Data Skeptic - podcast cover

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

Fraud Detection in Real Time

In this solo episode, Kyle overviews the field of fraud detection with eCommerce as a use case. He discusses some of the techniques and system architectures used by companies to fight fraud with a focus on why these things need to be approached from a real-time perspective.

Aug 18, 202038 min

Listener Survey Review

In this episode, Kyle and Linhda review the results of our recent survey. Hear all about the demographic details and how we interpret these results.

Aug 11, 202023 min

GANs Can Be Interpretable

Erik Härkönen joins us to discuss the paper GANSpace: Discovering Interpretable GAN Controls . During the interview, Kyle makes reference to this amazing interpretable GAN controls video and it’s accompanying codebase found here . Erik mentions the GANspace collab notebook which is a rapid way to try these ideas out for yourself....

Jul 11, 202027 min

Sentiment Preserving Fake Reviews

David Ifeoluwa Adelani joins us to discuss Generating Sentiment-Preserving Fake Online Reviews Using Neural Language Models and Their Human- and Machine-based Detection .

Jul 06, 202029 min

Interpretability Practitioners

Sungsoo Ray Hong joins us to discuss the paper Human Factors in Model Interpretability: Industry Practices, Challenges, and Needs .

Jun 26, 202032 min

Facial Recognition Auditing

Deb Raji joins us to discuss her recent publication Saving Face: Investigating the Ethical Concerns of Facial Recognition Auditing .

Jun 19, 202048 min

Robust Fit to Nature

Uri Hasson joins us this week to discuss the paper Robust-fit to Nature: An Evolutionary Perspective on Biological (and Artificial) Neural Networks .

Jun 12, 202038 min

Black Boxes Are Not Required

Deep neural networks are undeniably effective. They rely on such a high number of parameters, that they are appropriately described as “black boxes”. While black boxes lack desirably properties like interpretability and explainability, in some cases, their accuracy makes them incredibly useful. But does achiving “usefulness” require a black box? Can we be sure an equally valid but simpler solution does not exist? Cynthia Rudin helps us answer that question. We discuss her recent paper with co-au...

Jun 05, 202032 min

Interpretable AI in Healthcare

Jayaraman Thiagarajan joins us to discuss the recent paper Calibrating Healthcare AI: Towards Reliable and Interpretable Deep Predictive Models .

May 15, 202036 min

Understanding Neural Networks

What does it mean to understand a neural network? That’s the question posted on this arXiv paper . Kyle speaks with Tim Lillicrap about this and several other big questions.

May 08, 202035 min

Self-Explaining AI

Dan Elton joins us to discuss self-explaining AI. What could be better than an interpretable model? How about a model wich explains itself in a conversational way, engaging in a back and forth with the user. We discuss the paper Self-explaining AI as an alternative to interpretable AI which presents a framework for self-explainging AI....

May 02, 202032 min

Plastic Bag Bans

Becca Taylor joins us to discuss her work studying the impact of plastic bag bans as published in Bag Leakage: The Effect of Disposable Carryout Bag Regulations on Unregulated Bags from the Journal of Environmental Economics and Management. How does one measure the impact of these bans? Are they achieving their intended goals? Join us and find out!

Apr 24, 202035 min

Self Driving Cars and Pedestrians

We are joined by Arash Kalatian to discuss Decoding pedestrian and automated vehicle interactions using immersive virtual reality and interpretable deep learning .

Apr 18, 202031 min

Computer Vision is Not Perfect

Computer Vision is not Perfect Julia Evans joins us help answer the question why do neural networks think a panda is a vulture . Kyle talks to Julia about her hands-on work fooling neural networks. Julia runs Wizard Zines which publishes works such as Your Linux Toolbox . You can find her on Twitter @b0rk...

Apr 10, 202026 min

Uncertainty Representations

Jessica Hullman joins us to share her expertise on data visualization and communication of data in the media. We discuss Jessica’s work on visualizing uncertainty, interviewing visualization designers on why they don't visualize uncertainty, and modeling interactions with visualizations as Bayesian updates. Homepage: http://users.eecs.northwestern.edu/~jhullman/ Lab: MU Collective...

Apr 04, 202040 min

AlphaGo, COVID-19 Contact Tracing and New Data Set

Announcing Journal Club I am pleased to announce Data Skeptic is launching a new spin-off show called "Journal Club" with similar themes but a very different format to the Data Skeptic everyone is used to. In Journal Club, we will have a regular panel and occasional guest panelists to discuss interesting news items and one featured journal article every week in a roundtable discussion. Each week, I'll be joined by Lan Guo and George Kemp for a discussion of interesting data science related news ...

Mar 28, 202034 min

Interpretability Tooling

Pramit Choudhary joins us to talk about the methodologies and tools used to assist with model interpretability.

Mar 13, 202043 min

Shapley Values

Kyle and Linhda discuss how Shapley Values might be a good tool for determining what makes the cut for a home renovation.

Mar 06, 202020 min

Anchors as Explanations

We welcome back Marco Tulio Ribeiro to discuss research he has done since our original discussion on LIME . In particular, we ask the question Are Red Roses Red? and discuss how Anchors provide high precision model-agnostic explanations. Please take our listener survey ....

Feb 28, 202037 min

Adversarial Explanations

Walt Woods joins us to discuss his paper Adversarial Explanations for Understanding Image Classification Decisions and Improved Neural Network Robustness with co-authors Jack Chen and Christof Teuscher.

Feb 14, 202037 min

ObjectNet

Andrei Barbu joins us to discuss ObjectNet - a new kind of vision dataset. In contrast to ImageNet, ObjectNet seeks to provide images that are more representative of the types of images an autonomous machine is likely to encounter in the real world. Collecting a dataset in this way required careful use of Mechanical Turk to get Turkers to provide a corpus of images that removes some of the bias found in ImageNet. http://0xab.com/...

Feb 07, 202039 min

Visualization and Interpretability

Enrico Bertini joins us to discuss how data visualization can be used to help make machine learning more interpretable and explainable. Find out more about Enrico at http://enrico.bertini.io/ . More from Enrico with co-host Moritz Stefaner on the Data Stories podcast!

Jan 31, 202036 min

Interpretable One Shot Learning

We welcome Su Wang back to Data Skeptic to discuss the paper Distributional modeling on a diet: One-shot word learning from text only .

Jan 26, 202031 min

Fooling Computer Vision

Wiebe van Ranst joins us to talk about a project in which specially designed printed images can fool a computer vision system, preventing it from identifying a person. Their attack targets the popular YOLO2 pre-trained image recognition model, and thus, is likely to be widely applicable.

Jan 22, 202025 min