Brian and Don welcome a much anticipated guest for this episode, Professor Fernando Perez joins us for an episode of 26.1 AI Podcast. Dr. Perez speaks about his journey, the community, and all the challenges along the way. Fernando shares in his inimitable style, how he journeyed from straight laced physicist in pursuit of an academic career to doggedly ignoring naysayers and creating one of the most important components of the modern PyData stack. One personal challenge during this journey was ...
Dec 15, 2020•44 min•Season 2Ep. 33
[Part 2 of 2] Listeners join in for a wonderful conversation in this episode. Our guests Matthew Rocklin and Hugo Bowne-Anderson are extending access to powerful distributed computing for more data users with their startup Coiled (https://coiled.io/). Data scientists with a two minute download of Coiled’s software (https://cloud.coiled.io/) can scale their work to the cloud. We discuss during the episode how conversations with the open source community resembles early customer conversations comm...
Dec 12, 2020•27 min•Season 2Ep. 32
[Part 1 of 2] Listeners join in for a wonderful conversation in this episode. Our guests Matthew Rocklin and Hugo Bowne-Anderson are extending access to powerful distributed computing for more data users with their startup Coiled (https://coiled.io/). Data scientists with a two minute download of Coiled’s software (https://cloud.coiled.io/) can scale their work to the cloud. We discuss during the episode how conversations with the open source community resembles early customer conversations comm...
Dec 01, 2020•26 min•Season 2Ep. 31
Tileli Amimeur changed direction from a fast track traditional software career based on intriguing invitation to apply coding to biology. This shift followed study in undergrad and grad schools at University of Texas, and a string of jobs with top notch traditional technology companies. Now Tileli is happily applying computation in search of important cures with an interdisciplinary team of AI experts, biologists, and chemical engineers. A must listen no matter your day job. Listen for an unders...
Nov 24, 2020•29 min•Season 2Ep. 30
Our prior guest e2f CEO Michel Lopez introduced this week's guest. Intento founder Konstantin Savenkov walks us through a tutorial on how to buy and sell AI. A dense episode worth a listen both for anyone considering buying AI for an enterprise, and founders seeking to sell an AI product to buyers. Intento serves companies making sense of 32 different possible translation vendors. Intento identified the complexity presented to buyers by such a large population of possible vendors as a good marke...
Nov 19, 2020•31 min•Season 2Ep. 29
Our guest Kingsley Ndoh, MD has a global health project centered in Ondo state in Nigeria, where he endeavors to collect the largest set of cancer related data on people of African descent. We discuss during the episode, before algorithmic bias, how biased decisions about data collection has fatal consequences for cancer patients of African descent. Dr. Ndoh speaks about how Black Panther star Chadwick Boseman was far younger than current guidelines in the United States for early screening of co...
Nov 10, 2020•30 min•Season 2Ep. 28
Our guest for this episode shares with us the challenges their firm e2f faces when collecting data for training voice AI applications. Michel Lopez started early on and researched AI and taught the subject in Saudi Arabia and Thailand before the advent of cloud. Instead of practicing AI following teaching, he took a left turn into applying his multilingual skills to performing translations for technology companies. Serendipity brought Michel a new opportunity when a translation customer asked fo...
Oct 27, 2020•28 min•Season 2Ep. 27
Our guest this week Shreya Nallapati founded an organization to help prevent mass shootings. From the #NeverAgainTech website, a quote from Shreya explaining her passion for this project, "I founded this organization after hearing Emma Gonzalez's powerful speech. Growing up with Columbine, I was tired of hearing friends and family being impacted, without being able to do anything about it. So I naturally took the areas I am specialized in, artificial intelligence and data mining. Currently, over...
Oct 13, 2020•29 min•Season 2Ep. 26
Our guest this week on 26.1 AI Podcast is the long time Open Source Guru Ian Bicking. If you are a Python developer and ever typed, "pip," at the command line you can thank Ian. On this episode, he speaks on voice as a computing interface and some of the etiquette of addressing our assistants. How soon will AI improve to the point of being emotionally manipulative with users? Do you want to grade essays turned in by college students, cheating with GPT-3?
Sep 29, 2020•27 min•Season 2Ep. 25
Our host Brian Ray's staff colleague David Law joins with a special treat. David has led development of an open source project titled "data⎰describe". This Python package accelerates exploratory data analysis. David also shares how he transitioned from studying material science at Cornell to completing a masters in data science at Northwestern and practicing as a data scientist at Maven Wave. We manage to add to the episode, how AI experts feel about riding in a self driving car, right now.
Sep 22, 2020•27 min•Season 2Ep. 24
During the episode we discuss something Professor Beck is passionate about, getting more scholars into the data science fold. University of Washington's eScience Institute launched in 2008. Its practice has changed over the years as it examines how to extract knowledge and useful actionable information from data. An effort that started out serving engineering and science disciplines, now includes arts and humanities scholars. David helps foster the interdisciplinary sharing of knowledge to apply...
Sep 08, 2020•28 min•Season 2Ep. 23
Our friend Ruthe Farmer the Chief Strategy Officer of CSforALL and founder of Last Mile Fund brought to our attention amazing women of her network embarking on careers in data, analytics, ml, and artificial intelligence. First in an upcoming series, we have Divya Nagaraj join us from Houston as she completes her Facebook internship remotely during COVID-19. For the upcoming academic term, Divya will matriculate in her sophomore year at Stanford. She shares with us some of the work she's doing in...
Aug 19, 2020•27 min•Season 2Ep. 22
International tour continues with a stop in Singapore with a Korean managing partner of a venture fund subsidiary of a Japanese ecommerce and fintech giant. Our 21st episode of our 2nd season is your most globalized episode ever. Saemin Ahn is an investor in prior guest Kenny Daniel's startup Algorithmia. For AI founders, here's a lesson on making sure your SEO is well done. Saemin contacted Kenny and his fellow founder Diego Oppenheimer through the Algorithmia website's contact form. Going seve...
Jul 28, 2020•28 min•Season 2Ep. 21
Brian and Don have worked hard over many years building community for Pythonistas. Wonder how many folks in the Python community knows about Uruguay as a hotbed of Python use. Tryolabs has been slinging Python and ML for the past ten years. Besides helping nearshore customers in the U.S. solve business challenges with AI, Tryolabs spun out a successful startup, MonkeyLearn. Ernesto Rodriguez di Paolo our guest for this episode presented MonkeyLearn for a PyCon Startup Row event hosted by Grace L...
Jul 21, 2020•29 min•Season 2Ep. 20
In this episode we discuss with Alex how executives should think about the decision of buying of-the shelf software solution vs. building the solution in-house, by yourself or with a partner. The conversation includes an overview of the pros and cons of each from both financial and technical perspective. We leave the audience with some actionable advice on how to go through the decision calculus on the question that increasingly faces today’s CXO’s who are looking to take their firms through the...
Jul 14, 2020•30 min•Season 2Ep. 19
Our 26.1 AI Podcast's global tour continues with a visit with Chris Loy founder of London startup Datasine. Datasine applies machine learning to help companies talk with their customers more meaningfully and at scale. From Datasine's website, "We use machine learning, psychology and cutting edge tech to understand people and the content that appeals to them, and to help our users revolutionise how they engage with their customers at massive scale." Chris shares his personal journey of starting o...
Jul 07, 2020•24 min•Season 2Ep. 18
Brian and Don host Just One Giant Lab founder Leo Blondel. JOGL melds open source software practices with scientific research. Members can treat their research projects like software engineers commit code. Also community spin up groups for research projects like an OpenCovid19 group. From the JOGL website, "[This is] a JOGL program that develops open-source and low-cost tools and methodologies that are safe and easy to use in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. The OpenCovid19 program is powered ...
Jun 23, 2020•25 min•Season 2Ep. 17
Our 30th episode is our first international exploration visiting with Phaze Ventures's Managing Partner Masoud Al -- Rawahi. Headquartered in Muscat, Oman, Masoud and his partners are building up a tech ecosystem from scratch. They are determined to chart the path forward for an economy tethered solidly to the current carbon economy. Learn about the bits and bots opportunities for making traditional oil business cleaner. One pain point technologists are solving is a better solution for handling ...
Jun 16, 2020•25 min•Season 2Ep. 16
Dr. Beverly Wright talks about how she stays connected to Universities and Institutes. She explains how Corporate America can connect better with schools and activate the students for purposes of gaining insight into organization's data and promoting recruiting brand awareness amongst students. Dr. Wright brings over twenty years of research, analytics, and insights experience from corporate, consulting and academia.
Jun 09, 2020•26 min•Season 2Ep. 15
Don Miner speaks candidly about his AI firm being acquired by 110k headcount Atos. He joins our host Brian Ray as a colleague. Dr. Miner was an early adopter of big data and grew into the AI space. Today, he continues to innovate yet still finds time to pay it forward, teaching his passion topics at University of Maryland, Baltimore County.
May 26, 2020•28 min•Season 2Ep. 14
Gert De Geyter started his journey towards AI, modeling our galaxy as a notable astrophysics scholar. to He transitioned from academia to solving business problems using AI at Deloitte Belgium. He is now in the United State with Deloitte Consulting, based out of NYC. During this episode, Dr. De Geyter speaks about the universe of AI (pun intended by Brian Ray) and how it translates to adding business value in his practice. In this episode we cover everything from lightwaves to beer, and potatoes...
May 12, 2020•26 min•Season 2Ep. 13
Traditional wet lab approaches to find a cure for COVID-19 could take decades. Using artificial intelligence, Andrew Satz and Brett Averso are saving ImmunoPrecise Antibodies years on years and millions of dollars in an attempt to find a novel coronavirus antibody. Where Brett concentrated on the technology for our listeners, Andrew adds his CEO view on the problem they're tackling. We publish another ad-hoc COVID-19 episode for our audience, as we all work towards solutions to this pandemic. An...
Apr 14, 2020•27 min•Season 2Ep. 12
The name "EVQLV" looks itself like a amino acid sequence. Digging deeper, Don and Brian share with our listeners this fast-paced startup leading the race to find a treatment for COVID-19. Brett Averso, CTO, talks about how EVQLV with a small team of Data Scientists use Machine Learning in the cloud to run simulations that would have taken months to years in just days. Novel AI; for a novel treatment; for a novel pandemic. Keep safe, keep a distance.
Apr 03, 2020•26 min•Season 2Ep. 11
Hi folks, we just wanted to check-in with everybody. Our normal publishing time is 2am, Tuesday. Last week we missed publishing an episode, because we wanted to take a moment to ponder how best to serve you during this pandemic. If you're working on data science, analytics, ML, and AI related to COVID-19, we'd love to invite you join us and get help from our audience. As we seek guests who can help you understand where we're headed, we'll publish on an ad-hoc basis. Here's to all of you staying ...
Mar 31, 2020•10 min•Season 2Ep. 10
Bryan Hale, managing director of AI2's incubator, shares what his org is doing to support AI entrepreneurs. We discuss favorable outcomes from Seattle's AI startup ecosystem like Turi and Xnor.ai. Bryan also includes actionable advice for new founders of AI startups.
Mar 17, 2020•26 min•Season 2Ep. 9
Revisit the early days of Travis Oliphant's contributions to scientific Python and by extension Python's relevance to AI. Catch-up on the high energy, current efforts of the creator of NumPy, SciPy, Numba, and Conda. Travis also founded the NumFOCUS Foundation. NumFOCUS is backing Jupyter and Pandas. In this Episode, we break our 26.1 Minutes rule for a really great and important chat with this legend of Data Science. Enjoy an extra few minutes.
Mar 10, 2020•35 min•Season 2Ep. 8
Scott helps customers apply AI, NLP, and ML to reduce their technical debt. He comes from the front lines document management industry for over 20 years and provides a unique perspective into the usefulness of AI.
Mar 03, 2020•28 min•Season 2Ep. 7
Brian and Don recap the most recent ten episodes of 26.1 AI Podcast. For new listeners or anybody catching up on missed episodes, this edition provides a nice index to plan your listening. For those new to AI and looking to catch up to the wave of interest engulfing business leaders, great episode to learn keywords important for your study.
Feb 25, 2020•31 min•Season 2Ep. 5
During this Episode we speak with Dominique about how she repurposed her academic research in the areas of neuroscience, music cognition, psycholinguistics, and multisensory perception for her current work in data science. She speaks about her progression from tools like Matlab to open source Python-based tools. We explore the value of diversity in the workspace.
Feb 18, 2020•28 min•Season 2Ep. 4
Our 19th episode's guest Denny Lee joins us to share some of the developments at Databricks. Also, he shares a persuasive argument that traditional data professionals like DBAs have a future in ML and AI.
Feb 11, 2020•27 min•Season 2Ep. 3
