Linear Digressions

Latest Episodes:

Zero Shot Translation Jan 09, 2017

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Take Google-size data, the flexibility of a neural net, and all (well, most) of the languages of the world, and what you end up with is a pile of surprises. This episode is about some interesting features of Google's new neural machine translation system, namely that with minimal tweaking, it can accommodate many different languages in a single neural net, that it can do a half-decent job of translating between language pairs it's never been explicitly trained on, and that it seems to have its own internal representation of concepts that's independent of the language those concepts are being represented in. Intrigued? You should be...

Google Neural Machine Translation Jan 02, 2017

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Recently, Google swapped out the backend for Google Translate, moving from a statistical phrase-based method to a recurrent neural network. This marks a big change in methodology: the tried-and-true statistical translation methods that have been in use for decades are giving way to a neural net that, across the board, appears to be giving more fluent and natural-sounding translations. This episode recaps statistical phrase-based methods, digs into the RNN architecture a little bit, and recaps the impressive results that is making us all sound a little better in our non-native languages.

Data and the Future of Medicine : Interview with Precision Medicine Initiative researcher Matt Might Dec 26, 2016

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Today we are delighted to bring you an interview with Matt Might, computer scientist and medical researcher extraordinaire and architect of President Obama's Precision Medicine Initiative. As the Obama Administration winds down, we're talking with Matt about the goals and accomplishments of precision medicine (and related projects like the Cancer Moonshot) and what he foresees as the future marriage of data and medicine. Many thanks to Matt, our friends over at Partially Derivative (hi, Jonathon!) and the White House for arranging this opportunity to chat. Enjoy!

Special Crossover Episode: Partially Derivative interview with White House Data Scientist DJ Patil Dec 18, 2016

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We have the pleasure of bringing you a very special crossover episode this week: our friends at Partially Derivative (another great podcast about data science, you should check it out) recently interviewed White House Chief Data Scientist DJ Patil. We think DJ's message about the importance and impact of data science is worth spreading, so it's our pleasure to bring it to you today. A huge thanks to Jonathon Morgan and Partially Derivative for sharing this interview with us--enjoy! Relevant links: http://partiallyderivative.com/podcast/2016/12/13/dj-patil

How to Lose at Kaggle Dec 12, 2016

Show notes

Competing in a machine learning competition on Kaggle is a kind of rite of passage for data scientists. Losing unexpectedly at the very end of the contest is also something that a lot of us have experienced. It's not just bad luck: a very specific combination of overfitting on popular competitions can take someone who is in the top few spots in the final days of a contest and bump them down hundreds of slots in the final tally.

Attacking Discrimination in Machine Learning Dec 05, 2016

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Imagine there's an important decision to be made about someone, like a bank deciding whether to extend a loan, or a school deciding to admit a student--unfortunately, we're all too aware that discrimination can sneak into these situations (even when everyone is acting with the best of intentions!). Now, these decisions are often made with the assistance of machine learning and statistical models, but unfortunately these algorithms pick up on the discrimination in the world (it sneaks in through the data, which can capture inequities, which the algorithms then learn) and reproduce it. This podcast covers some of the most common ways we can try to minimize discrimination, and why none of those ways is perfect at fixing the problem. Then we'll get to a new idea called "equality of opportunity," which came out of Google recently and takes a pretty practical and well-aimed approach to machine learning bias.

Recurrent Neural Nets Nov 28, 2016

Show notes

This week, we're doing a crash course in recurrent neural networks--what the structural pieces are that make a neural net recurrent, how that structure helps RNNs solve certain time series problems, and the importance of forgetfulness in RNNs. Relevant links: http://colah.github.io/posts/2015-08-Understanding-LSTMs/

Stealing a PIN with signal processing and machine learning Nov 21, 2016

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Want another reason to be paranoid when using the free coffee shop wifi? Allow us to introduce WindTalker, a system that cleverly combines a dose of signal processing with a dash of machine learning to (potentially) steal the PIN from your phone transactions without ever having physical access to your phone. This episode has it all, folks--channel state information, ICMP echo requests, low-pass filtering, PCA, dynamic time warps, and the PIN for your phone.

Neural Net Cryptography Nov 14, 2016

Show notes

Cryptography used to be the domain of information theorists and spies. There's a new player now: neural networks. Given the task of communicating securely, neural networks are inventing new encryption methods that, as best we can tell, are unlike anything humans have ever seen before. Relevant links: http://arstechnica.co.uk/information-technology/2016/10/google-ai-neural-network-cryptography/ https://arxiv.org/pdf/1610.06918v1.pdf

Deep Blue Nov 07, 2016

Show notes

In 1997, Deep Blue was the IBM algorithm/computer that did what no one, at the time, though possible: it beat the world's best chess player. It turns out, though, that one of the most important moves in the matchup, where Deep Blue psyched out its opponent with a weird move, might not have been so inspired after all. It might have been nothing more than a bug in the program, and it changed computer science history. Relevant links: https://www.wired.com/2012/09/deep-blue-computer-bug/

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