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Eye On A.I.

Craig S. Smithwww.eye-on.ai
Eye on A.I. is a biweekly podcast, hosted by longtime New York Times correspondent Craig S. Smith. In each episode, Craig will talk to people making a difference in artificial intelligence. The podcast aims to put incremental advances into a broader context and consider the global implications of the developing technology. AI is about to change your world, so pay attention.
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Episodes

US Defense: AI-ready by 2025

NSCAI staff Chris Rice and Courtney Barno talk about what the US has to do to get up to speed on its AI military capabilities by 2025 in order to outpace our competitors, particularly China.

May 19, 202139 minSeason 1Ep. 73

Educating the Warfighter to use AI

NSCAI staff Justin Lynch, Lance Lantier and Shaantam Chawla, talked about educating the warfighter for the AI era. They spoke about what kind of training warfighters need to effectively integrate AI, from commanders to infantry men and women and how that integration will change the nature of warfare and the military's perception of itself in the years ahead.

May 12, 202138 minSeason 1Ep. 72

AI and National Security: US vs China

Ylli Bajraktari, executive director of the National Security Commission on AI, talked about what he considers the most important recommendations in the commission's final report and about the need for Congress and the White House to act swiftly to counter China's concerted efforts to beat the US in deploying this critical technology around the world.

May 05, 202134 minSeason 1Ep. 71

Cade Metz on Genius Makers

This week, I talk to Cade Metz, the New York Times' lead reporter on artificial intelligence, about his new book, "Genius Makers, the Mavericks Who Brought AI to Google Facebook and the World." The book focuses on some of the personalities and companies responsible for the current wave of AI innovation and touches on some of the controversies swirling around the new technology today.

Apr 28, 202134 minSeason 1Ep. 70

Google's Kent Walker on Ethical AI

Kent Walker, who oversees the Google's AI ethics and responsible AI innovation, talks about how Google reviews AI systems for trust and safety and the outlook for safe AI going forward.

Apr 14, 202139 minSeason 1Ep. 69

Synthetic Data

Daeil Kim, cofounder of AI.Reverie, talks about the role that synthetic data can play in training AI models.

Mar 18, 202140 minSeason 1Ep. 68

Creating New Materials with AI

Alan Aspuru Guzik, a professor at the University of Toronto, talks about his work in new materials discovery with machine learning and building a fully automated materials lab that can synthesize molecules discovered in a computer.

Mar 03, 202126 minSeason 1Ep. 67

Lt. Gen. Michael S. Groen on AI war fighting

Director of the Pentagon's Joint AI Center, Lieutenant General Michael S. Groen talks about improving war fighting and the challenge of China.

Feb 17, 202147 minSeason 1Ep. 66

Riiid, the leader in AI for Education

David Yi and Yohan Lee from Riiid Labs, the leading startup applying machine-learning to education, talk about making personalized instruction available to anyone in the world with an internet-connected device. They spoke about the family of algorithms behind their system and the recently concluded Riiid AIEd Challenge, a Kaggle competition that engaged more than 3,400 teams across the world in developing knowledge tracing algorithms.

Feb 03, 202145 minSeason 1Ep. 65

Yoshua Bengio and Iulian Serban on AI for Education

Turing award winner Yoshua Bengio and his colleague Julian Serban, co-founder of Korbit, an AI ed-tech startup with the aim of democratizing education, talk about enhancing education through the application of deep learning systems that can track student behavior predict their performance and deliver strategies to both improve performance and prevent students from losing interest.

Jan 28, 202140 minSeason 1Ep. 64

Geoff Hinton on his quest to decode learning in the brain

Geoff Hinton has lived at the outer reaches of machine learning research since an aborted attempt at a carpentry career a half century ago. He spoke to me about his work In 2020 and what he sees on the horizon for AI.

Dec 18, 202039 minSeason 1Ep. 63

Biodata as an instrument of National Power

Chris Darby, CEO of the CIA-backed tech investment company In-Q-Tel, talks about the commission's recommendation that AI for national security be extended to biotechnology, and that bio-data be considered an instrument of national power.

Dec 11, 202034 minSeason 1Ep. 62

Eric Horvitz on AI and Allies

Eric Horvitz, chief research scientist at Microsoft and a commissioner on the National Security Commission on AI, talks about ensuring interoperability of AI systems with US allies and working to make all AI systems reliable.

Dec 03, 202026 minSeason 1Ep. 61

AI in Space with NASA's Steve Chien

NSCAI commissioner Steve Chien, technical supervisor of the artificial intelligence group at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, talks about the growing demand for AI solutions in space, from coordinating an increasing number of earth-orbiting objects to protecting critical communication satellites from attack.

Nov 12, 202049 minSeason 1Ep. 59

Opening AI Career Paths in Government and funding STEM education

This week, NSCAI commissioner Jose-Marie Griffiths talks about her line of effort's recommendations to increase STEM related educational funding by $8 billion in order to prime the pump for an AI ready workforce and to make a variety of bureaucratic changes that will open AI related career pathways for government employees.

Nov 04, 202037 minSeason 1Ep. 58

AI and Allies: coordinating national security with NATO and India

Jason Matheny, a commissioner at the National Security Commission on AI and head of Georgetown University's Center for Security and Emerging Technology, talks about coordinating AI developments with NATO and making India the focus of the US's Indo-Pacific AI strategy to counter China.

Oct 28, 202036 minSeason 1Ep. 57

Programmatic labeling with Alex Ratner of Snorkel AI

Alex Ratner, an assistant professor at the University of Washington and a cofounder and CEO of Snorkel AI, talks about programmatically labeling training data for supervised learning models.

Oct 28, 202046 minSeason 1Ep. 56

Data Wrangling with Joe Hellerstein

In the second episode of a series on the machine-learning pipeline, Joe Hellerstein, a professor at UC Berkeley, talks about data wrangling.

Oct 14, 202044 minSeason 1Ep. 55

Turing Award Winner David Patterson - CPUs to GPUs to TPUs and Beyond

Turing Award winner David Patterson talks about the end of Moore's law and the evolution of computer chips from general purpose CPUs to GPUs to the recent Cambrian explosion of specialized AI chips, including Google's TPU, in the first episode of five about the machine-learning model-development pipeline with Ameet Talwalkar, co-founder of Determined AI, an open-source platform for ML model development....

Sep 30, 202050 minSeason 1Ep. 54

Great Power Competition in the Digital Age with Gilman Louie

NSCAI commissioner Gilman Louie talks about great power competition in the digital age and the US need for a more technologically literate diplomatic core to counter China's increasing diplomatic efforts on the technology front.

Sep 16, 202033 minSeason 1Ep. 53

Turning AI from a Tool to a Teammate with Ken Ford

Ken Ford, an NSCAI commissioner, talks about turning AI from a tool to a teammate and unshackling research and implementation of AI from government bureaucracy in order to compete with nimbler countries such as China.

Sep 09, 202034 minSeason 1Ep. 52

AI War Games Will Inform Military Doctrine with Katharina McFarland

Katharina McFarland, an NSCAI commissioner, talks about the commission's recommendations on inserting AI into the National Defense Strategy and how war games should integrate AI enabled applications in order to inform US military doctrine

Sep 02, 202032 minSeason 1Ep. 51

Eric Horvitz on Ethical Uses of AI for National Security

Eric Horvitz, Chief Scientific Officer at Microsoft and a commissioner with the National Security Commission on AI, talks about the commission's recommendations that responsible and ethical uses be a primary consideration in any AI system for national security.

Aug 26, 202036 minSeason 1Ep. 50

The Conundrum of AI Export Controls with Jason Matheny

Jason Matheny, an NSCAI commissioner who now leads a think tank at Georgetown University focused on the intersections of technology, policy and national security, spoke in this week's episode about the Commission's recommendations on export controls for sensitive technology and the difficult problem of protecting digital assets like algorithms and data.

Aug 19, 202039 minSeason 1Ep. 49

Episode 48 - Mignon Clyburn

Mignon Clyburn, an NSCAI commissioner and longtime regulator at the FCC, talks about the Commission's recommendations to increase competency in artificial intelligence at the Department of Defense and other government agencies. Ms. Clyburn talked about establishing a National Reserve Digital Corps with a scholarship program modeled after the ROTC and the creation of a United States Digital Service Academy similar to mint a new class of civil servants with deep technical knowledge.

Aug 12, 202034 minSeason 1Ep. 48

Episode 47 - Talking Machines

The Alexa Prize Socialbot Grand Challenge is a competition for university students to create a social bot that can converse coherently and engagingly with humans. This year's prize goes to the team from Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia. I speak with Prem Natarajan, vice president of natural understanding in the Alexa AI organization, about the prize, the evolution of conversational AI, its current challenges and its future promise

Aug 04, 202040 minSeason 1Ep. 47

Episode 46 - Qualcomm Technologies

Qualcomm Technologies is powering the shift to fifth generation wireless communications, known as 5G. In this sponsored episode, I speak to two of the company's product managers leading the company's efforts to use AI to enhance 5G, reduce on-device power consumption, and give developers the tools necessary to make devices smarter and faster.

Aug 04, 202043 minSeason 1Ep. 46

Starting Project Maven with Lt. Gen. Jack Shanahan

This week I speak to Lieutenant General Jack Shanahan, recently retired Director of the Pentagon's Joint Artificial Intelligence Center,or JAIC. He was instrumental in starting Project Maven to integrate state-of-the-art computer vision into drone technology. He then started the JAIC, the central hub for the military's AI efforts. Gen. Shanahan spoke about the challenges of nurturing innovation within a rigid and multilayered organization like the DOD and the threats the US faces ahead.

Jul 22, 202048 minSeason 1Ep. 45

Episode 44 - Fei-Fei Li

This week I speak to Stanford professor Fei-Fei Li, one of the people responsible for the current AI revolution. Fei-Fei talked about her early days running a New Jersey dry cleaner to finance her Princeton education, her creation of ImageNet, the world's first large labeled image data set, which allowed the validation of neural networks, and her latest work on ambient intelligence, which promises to transform elder care.

Jul 08, 202043 minSeason 1Ep. 44
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