Practical AI: Machine Learning, Data Science
280 episodes - English - Latest episode: 3 days ago - ★★★★★ - 37 ratingsMaking artificial intelligence practical, productive & accessible to everyone. Practical AI is a show in which technology professionals, business people, students, enthusiasts, and expert guests engage in lively discussions about Artificial Intelligence and related topics (Machine Learning, Deep Learning, Neural Networks, GANs, MLOps, AIOps, LLMs & more). The focus is on productive implementations and real-world scenarios that are accessible to everyone. If you want to keep up with the latest advances in AI, while keeping one foot in the real world, then this is the show for you!
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Episodes
NLP for the world's 7000+ languages
February 24, 2020 18:30 - 54 minutes - 50.3 MBExpanding 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 ...
Real-time conversational insights from phone call data
February 17, 2020 17:00 - 51 minutes - 47.5 MBDaniel 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.
AI-powered scientific exploration and discovery
February 10, 2020 18:15 - 42 minutes - 58.6 MBDaniel 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.
Insights from the AI Index 2019 Annual Report
February 03, 2020 16:00 - 44 minutes - 61.3 MBDaniel 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.
Testing ML systems
January 27, 2020 21:00 - 47 minutes - 65.4 MBProduction 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.
AI-driven automation in manufacturing
January 20, 2020 17:07 - 47 minutes - 65.1 MBOne 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.
How the U.S. military thinks about AI
January 13, 2020 16:45 - 48 minutes - 67.2 MBChris 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 ...
2019's AI top 5
January 06, 2020 21:30 - 58 minutes - 79.9 MBWow, 2019 was an amazing year for AI! In this fully connected episode, Chris and Daniel discuss their list of top 5 notable AI things from 2019. They also discuss the “state of AI” at the end of 2019, and they make some predictions for 2020.
AI for search at Etsy
December 23, 2019 17:00 - 46 minutes - 63.6 MBWe 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.
Escaping the "dark ages" of AI infrastructure
December 16, 2019 17:45 - 50 minutes - 68.8 MBEvan 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.
Modern NLP with spaCy
December 09, 2019 19:35 - 56 minutes - 77.6 MBSpaCy 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!
Modern NLP with SpaCy
December 09, 2019 19:35 - 56 minutes - 77.6 MBSpaCy 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!
Making GANs practical
December 02, 2019 18:10 - 59 minutes - 81.2 MBGANs 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.
Build custom ML tools with Streamlit
November 25, 2019 16:29 - 44 minutes - 60.9 MBStreamlit 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.
Intelligent systems and knowledge graphs
November 18, 2019 17:08 - 57 minutes - 78.6 MBThere’s a lot of hype about knowledge graphs and AI-methods for building or using them, but what exactly is a knowledge graph? How is it different from a database or other data store? How can I build my own knowledge graph? James Fletcher from Grakn Labs helps us understand knowledge graphs in general and some practical steps towards creating your own. He also discusses graph neural networks and the future of graph-augmented methods.
Robot hands solving Rubik's cubes
November 11, 2019 16:07 - 44 minutes - 61.3 MBEveryone is talking about it. OpenAI trained a pair of neural nets that enable a robot hand to solve a Rubik’s cube. That is super dope! The results have also generated a lot of commentary and controversy, mainly related to the way in which the results were represented on OpenAI’s blog. We dig into all of this in on today’s Fully Connected episode, and we point you to a few places where you can learn more about reinforcement learning.
Open source data labeling tools
November 05, 2019 12:00 - 44 minutes - 61 MBWhat’s the most practical of practical AI things? Data labeling of course! It’s also one of the most time consuming and error prone processes that we deal with in AI development. Michael Malyuk of Heartex and Label Studio joins us to discuss various data labeling challenges and open source tooling to help us overcome those challenges.
It's time to talk time series
October 28, 2019 18:57 - 42 minutes - 58.9 MBTimes series data is everywhere! I mean, seriously, try to think of some data that isn’t a time series. You have stock prices and weather data, which are the classics, but you also have a time series of images on your phone, time series log data coming off of your servers, and much more. In this episode, Anais from InfluxData helps us understand the range of methods and problems related to time series data. She also gives her perspective on when statistical methods might perform better than n...
AI in the browser
October 21, 2019 16:43 - 49 minutes - 68.3 MBWe’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
Blacklisted facial recognition and surveillance companies
October 15, 2019 20:00 - 49 minutes - 68 MBThe United States has blacklisted several Chinese AI companies working in facial recognition and surveillance. Why? What are these companies doing exactly, and how does this fit into the international politics of AI? We dig into these questions and attempt to do some live fact finding in this episode.
Flying high with AI drone racing at AlphaPilot
October 07, 2019 16:25 - 47 minutes - 65.8 MBChris 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 ...
AI in the majority world and model distillation
September 30, 2019 15:05 - 45 minutes - 62.2 MBChris and Daniel take some time to cover recent trends in AI and some noteworthy publications. In particular, they discuss the increasing AI momentum in the majority world (Africa, Asia, South and Central America and the Caribbean), and they dig into Hugging Face’s recent model distillation results.
The influence of open source on AI development
September 25, 2019 19:58 - 45 minutes - 62.7 MBThe All Things Open conference is happening soon, and we snagged one of their speakers to discuss open source and AI. Samuel Taylor talks about the essential role that open source is playing in AI development and research, and he gives us some tips on choosing AI-related side projects.
Worlds are colliding - AI and HPC
September 17, 2019 15:22 - 48 minutes - 66.6 MBIn this very special fully-connected episode of Practical AI, Daniel interviews Chris. They discuss High Performance Computing (HPC) and how it is colliding with the world of AI. Chris explains how HPC differs from cloud/on-prem infrastructure, and he highlights some of the challenges of an HPC-based AI strategy.
AutoML and AI at Google
September 09, 2019 21:06 - 58 minutes - 80.6 MBWe’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).
On being humAIn
August 26, 2019 21:35 - 55 minutes - 76.9 MBDavid 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.
Serving deep learning models with RedisAI
August 12, 2019 19:00 - 46 minutes - 63.7 MBRedis is a an open source, in-memory data structure store, widely used as a database, cache and message broker. It now also support tensor data types and deep learning models via the RedisAI module. Why did they build this module? Who is or should be using it? We discuss this and much more with Pieter Cailliau.
AI-driven studies of the ancient world and good GANs
July 30, 2019 19:10 - 54 minutes - 75.4 MBChris and Daniel take the opportunity to catch up on some recent AI news. Among other things, they discuss the increasing impact of AI on studies of the ancient world and “good” uses of GANs. They also provide some more learning resources to help you level up your AI and machine learning game.
AI code that facilitates good science
July 19, 2019 18:30 - 53 minutes - 72.9 MBWe’re talking with Joel Grus, author of Data Science from Scratch, 2nd Edition, senior research engineer at the Allen Institute for AI (AI2), and maintainer of AllenNLP. We discussed Joel’s book, which has become a personal favorite of the hosts, and why he decided to approach data science and AI “from scratch.” Joel also gives us a glimpse into AI2, an introduction to AllenNLP, and some tips for writing good research code. This episode is packed full of reproducible AI goodness!
Celebrating episode 50 and the neural net!
July 03, 2019 11:00 - 50 minutes - 70 MBWoo 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!
Exposing the deception of DeepFakes
June 25, 2019 16:30 - 55 minutes - 76 MBThis 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!
Model inspection and interpretation at Seldon
June 17, 2019 15:09 - 43 minutes - 60.2 MBInterpreting complicated models is a hot topic. How can we trust and manage AI models that we can’t explain? In this episode, Janis Klaise, a data scientist with Seldon, joins us to talk about model interpretation and Seldon’s new open source project called Alibi. Janis also gives some of his thoughts on production ML/AI and how Seldon addresses related problems.
GANs, RL, and transfer learning oh my!
June 11, 2019 11:00 - 51 minutes - 70.9 MBDaniel 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!
Visualizing and understanding RNNs
June 04, 2019 11:00 - 46 minutes - 63.7 MBAndreas Madsen, a freelance ML/AI engineer and Distill.pub author, joins us to discuss his work visualizing neural networks and recurrent neural units. Andreas discusses various neural unites, RNNs in general, and the “why” of neural network visualization. He also gives us his perspective on ML/AI freelancing and moving from web development to AI research.
How to get plugged into the AI community
May 28, 2019 16:30 - 1 hour - 85.7 MBChris 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 ...
AI adoption in the enterprise
May 21, 2019 21:00 - 57 minutes - 78.5 MBAt 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.
When AI meets quantum mechanics
May 14, 2019 17:00 - 1 hour - 85.4 MBCan 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.
TensorFlow Dev Summit 2019
May 07, 2019 13:00 - 59 minutes - 81.5 MBThis 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.
CTRL-labs lets you control machines with your mind
April 30, 2019 11:05 - 1 hour - 87 MBNo, this isn’t science fiction! CTRL-labs is using neural signals and AI to build neural interfaces. Adam Berenzweig, from CTRL-labs R&D, joins us to explain how this works and how they have made it practical.
Deep Reinforcement Learning
April 23, 2019 11:00 - 45 minutes - 62.6 MBWhile 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!
Making the world a better place at the AI for Good Foundation
April 15, 2019 19:00 - 51 minutes - 70.9 MBLongtime 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 celebrity detector
April 08, 2019 19:00 - 49 minutes - 67.8 MBGIPHY’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!
The landscape of AI infrastructure
April 02, 2019 11:00 - 51 minutes - 70.8 MBBeing that this is “practical” AI, we decided that it would be good to take time to discuss various aspects of AI infrastructure. In this full-connected episode, we discuss our personal/local infrastructure along with trends in AI, including infra for training, serving, and data management.
Growing up to become a world-class AI expert
March 25, 2019 21:00 - 1 hour - 90.1 MBWhile 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.
Social AI with Hugging Face
March 18, 2019 17:00 - 39 minutes - 53.7 MBClément Delangue, the co-founder & CEO of Hugging Face, joined us to discuss fun, social, and conversational AI. Clem explained why social AI is important, what products they are building (social AIs who learn to chit-chat, talk sassy and trades selfies with you), and how this intersects with the latest research in AI for natural language. He also shared his vision for how AI for natural language with develop over the next few years.
The White House Executive Order on AI
March 11, 2019 11:00 - 40 minutes - 55.8 MBThe 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.
Staving off disaster through AI safety research
March 04, 2019 18:00 - 51 minutes - 70 MBWhile covering Applied Machine Learning Days in Switzerland, Chris met El Mahdi El Mhamdi by chance, and was fascinated with his work doing AI safety research at EPFL. El Mahdi agreed to come on the show to share his research into the vulnerabilities in machine learning that bad actors can take advantage of. We cover everything from poisoned data sets and hacked machines to AI-generated propaganda and fake news, so grab your James Bond 007 kit from Q Branch, and join us for this important c...
OpenAI's new "dangerous" GPT-2 language model
February 25, 2019 20:15 - 40 minutes - 55.6 MBThis week we discuss GPT-2, a new transformer-based language model from OpenAI that has everyone talking. It’s capable of generating incredibly realistic text, and the AI community has lots of concerns about potential malicious applications. We help you understand GPT-2 and we discuss ethical concerns, responsible release of AI research, and resources that we have found useful in learning about language models.
AI for social good at Intel
February 20, 2019 12:00 - 37 minutes - 52.2 MBWhile at Applied Machine Learning Days in Lausanne, Switzerland, Chris had an inspiring conversation with Anna Bethke, Head of AI for Social Good at Intel. Anna reveals how she started the AI for Social Good program at Intel, and goes on to share the positive impact this program has had - from stopping animal poachers, to helping the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children. Through this AI for Social Good program, Intel clearly demonstrates how a for-profit business can effectively...
GirlsCoding.org empowers young women to embrace computer science
February 13, 2019 16:11 - 40 minutes - 55.8 MBChris sat down with Marta Martinez-Cámara and Miranda Kreković to learn how GirlsCoding.org is inspiring 9–16-year-old girls to learn about computer science. The site is successfully empowering young women to recognize computer science as a valid career choice through hands-on workshops, role models, and by smashing prevalent gender stereotypes. This is an episode that you’ll want to listen to with your daughter!