The TWIML AI Podcast (formerly This Week in Machine Learning & Artificial Intelligence)

Latest Episodes:

Deep Reinforcement Learning at the Edge of the Statistical Precipice with Rishabh Agarwal - #559 Feb 14, 2022

Show notes

Today we’re joined by Rishabh Agarwal, a research scientist at Google Brain in Montreal. In our conversation with Rishabh, we discuss his recent paper Deep Reinforcement Learning at the Edge of the Statistical Precipice, which won an outstanding paper award at the most recent NeurIPS conference. In this paper, Rishabh and his coauthors call for a change in how deep RL performance is reported on benchmarks when using only a few runs, acknowledging that typically, DeepRL algorithms are evaluated by the performance on a large suite of tasks. Using the Atari 100k benchmark, they found substantial disparities in the conclusions from point estimates alone versus statistical analysis. We explore the reception of this paper from the research community, some of the more surprising results, what incentives researchers have to implement these types of changes in self-reporting when publishing, and much more.

The complete show notes for this episode can be found at twimlai.com/go/559

Designing New Energy Materials with Machine Learning with Rafael Gomez-Bombarelli - #558 Feb 07, 2022

Show notes

Today we’re joined by Rafael Gomez-Bombarelli, an assistant professor in the department of material science and engineering at MIT. In our conversation with Rafa, we explore his goal of fusing machine learning and atomistic simulations for designing materials, a topic he spoke about at the recent SigOpt AI & HPC Summit. We discuss the two ways in which he thinks of material design, virtual screening and inverse design, as well as the unique challenges each technique presents. We also talk through the use of generative models for simulation, the type of training data necessary for these tasks, and if he’s building hand-coded simulations vs existing packages or tools. Finally, we explore the dynamic relationship between simulation and modeling and how the results of one drive the others efforts, and how hyperparameter optimization gets incorporated into the various projects.

The complete show notes for this episode can be found at twimlai.com/go/558

Differentiable Programming for Oceanography with Patrick Heimbach - #557 Jan 31, 2022

Show notes

Today we’re joined by Patrick Heimbach, a professor at the University of Texas working at the intersection of ML and oceanography. In our conversation with Patrick, we explore some of the challenges of computational oceanography, the potential use cases for machine learning in this field, as well as how it can be used to support scientists in solving simulation problems, and the role of differential programming and how it is expressed in his work.

The complete show notes for this episode can be found at twimlai.com/go/557

Trends in Machine Learning & Deep Learning with Zachary Lipton - #556 Jan 27, 2022

Show notes

Today we continue our AI Rewind 2021 series joined by a friend of the show, assistant professor at Carnegie Mellon University, and AI Rewind veteran, Zack Lipton! In our conversation with Zack, we touch on recurring themes like “NLP Eating AI” and the recent slowdown in innovation in the field, the redistribution of resources across research problems, and where the opportunities for real breakthroughs lie. We also discuss problems facing the current peer-review system, notable research from last year like the introduction of the WILDS library, and the evolution of problems (and potential solutions) in fairness, bias, and equity. Of course, we explore some of the use cases and application areas that made notable progress in 2021, what Zack is looking forward to in 2022 and beyond, and much more!

The complete show notes for this episode can be found at twimlai.com/go/556

Solving the Cocktail Party Problem with Machine Learning, w/ ‪Jonathan Le Roux - #555 Jan 24, 2022

Show notes

Today we’re joined by Jonathan Le Roux, a senior principal research scientist at Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories (MERL). At MERL, Jonathan and his team are focused on using machine learning to solve the “cocktail party problem”, focusing on not only the separation of speech from noise, but also the separation of speech from speech. In our conversation with Jonathan, we focus on his paper The Cocktail Fork Problem: Three-Stem Audio Separation For Real-World Soundtracks, which looks to separate and enhance a complex acoustic scene into three distinct categories, speech, music, and sound effects. We explore the challenges of working with such noisy data, the model architecture used to solve this problem, how ML/DL fits into solving the larger cocktail party problem, future directions for this line of research, and much more!

The complete show notes for this episode can be found at twimlai.com/go/555

Machine Learning for Earthquake Seismology with Karianne Bergen - #554 Jan 20, 2022

Show notes

Today we’re joined by Karianne Bergen, an assistant professor at Brown University. In our conversation with Karianne, we explore her work at the intersection of earthquake seismology and machine learning, where she’s working on interpretable data classification for seismology. We discuss some of the challenges that present themselves when trying to solve this problem, and the state of applying machine learning to seismological events and earth sciences. Karianne also shares her thoughts on the different relationships that computer scientists and natural scientists have with machine learning, and how to bridge that gap to create tools that work broadly for all scientists.

The complete show notes for this episode can be found at twimlai.com/go/554

The New DBfication of ML/AI with Arun Kumar - #553 Jan 17, 2022

Show notes

Today we’re joined by Arun Kumarm, an associate professor at UC San Diego. We had the pleasure of catching up with Arun prior to the Workshop on Databases and AI at NeurIPS 2021, where he delivered the talk “The New DBfication of ML/AI.” In our conversation, we explore this “database-ification” of machine learning, a concept analogous to the transformation of relational SQL computation. We discuss the relationship between the ML and database fields and how the merging of the two could have positive outcomes for the end-to-end ML workflow, and a few tools that his team has developed, Cerebro, a tool for reproducible model selection, and SortingHat, a tool for automating data prep, and how tools like these and others affect Arun’s outlook on the future of machine learning platforms and MLOps.

The complete show notes for this episode can be found at twimlai.com/go/553

Building Public Interest Technology with Meredith Broussard - #552 Jan 13, 2022

Show notes

Today we’re joined by Meredith Broussard, an associate professor at NYU & research director at the NYU Alliance for Public Interest Technology. Meredith was a keynote speaker at the recent NeurIPS conference, and we had the pleasure of speaking with her to discuss her talk from the event, and her upcoming book, tentatively titled More Than A Glitch: What Everyone Needs To Know About Making Technology Anti-Racist, Accessible, And Otherwise Useful To All.

In our conversation, we explore Meredith’s work in the field of public interest technology, and her view of the relationship between technology and artificial intelligence. Meredith and Sam talk through real-world scenarios where an emphasis on monitoring bias and responsibility would positively impact outcomes, and how this type of monitoring parallels the infrastructure that many organizations are already building out. Finally, we talk through the main takeaways from Meredith’s NeurIPS talk, and how practitioners can get involved in the work of building and deploying public interest technology.

The complete show notes for this episode can be found at twimlai.com/go/552

A Universal Law of Robustness via Isoperimetry with Sebastien Bubeck - #551 Jan 10, 2022

Show notes

Today we’re joined by Sebastian Bubeck a sr principal research manager at Microsoft, and author of the paper A Universal Law of Robustness via Isoperimetry, a NeurIPS 2021 Outstanding Paper Award recipient. We begin our conversation with Sebastian with a bit of a primer on convex optimization, a topic that hasn’t come up much in previous interviews. We explore the problem that convex optimization is trying to solve, the application of convex optimization to multi-armed bandit problems, metrical task systems and solving the K-server problem. We then dig into Sebastian’s paper, which looks to prove that for a broad class of data distributions and model classes, overparameterization is necessary if one wants to interpolate the data. Finally, we discussed the relationship between the paper and the work being done in the adversarial robustness community.

The complete show notes for this episode can be found at twimlai.com/go/551

Trends in NLP with John Bohannon - #550 Jan 06, 2022

Show notes

Today we’re joined by friend of the show John Bohannon, the director of science at Primer AI, to help us showcase all of the great achievements and accomplishments in NLP in 2021! In our conversation, John shares his two major takeaways from last year, 1) NLP as we know it has changed, and we’re back into the incremental phase of the science, and 2) NLP is “eating” the rest of machine learning. We explore the implications of these two major themes across the discipline, as well as best papers, up and coming startups, great things that did happen, and even a few bad things that didn’t. Finally, we explore what 2022 and beyond will look like for NLP, from multilingual NLP to use cases for the influx of large auto-regressive language models like GPT-3 and others, as well as ethical implications that are reverberating across domains and the changes that have been ushered in in that vein.

The complete show notes for this episode can be found at twimlai.com/go/550

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