3 MBToday, we are joined by David Bourget. David is an Associate Professor in Philosophy at Western University in London, Ontario. David is also the co-director of the PhilPapers Foundation and Director of the Center for Digital Philosophy. He joins us to discuss the PhilPapers Survey project. The PhilPapers survey was initially taken in 2009, but there was a follow-up survey in 2020. David discussed the need for the subsequent survey and what changed. He mentioned the metric for measuring the...