Linear Digressions

Latest Episodes:

Neural Nets (Part 1) May 01, 2015

Show notes

There is no known learning algorithm that is more flexible and powerful than the human brain. That's quite inspirational, if you think about it--to level up machine learning, maybe we should be going back to biology and letting millions of year of evolution guide the structure of our algorithms. This is the idea behind neural nets, which mock up the structure of the brain and are some of the most studied and powerful algorithms out there. In this episode, we’ll lay out the building blocks of the neural net (called neurons, naturally) and the networks that are built out of them. We’ll also explore the results that neural nets get when used to do object recognition in photographs.

Inferring Authorship (Part 2) Apr 28, 2015

Show notes

Now that we’re up to speed on the classic author ID problem (who wrote the unsigned Federalist Papers?), we move onto a couple more contemporary examples. First, J.K. Rowling was famously outed using computational linguistics (and Twitter) when she wrote a book under the pseudonym Robert Galbraith. Second, we’ll talk about a mystery that still endures--who is Satoshi Nakamoto? Satoshi is the mysterious person (or people) behind an extremely lucrative cryptocurrency (aka internet money) called Bitcoin; no one knows who he, she or they are, but we have plenty of writing samples in the form of whitepapers and Bitcoin forum posts. We’ll discuss some attempts to link Satoshi Nakamoto with a cryptocurrency expert and computer scientist named Nick Szabo; the links are tantalizing, but not a smoking gun. “Who is Satoshi” remains an example of attempted author identification where the threads are tangled, the conclusions inconclusive and the stakes high.

Inferring Authorship (Part 1) Apr 16, 2015

Show notes

This episode is inspired by one of our projects for Intro to Machine Learning: given a writing sample, can you use machine learning to identify who wrote it? Turns out that the answer is yes, a person’s writing style is as distinctive as their vocal inflection or their gait when they walk. By tracing the vocabulary used in a given piece, and comparing the word choices to the word choices in writing samples where we know the author, it can be surprisingly clear who is the more likely author of a given piece of text. We’ll use a seminal paper from the 1960’s as our example here, where the Naive Bayes algorithm was used to determine whether Alexander Hamilton or James Madison was the more likely author of a number of anonymous Federalist Papers.

Statistical Mistakes and the Challenger Disaster Apr 06, 2015

Show notes

After the Challenger exploded in 1986, killing all 7 astronauts aboard, an investigation into the cause was immediately launched. In the cold temperatures the night before the launch, the o-rings that seal off the fuel tanks from the rocket boosters became inflexible, so they did not seal properly, which led to the fuel tank explosion. NASA knew that there could be o-ring problems, but performed the analysis of their data incorrectly and ended up massively underestimating the risk associated with the cold temperatures. In this episode, we'll unpack the mistakes they made. We'll talk about how they excluded data points that they thought were irrelevant but which actually were critical to recognizing a fatal pattern.

Genetics and Um Detection (HMM Part 2) Mar 25, 2015

Show notes

In part two of our series on Hidden Markov Models (HMMs), we talk to Katie and special guest Francesco about more useful and novel applications of HMMs. We revisit Katie's "Um Detector," and hear about how HMMs are used in genetics research.

Introducing Hidden Markov Models (HMM Part 1) Mar 24, 2015

Show notes

Wikipedia says, "A hidden Markov model (HMM) is a statistical Markov model in which the system being modeled is assumed to be a Markov process with unobserved (hidden) states." What does that even mean? In part one of a special two-parter on HMMs, Katie, Ben, and special guest Francesco explain the basics of HMMs, and some simple applications of them in the real world. This episode sets the stage for part two, where we explore the use of HMMs in Modern Genetics, and possibly Katie's "Um Detector."

Monte Carlo For Physicists Mar 12, 2015

Show notes

This is another physics-centered podcast, about an ML-backed particle identification tool that we use to figure out what kind of particle caused a particular blob in the detector. But in this case, as in many cases, it looks hard at the outset to use ML because we don't have labeled training data. Monte Carlo to the rescue! Monte Carlo (MC) is fake data that we generate for ourselves, usually following certain sets of rules (often a Markov chain; in physics we generate MC according to the laws of physics as we understand them) and since you generated the event, you "know" what the correct label is. Of course, it's a lot of work to validate your MC, but the payoff is that then you can use Machine Learning where you never could before.

Random Kanye Mar 04, 2015

Show notes

Ever feel like you could randomly assemble words from a certain vocabulary and make semi-coherent Kanye West lyrics? Or technical documentation, imitations of local newscasters, your politically outspoken uncle, etc.? Wonder no more, there's a way to do this exact type of thing: it's called a Markov Chain, and probably the most powerful way to generate made-up data that you can then use for fun and profit. The idea behind a Markov Chain is that you probabilistically generate a sequence of steps, numbers, words, etc. where each next step/number/word depends only on the previous one, which makes it fast and efficient to computationally generate. Usually Markov Chains are used for serious academic uses, but this ain't one of them: here they're used to randomly generate rap lyrics based on Kanye West lyrics.

Lie Detectors Feb 25, 2015

Show notes

Often machine learning discussions center around algorithms, or features, or datasets--this one centers around interpretation, and ethics. Suppose you could use a technology like fMRI to see what regions of a person's brain are active when they ask questions. And also suppose that you could run trials where you watch their brain activity while they lie about some minor issue (say, whether the card in their hand is a spade or a club)--could you use machine learning to analyze those images, and use the patterns in them for lie detection? Well you certainly can try, and indeed researchers have done just that. There are important problems though--the images of brains can be high variance, meaning that for any given person, there might not be a lot of certainty about whether they're lying or not. It's also open to debate whether the training set (in this case, test subjects with playing cards in their hands) really generalize well to the more important cases, like a person accused of a crime. So while machine learning has yielded some impressive gains in lie detection, it is not a solution to these thornier scientific issues. http://www.amacad.org/pdfs/deceit.pdf

The Enron Dataset Feb 09, 2015

Show notes

In 2000, Enron was one of the largest and companies in the world, praised far and wide for its innovations in energy distribution and many other markets. By 2002, it was apparent that many bad apples had been cooking the books, and billions of dollars and thousands of jobs disappeared. In the aftermath, surprisingly, one of the greatest datasets in all of machine learning was born--the Enron emails corpus. Hundreds of thousands of emails amongst top executives were made public; there's no realistic chance any dataset like this will ever be made public again. But the dataset that was released has gone on to immortality, serving as the basis for a huge variety of advances in machine learning and other fields. http://www.technologyreview.com/news/515801/the-immortal-life-of-the-enron-e-mails/

Our TOPPODCAST Picks

Follow Us

Stay Connected

Related Podcasts

Links

Stay Connected

Our TOPPODCAST Picks

Follow Us

Stay Connected

Linear Digressions

Related Podcasts

1

2

3

4

5

6