Gradient Dissent: Conversations on AI

Latest Episodes:

Xavier Amatriain — Building AI-powered Primary Care Jul 30, 2021

Show notes

Xavier shares his experience deploying healthcare models, augmenting primary care with AI, the challenges of "ground truth" in medicine, and robustness in ML.

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Xavier Amatriain is co-founder and CTO of Curai, an ML-based primary care chat system. Previously, he was VP of Engineering at Quora, and Research/Engineering Director at Neflix, where he started and led the Algorithms team responsible for Netflix's recommendation systems.

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⏳ Timestamps:

0:00 Sneak peak, intro

0:49 What is Curai?

5:48 The role of AI within Curai

8:44 Why Curai keeps humans in the loop

15:00 Measuring diagnostic accuracy

18:53 Patient safety

22:39 Different types of models at Curai

25:42 Using GPT-3 to generate training data

32:13 How Curai monitors and debugs models

35:19 Model explainability

39:27 Robustness in ML

45:52 Connecting metrics to impact

49:32 Outro

🌟 Show notes:

- http://wandb.me/gd-xavier-amatriain

- Transcription of the episode

- Links to papers, projects, and people

---

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Spence Green — Enterprise-scale Machine Translation Jul 16, 2021

Show notes

Spence shares his experience creating a product around human-in-the-loop machine translation, and explains how machine translation has evolved over the years.

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Spence Green is co-founder and CEO of Lilt, an AI-powered language translation platform. Lilt combines human translators and machine translation in order to produce high-quality translations more efficiently.

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🌟 Show notes:

- http://wandb.me/gd-spence-green

- Transcription of the episode

- Links to papers, projects, and people

⏳ Timestamps:

0:00 Sneak peak, intro

0:45 The story behind Lilt

3:08 Statistical MT vs neural MT

6:30 Domain adaptation and personalized models

8:00 The emergence of neural MT and development of Lilt

13:09 What success looks like for Lilt

18:20 Models that self-correct for gender bias

19:39 How Lilt runs its models in production

26:33 How far can MT go?

29:55 Why Lilt cares about human-computer interaction

35:04 Bilingual grammatical error correction

37:18 Human parity in MT

39:41 The unexpected challenges of prototype to production

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Roger & DJ — The Rise of Big Data and CA's COVID-19 Response Jul 08, 2021

Show notes

Roger and DJ share some of the history behind data science as we know it today, and reflect on their experiences working on California's COVID-19 response.

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Roger Magoulas is Senior Director of Data Strategy at Astronomer, where he works on data infrastructure, analytics, and community development. Previously, he was VP of Research at O'Reilly and co-chair of O'Reilly's Strata Data and AI Conference.

DJ Patil is a board member and former CTO of Devoted Health, a healthcare company for seniors. He was also Chief Data Scientist under the Obama administration and the Head of Data Science at LinkedIn.

Roger and DJ recently volunteered for the California COVID-19 response, and worked with data to understand case counts, bed capacities and the impact of intervention.

Connect with Roger and DJ:

📍 Roger's Twitter: https://twitter.com/rogerm

📍 DJ's Twitter: https://twitter.com/dpatil

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🌟 Transcript: http://wandb.me/gd-roger-and-dj 🌟

⏳ Timestamps:

0:00 Sneak peek, intro

1:03 Coining the terms "big data" and "data scientist"

7:12 The rise of data science teams

15:28 Big Data, Hadoop, and Spark

23:10 The importance of using the right tools

29:20 BLUF: Bottom Line Up Front

34:44 California's COVID response

41:21 The human aspects of responding to COVID

48:33 Reflecting on the impact of COVID interventions

57:06 Advice on doing meaningful data science work

1:04:18 Outro

🍀 Links:

1. "MapReduce: Simplified Data Processing on Large Clusters" (Dean and Ghemawat, 2004): https://research.google/pubs/pub62/

2. "Big Data: Technologies and Techniques for Large-Scale Data" (Magoulas and Lorica, 2009): https://academics.uccs.edu/~ooluwada/courses/datamining/ExtraReading/BigData

3. The O'RLY book covers: https://www.businessinsider.com/these-hilarious-memes-perfectly-capture-what-its-like-to-work-in-tech-2016-4

4. "The Premonition" (Lewis, 2021): https://www.npr.org/2021/05/03/991570372/michael-lewis-the-premonition-is-a-sweeping-indictment-of-the-cdc

5. Why California's beaches are glowing with bioluminescence: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AVYSr19ReOs

7. Sturgis Motorcyle Rally: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sturgis_Motorcycle_Rally

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Amelia & Filip — How Pandora Deploys ML Models into Production Jul 01, 2021

Show notes

Amelia and Filip give insights into the recommender systems powering Pandora, from developing models to balancing effectiveness and efficiency in production.

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Amelia Nybakke is a Software Engineer at Pandora. Her team is responsible for the production system that serves models to listeners.

Filip Korzeniowski is a Senior Scientist at Pandora working on recommender systems. Before that, he was a PhD student working on deep neural networks for acoustic and language modeling applied to musical audio recordings.

Connect with Amelia and Filip:

📍 Amelia's LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/amelia-nybakke-60bba5107/

📍 Filip's LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/filip-korzeniowski-28b33815a/

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⏳ Timestamps:

0:00 Sneak peek, intro

0:42 What type of ML models are at Pandora?

3:39 What makes two songs similar or not similar?

7:33 Improving models and A/B testing

8:52 Chaining, retraining, versioning, and tracking models

13:29 Useful development tools

15:10 Debugging models

18:28 Communicating progress

20:33 Tuning and improving models

23:08 How Pandora puts models into production

29:45 Bias in ML models

36:01 Repetition vs novelty in recommended songs

38:01 The bottlenecks of deployment

🌟 Transcript: http://wandb.me/gd-amelia-and-filip 🌟

Links:

📍 Amelia's "Women's History Month" playlist: https://www.pandora.com/playlist/PL:1407374934299927:100514833

---

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Luis Ceze — Accelerating Machine Learning Systems Jun 24, 2021

Show notes

From Apache TVM to OctoML, Luis gives direct insight into the world of ML hardware optimization, and where systems optimization is heading.

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Luis Ceze is co-founder and CEO of OctoML, co-author of the Apache TVM Project, and Professor of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Washington. His research focuses on the intersection of computer architecture, programming languages, machine learning, and molecular biology.

Connect with Luis:

📍 Twitter: https://twitter.com/luisceze

📍 University of Washington profile: https://homes.cs.washington.edu/~luisceze/

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⏳ Timestamps:

0:00 Intro and sneak peek

0:59 What is TVM?

8:57 Freedom of choice in software and hardware stacks

15:53 How new libraries can improve system performance

20:10 Trade-offs between efficiency and complexity

24:35 Specialized instructions

26:34 The future of hardware design and research

30:03 Where does architecture and research go from here?

30:56 The environmental impact of efficiency

32:49 Optimizing and trade-offs

37:54 What is OctoML and the Octomizer?

42:31 Automating systems design with and for ML

44:18 ML and molecular biology

46:09 The challenges of deployment and post-deployment

🌟 Transcript: http://wandb.me/gd-luis-ceze 🌟

Links:

1. OctoML: https://octoml.ai/

2. Apache TVM: https://tvm.apache.org/

3. "Scalable and Intelligent Learning Systems" (Chen, 2019): https://digital.lib.washington.edu/researchworks/handle/1773/44766

4. "Principled Optimization Of Dynamic Neural Networks" (Roesch, 2020): https://digital.lib.washington.edu/researchworks/handle/1773/46765

5. "Cross-Stack Co-Design for Efficient and Adaptable Hardware Acceleration" (Moreau, 2018): https://digital.lib.washington.edu/researchworks/handle/1773/43349

6. "TVM: An Automated End-to-End Optimizing Compiler for Deep Learning" (Chen et al., 2018): https://www.usenix.org/system/files/osdi18-chen.pdf

7. Porcupine is a molecular tagging system introduced in "Rapid and robust assembly and decoding of molecular tags with DNA-based nanopore signatures" (Doroschak et al., 2020): https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-020-19151-8

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Matthew Davis — Bringing Genetic Insights to Everyone Jun 17, 2021

Show notes

Matthew explains how combining machine learning and computational biology can provide mainstream medicine with better diagnostics and insights.

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Matthew Davis is Head of AI at Invitae, the largest and fastest growing genetic testing company in the world. His research includes bioinformatics, computational biology, NLP, reinforcement learning, and information retrieval. Matthew was previously at IBM Research AI, where he led a research team focused on improving AI systems.

Connect with Matthew:

📍 Personal website: https://www.linkedin.com/in/matthew-davis-51233386/

📍 Twitter: https://twitter.com/deadsmiths

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⏳ Timestamps:

0:00 Sneak peek, intro

1:02 What is Invitae?

2:58 Why genetic testing can help everyone

7:51 How Invitae uses ML techniques

14:02 Modeling molecules and deciding which genes to look at

22:22 NLP applications in bioinformatics

27:10 Team structure at Invitae

36:50 Why reasoning is an underrated topic in ML

40:25 Why having a clear buy-in is important

🌟 Transcript: http://wandb.me/gd-matthew-davis 🌟

Links:

📍 Invitae: https://www.invitae.com/en

📍 Careers at Invitae: https://www.invitae.com/en/careers/

---

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Clément Delangue — The Power of the Open Source Community Jun 10, 2021

Show notes

Clem explains the virtuous cycles behind the creation and success of Hugging Face, and shares his thoughts on where NLP is heading.

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Clément Delangue is co-founder and CEO of Hugging Face, the AI community building the future. Hugging Face started as an open source NLP library and has quickly grown into a commercial product used by over 5,000 companies.

Connect with Clem:

📍 Twitter: https://twitter.com/ClementDelangue

📍 LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/clementdelangue/

---

🌟 Transcript: http://wandb.me/gd-clement-delangue 🌟

⏳ Timestamps:

0:00 Sneak peek and intro

0:56 What is Hugging Face?

4:15 The success of Hugging Face Transformers

7:53 Open source and virtuous cycles

10:37 Working with both TensorFlow and PyTorch

13:20 The "Write With Transformer" project

14:36 Transfer learning in NLP

16:43 BERT and DistilBERT

22:33 GPT

26:32 The power of the open source community

29:40 Current applications of NLP

35:15 The Turing Test and conversational AI

41:19 Why speech is an upcoming field within NLP

43:44 The human challenges of machine learning

Links Discussed:

📍 Write With Transformer, Hugging Face Transformer's text generation demo: https://transformer.huggingface.co/

📍 "Attention Is All You Need" (Vaswani et al., 2017): https://arxiv.org/abs/1706.03762

📍 EleutherAI and GPT-Neo: https://github.com/EleutherAI/gpt-neo]

📍 Rasa, open source conversational AI: https://rasa.com/

📍 Roblox article on BERT: https://blog.roblox.com/2020/05/scaled-bert-serve-1-billion-daily-requests-cpus/

---

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Wojciech Zaremba — What Could Make AI Conscious? Jun 03, 2021

Show notes

Wojciech joins us to talk the principles behind OpenAI, the Fermi Paradox, and the future stages of developments in AGI.

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Wojciech Zaremba is a co-founder of OpenAI, a research company dedicated to discovering and enacting the path to safe artificial general intelligence. He was also Head of Robotics, where his team developed general-purpose robots through new approaches to transfer learning, and taught robots complex behaviors.

Connect with Wojciech:

Personal website: https://wojzaremba.com//

Twitter: https://twitter.com/woj_zaremba

---

Topics Discussed:

0:00 Sneak peek and intro

1:03 The people and principles behind OpenAI

6:31 The stages of future AI developments

13:42 The Fermi paradox

16:18 What drives Wojciech?

19:17 Thoughts on robotics

24:58 Dota and other projects at OpenAI

33:42 What would make an AI conscious?

41:31 How to be succeed in robotics

Transcript:

http://wandb.me/gd-wojciech-zaremba

Links:

Fermi paradox: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermi_paradox

OpenAI and Dota: https://openai.com/projects/five/

---

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Phil Brown — How IPUs are Advancing Machine Intelligence May 27, 2021

Show notes

Phil shares some of the approaches, like sparsity and low precision, behind the breakthrough performance of Graphcore's Intelligence Processing Units (IPUs).

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Phil Brown leads the Applications team at Graphcore, where they're building high-performance machine learning applications for their Intelligence Processing Units (IPUs), new processors specifically designed for AI compute.

Connect with Phil:

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/philipsbrown/

Twitter: https://twitter.com/phil_s_brown

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0:00 Sneak peek, intro

1:44 From computational chemistry to Graphcore

5:16 The simulations behind weather prediction

10:54 Measuring improvement in weather prediction systems

15:35 How high performance computing and ML have different needs

19:00 The potential of sparse training

31:08 IPUs and computer architecture for machine learning

39:10 On performance improvements

44:43 The impacts of increasing computing capability

50:24 The ML chicken and egg problem

52:00 The challenges of converging at scale and bringing hardware to market

Links Discussed:

Rigging the Lottery: Making All Tickets Winners (Evci et al., 2019): https://arxiv.org/abs/1911.11134

Graphcore MK2 Benchmarks: https://www.graphcore.ai/mk2-benchmarks

Check out the transcription and discover more awesome ML projects: http://wandb.me/gd-phil-brown

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Soundcloud: http://wandb.me/soundcloud

Join our community of ML practitioners where we host AMAs, share interesting projects and meet other people working in Deep Learning: http://wandb.me/slack

Check out our Gallery, which features curated machine learning reports by researchers exploring deep learning techniques, Kagglers showcasing winning models, industry leaders sharing best practices, and more: https://wandb.ai/gallery

Alyssa Simpson Rochwerger — Responsible ML in the Real World May 20, 2021

Show notes

From working on COVID-19 vaccine rollout to writing a book on responsible ML, Alyssa shares her thoughts on meaningful projects and the importance of teamwork.

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Alyssa Simpson Rochwerger is as a Director of Product at Blue Shield of California, pursuing her dream of using technology to improve healthcare. She has over a decade of experience in building technical data-driven products and has held numerous leadership roles for machine learning organizations, including VP of AI and Data at Appen and Director of Product at IBM Watson.

Connect with Sean:

Personal website: https://seanjtaylor.com/

Twitter: https://twitter.com/seanjtaylor

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/seanjtaylor/

---

Topics Discussed:

0:00 Sneak peak, intro

1:17 Working on COVID-19 vaccine rollout in California

6:50 Real World AI

12:26 Diagnosing bias in models

17:43 Common challenges in ML

21:56 Finding meaningful projects

24:28 ML applications in health insurance

31:21 Longitudinal health records and data cleaning

38:24 Following your interests

40:21 Why teamwork is crucial

Transcript:

http://wandb.me/gd-alyssa-s-rochwerger

Links Discussed:

My Turn: https://myturn.ca.gov/

"Turn the Ship Around!": https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/314163/turn-the-ship-around-by-l-david-marquet/

---

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