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Data Skeptic

Kyle Polichdataskeptic.com
The Data Skeptic Podcast features interviews and discussion of topics related to data science, statistics, machine learning, artificial intelligence and the like, all from the perspective of applying critical thinking and the scientific method to evaluate the veracity of claims and efficacy of approaches.

Episodes

Algorithmic Fairness

This episode includes an interview with Aaron Roth author of The Ethical Algorithm .

Jan 14, 202042 min

Interpretability

Interpretability Machine learning has shown a rapid expansion into every sector and industry. With increasing reliance on models and increasing stakes for the decisions of models, questions of how models actually work are becoming increasingly important to ask. Welcome to Data Skeptic Interpretability. In this episode, Kyle interviews Christoph Molnar about his book Interpretable Machine Learning . Thanks to our sponsor, the Gartner Data & Analytics Summit going on in Grapevine, TX on March 23 –...

Jan 07, 202033 min

The Limits of NLP

We are joined by Colin Raffel to discuss the paper "Exploring the Limits of Transfer Learning with a Unified Text-to-Text Transformer".

Dec 24, 201930 min

Jumpstart Your ML Project

Seth Juarez joins us to discuss the toolbox of options available to a data scientist to jumpstart or extend their machine learning efforts.

Dec 15, 201921 min

Serverless NLP Model Training

Alex Reeves joins us to discuss some of the challenges around building a serverless, scalable, generic machine learning pipeline. The is a technical deep dive on architecting solutions and a discussion of some of the design choices made.

Dec 10, 201929 min

Team Data Science Process

Buck Woody joins Kyle to share experiences from the field and the application of the Team Data Science Process - a popular six-phase workflow for doing data science.

Dec 03, 201941 min

Ancient Text Restoration

Thea Sommerschield joins us this week to discuss the development of Pythia - a machine learning model trained to assist in the reconstruction of ancient language text.

Dec 01, 201941 min

ML Ops

Kyle met up with Damian Brady at MS Ignite 2019 to discuss machine learning operations.

Nov 27, 201937 min

Annotator Bias

The modern deep learning approaches to natural language processing are voracious in their demands for large corpora to train on. Folk wisdom estimates used to be around 100k documents were required for effective training. The availability of broadly trained, general-purpose models like BERT has made it possible to do transfer learning to achieve novel results on much smaller corpora. Thanks to these advancements, an NLP researcher might get value out of fewer examples since they can use the tran...

Nov 23, 201926 min

NLP for Developers

While at MS Build 2019, Kyle sat down with Lance Olson from the Applied AI team about how tools like cognitive services and cognitive search enable non-data scientists to access relatively advanced NLP tools out of box, and how more advanced data scientists can focus more time on the bigger picture problems.

Nov 20, 201929 min

Indigenous American Language Research

Manuel Mager joins us to discuss natural language processing for low and under-resourced languages. We discuss current work in this area and the Naki Project which aggregates research on NLP for native and indigenous languages of the American continent.

Nov 13, 201923 min

Talking to GPT-2

GPT-2 is yet another in a succession of models like ELMo and BERT which adopt a similar deep learning architecture and train an unsupervised model on a massive text corpus. As we have been covering recently, these approaches are showing tremendous promise, but how close are they to an AGI? Our guest today, Vazgen Davidyants wondered exactly that, and have conversations with a Chatbot running GPT-2. We discuss his experiences as well as some novel thoughts on artificial intelligence....

Oct 31, 201929 min

Reproducing Deep Learning Models

Rajiv Shah attempted to reproduce an earthquake-predicting deep learning model. His results exposed some issues with the model. Kyle and Rajiv discuss the original paper and Rajiv's analysis.

Oct 23, 201923 min

What BERT is Not

Allyson Ettinger joins us to discuss her work in computational linguistics, specifically in exploring some of the ways in which the popular natural language processing approach BERT has limitations.

Oct 14, 201927 min

SpanBERT

Omer Levy joins us to discuss "SpanBERT: Improving Pre-training by Representing and Predicting Spans". https://arxiv.org/abs/1907.10529

Oct 08, 201925 min

BERT is Shallow

Tim Niven joins us this week to discuss his work exploring the limits of what BERT can do on certain natural language tasks such as adversarial attacks, compositional learning, and systematic learning.

Sep 23, 201920 min

BERT is Magic

Kyle pontificates on how impressed he is with BERT.

Sep 16, 201918 min

Applied Data Science in Industry

Kyle sits down with Jen Stirrup to inquire about her experiences helping companies deploy data science solutions in a variety of different settings.

Sep 06, 201922 min

Building the howto100m Video Corpus

Video annotation is an expensive and time-consuming process. As a consequence, the available video datasets are useful but small. The availability of machine transcribed explainer videos offers a unique opportunity to rapidly develop a useful, if dirty, corpus of videos that are "self annotating", as hosts explain the actions they are taking on the screen. This episode is a discussion of the HowTo100m dataset - a project which has assembled a video corpus of 136M video clips with captions coveri...

Aug 19, 201923 min

BERT

Kyle provides a non-technical overview of why Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT) is a powerful tool for natural language processing projects.

Jul 29, 201914 min

Onnx

Kyle interviews Prasanth Pulavarthi about the Onnx format for deep neural networks.

Jul 22, 201921 min

Catastrophic Forgetting

Kyle and Linhda discuss some high level theory of mind and overview the concept machine learning concept of catastrophic forgetting.

Jul 15, 201921 min

Transfer Learning

Sebastian Ruder is a research scientist at DeepMind. In this episode, he joins us to discuss the state of the art in transfer learning and his contributions to it.

Jul 08, 201930 min

Facebook Bargaining Bots Invented a Language

In 2017, Facebook published a paper called Deal or No Deal? End-to-End Learning for Negotiation Dialogues . In this research, the reinforcement learning agents developed a mechanism of communication (which could be called a language) that made them able to optimize their scores in the negotiation game. Many media sources reported this as if it were a first step towards Skynet taking over. In this episode, Kyle discusses bargaining agents and the actual results of this research....

Jun 21, 201923 min

Under Resourced Languages

Priyanka Biswas joins us in this episode to discuss natural language processing for languages that do not have as many resources as those that are more commonly studied such as English. Successful NLP projects benefit from the availability of like large corpora, well-annotated corpora, software libraries, and pre-trained models. For languages that researchers have not paid as much attention to, these tools are not always available.

Jun 15, 201917 min

Named Entity Recognition

Kyle and Linh Da discuss the class of approaches called "Named Entity Recognition" or NER. NER algorithms take any string as input and return a list of "entities" - specific facts and agents in the text along with a classification of the type (e.g. person, date, place).

Jun 08, 201917 min

The Death of a Language

USC students from the CAIS++ student organization have created a variety of novel projects under the mission statement of "artificial intelligence for social good". In this episode, Kyle interviews Zane and Leena about the Endangered Languages Project .

Jun 01, 201920 min

Neural Turing Machines

Kyle and Linh Da discuss the concepts behind the neural Turing machine.

May 25, 201925 min

Data Infrastructure in the Cloud

Kyle chats with Rohan Kumar about hyperscale, data at the edge, and a variety of other trends in data engineering in the cloud.

May 18, 201930 min