We’ve mentioned ML/AI in the browser and in JS a bunch on this show, but we haven’t done a deep dive on the subject… until now! Victor Dibia helps us understand why people are interested in porting models to the browser and how people are using the functionality. We discuss TensorFlow.js and some applications built using TensorFlow.js Sponsors: DigitalOcean – DigitalOcean now offers three managed databases — PostgreSQL, MySQL, and Redis. Get started for free with a $50 credit. Learn more at do.c...
Oct 21, 2019•50 min•Ep. 61
The United States has blacklisted several Chinese AI companies working in facial recognition and surveillance. Why? What are these companies doing exactly, and how does this fit into the international politics of AI? We dig into these questions and attempt to do some live fact finding in this episode. Sponsors: DigitalOcean – DigitalOcean now offers three managed databases — PostgreSQL, MySQL, and Redis. Get started for free with a $50 credit. Learn more at do.co/changelog . The Brave Browser – ...
Oct 15, 2019•49 min•Ep. 60
Chris and Daniel talk with Keith Lynn, AlphaPilot Program Manager at Lockheed Martin. AlphaPilot is an open innovation challenge, developing artificial intelligence for high-speed racing drones, created through a partnership between Lockheed Martin and The Drone Racing League (DRL). AlphaPilot challenged university teams from around the world to design AI capable of flying a drone without any human intervention or navigational pre-programming. Autonomous drones will race head-to-head through com...
Oct 07, 2019•48 min•Ep. 59
Chris and Daniel take some time to cover recent trends in AI and some noteworthy publications. In particular, they discuss the increasing AI momentum in the majority world (Africa, Asia, South and Central America and the Caribbean), and they dig into Hugging Face’s recent model distillation results. Sponsors: DigitalOcean – DigitalOcean now offers three managed databases — PostgreSQL, MySQL, and Redis. Get started for free with a $50 credit. Learn more at do.co/changelog . All Things Open – Expl...
Sep 30, 2019•45 min•Ep. 58
The All Things Open conference is happening soon, and we snagged one of their speakers to discuss open source and AI. Samuel Taylor talks about the essential role that open source is playing in AI development and research, and he gives us some tips on choosing AI-related side projects. Sponsors: DigitalOcean – DigitalOcean now offers three managed databases — PostgreSQL, MySQL, and Redis. Get started for free with a $50 credit. Learn more at do.co/changelog . The Brave Browser – Browse the web u...
Sep 25, 2019•46 min•Ep. 57
In this very special fully-connected episode of Practical AI, Daniel interviews Chris. They discuss High Performance Computing (HPC) and how it is colliding with the world of AI. Chris explains how HPC differs from cloud/on-prem infrastructure, and he highlights some of the challenges of an HPC-based AI strategy. Sponsors: DigitalOcean – DigitalOcean now offers three managed databases — PostgreSQL, MySQL, and Redis. Get started for free with a $50 credit. Learn more at do.co/changelog . The Brav...
Sep 17, 2019•48 min•Ep. 56
We’re talking with Sherol Chen, a machine learning developer, about AI at Google and AutoML methods. Sherol explains how the various AI groups within Google work together and how AutoML fits into that puzzle. She also explains how to get started with AutoML step-by-step (this is “practical” AI after all). Sponsors: DigitalOcean – DigitalOcean now offers three managed databases — PostgreSQL, MySQL, and Redis. Get started for free with a $50 credit. Learn more at do.co/changelog . Changelog Weekly...
Sep 09, 2019•59 min•Ep. 55
David Yakobovitch joins the show to talk about the evolution of data science tools and techniques, the work he’s doing to teach these things at Galvanize , what his HumAIn Podcast is all about, and more. Sponsors: DigitalOcean – The simplest cloud platform for developers and teams Whether you’re running one virtual machine or ten thousand, makes managing your infrastructure too easy. Get started for free with a $50 credit. Learn more at do.co/changelog . Brain Science – For the curious! Brain Sc...
Aug 26, 2019•56 min•Ep. 54
Redis is a an open source, in-memory data structure store, widely used as a database, cache and message broker. It now also support tensor data types and deep learning models via the RedisAI module. Why did they build this module? Who is or should be using it? We discuss this and much more with Pieter Cailliau. Sponsors: DigitalOcean – The simplest cloud platform for developers and teams Whether you’re running one virtual machine or ten thousand, makes managing your infrastructure too easy. Get ...
Aug 12, 2019•46 min•Ep. 53
Chris and Daniel take the opportunity to catch up on some recent AI news. Among other things, they discuss the increasing impact of AI on studies of the ancient world and “good” uses of GANs. They also provide some more learning resources to help you level up your AI and machine learning game. Sponsors: DigitalOcean – The simplest cloud platform for developers and teams Whether you’re running one virtual machine or ten thousand, makes managing your infrastructure too easy. Get started for free w...
Jul 30, 2019•55 min•Ep. 52
We’re talking with Joel Grus, author of Data Science from Scratch, 2nd Edition , senior research engineer at the Allen Institute for AI (AI2), and maintainer of AllenNLP. We discussed Joel’s book, which has become a personal favorite of the hosts, and why he decided to approach data science and AI “from scratch.” Joel also gives us a glimpse into AI2, an introduction to AllenNLP, and some tips for writing good research code. This episode is packed full of reproducible AI goodness! Sponsors: Digi...
Jul 19, 2019•53 min•Ep. 51
Woo hoo! As we celebrate reaching episode 50, we come full circle to discuss the basics of neural networks. If you are just jumping into AI, then this is a great primer discussion with which to take that leap. Our commitment to making artificial intelligence practical, productive, and accessible to everyone has never been stronger, so we invite you to join us for the next 50 episodes! Featuring: Chris Benson – Website , GitHub , LinkedIn , X Daniel Whitenack – Website , GitHub , X Show Notes: Le...
Jul 03, 2019•51 min•Ep. 50
This week we bend reality to expose the deceptions of deepfake videos. We talk about what they are, why they are so dangerous, and what you can do to detect and resist their insidious influence. In a political environment rife with distrust, disinformation, and conspiracy theories, deepfakes are being weaponized and proliferated as the latest form of state-sponsored information warfare. Join us for an episode scarier than your favorite horror movie, because this AI bogeyman is real! Sponsors: Di...
Jun 25, 2019•55 min•Ep. 49
Interpreting complicated models is a hot topic. How can we trust and manage AI models that we can’t explain? In this episode, Janis Klaise, a data scientist with Seldon, joins us to talk about model interpretation and Seldon’s new open source project called Alibi . Janis also gives some of his thoughts on production ML/AI and how Seldon addresses related problems. Sponsors: DigitalOcean – Check out DigitalOcean’s dedicated vCPU Droplets with dedicated vCPU threads. Get started for free with a $5...
Jun 17, 2019•44 min•Ep. 48
Daniel and Chris explore three potentially confusing topics - generative adversarial networks (GANs), deep reinforcement learning (DRL), and transfer learning. Are these types of neural network architectures? Are they something different? How are they used? Well, If you have ever wondered how AI can be creative, wished you understood how robots get their smarts, or were impressed at how some AI practitioners conquer big challenges quickly, then this is your episode! Sponsors: DigitalOcean – Chec...
Jun 11, 2019•52 min•Ep. 47
Andreas Madsen, a freelance ML/AI engineer and Distill.pub author, joins us to discuss his work visualizing neural networks and recurrent neural units. Andreas discusses various neural unites, RNNs in general, and the “why” of neural network visualization. He also gives us his perspective on ML/AI freelancing and moving from web development to AI research. Sponsors: DigitalOcean – Check out DigitalOcean’s dedicated vCPU Droplets with dedicated vCPU threads. Get started for free with a $50 credit...
Jun 04, 2019•46 min•Ep. 46
Chris and Daniel take you on a tour of local and global AI events, and discuss how to get the most out of your experiences. From access to experts to developing new industry relationships, learn how to get your foot in the door and make connections that help you grow as an AI practitioner. Then drawing from their own wealth of experience as speakers, they dive into what it takes to give a memorable world-class talk that your audience will love. They break down how to select the topic, write the ...
May 28, 2019•1 hr 2 min•Ep. 45
At the recent O’Reilly AI Conference in New York City, Chris met up with O’Reilly Chief Data Scientist Ben Lorica, the Program Chair for Strata Data, the AI Conference, and TensorFlow World. O’Reilly’s ‘ AI Adoption in the Enterprise ’ report had just been released, so naturally Ben and Chris wanted to do a deep dive into enterprise AI adoption to discuss strategy, execution, and implications. Sponsors: DigitalOcean – Check out DigitalOcean’s dedicated vCPU Droplets with dedicated vCPU threads. ...
May 21, 2019•57 min•Ep. 44
Can AI help quantum physicists? Can quantum physicists help the AI community? The answers are yes and yes! Dr. Shohini Ghose from Wilfrid Laurier University and Marcus Edwards from the University of Waterloo join us to discuss ML/AI’s impact on physics and quantum computing potential for ML/AI. Sponsors: DigitalOcean – Check out DigitalOcean’s dedicated vCPU Droplets with dedicated vCPU threads. Get started for free with a $100 credit. Learn more at do.co/changelog . Discover.bot – A digital spa...
May 14, 2019•1 hr 2 min•Ep. 43
This week Daniel and Chris discuss the announcements made recently at TensorFlow Dev Summit 2019. They kick it off with the alpha release of TensorFlow 2.0, which features eager execution and an improved user experience through Keras, which has been integrated into TensorFlow itself. They round out the list with TensorFlow Datasets, TensorFlow Addons, TensorFlow Extended (TFX), and the upcoming inaugural O’Reilly TensorFlow World conference. Sponsors: DigitalOcean – Check out DigitalOcean’s dedi...
May 07, 2019•59 min•Ep. 42
No, this isn’t science fiction! CTRL-labs is using neural signals and AI to build neural interfaces. Adam Berenzweig, from CTRL-labs R&D, joins us to explain how this works and how they have made it practical. Sponsors: DigitalOcean – Check out DigitalOcean’s dedicated vCPU Droplets with dedicated vCPU threads. Get started for free with a $100 credit. Learn more at do.co/changelog . O'Reilly Open Source Software Conference – OSCON has been ground zero for the open source community for 20 yea...
Apr 30, 2019•1 hr 3 min•Ep. 41
While attending the NVIDIA GPU Technology Conference in Silicon Valley, Chris met up with Adam Stooke, a speaker and PhD student at UC Berkeley who is doing groundbreaking work in large-scale deep reinforcement learning and robotics. Adam took Chris on a tour of deep reinforcement learning - explaining what it is, how it works, and why it’s one of the hottest technologies in artificial intelligence! Sponsors: DigitalOcean – Check out DigitalOcean’s dedicated vCPU Droplets with dedicated vCPU thr...
Apr 23, 2019•46 min•Ep. 40
Longtime listeners know that we’re always advocating for ‘AI for good’, but this week we have taken it to a whole new level. We had the privilege of chatting with James Hodson, Director of the AI for Good Foundation, about ways they have used artificial intelligence to positively-impact the world - from food production to climate change. James inspired us to find our own ways to use AI for good, and we challenge our listeners to get out there and do some good! Sponsors: DigitalOcean – Check out ...
Apr 15, 2019•52 min•Ep. 39
GIPHY’s head of R&D, Nick Hasty, joins us to discuss their recently released celebrity detector project. He gives us all of the details about that project, but he also tells us about GIPHY’s origins, AI in general at GIPHY, and more! Sponsors: DigitalOcean – Check out DigitalOcean’s dedicated vCPU Droplets with dedicated vCPU threads. Get started for free with a $100 credit. Learn more at do.co/changelog . Discover.bot – A digital space for bot developers and enthusiasts of all skill levels ...
Apr 08, 2019•49 min•Ep. 38
Being that this is “practical” AI, we decided that it would be good to take time to discuss various aspects of AI infrastructure. In this full-connected episode, we discuss our personal/local infrastructure along with trends in AI, including infra for training, serving, and data management. Sponsors: DigitalOcean – Check out DigitalOcean’s dedicated vCPU Droplets with dedicated vCPU threads. Get started for free with a $100 credit. Learn more at do.co/changelog . DataEngPodcast – A podcast about...
Apr 02, 2019•52 min•Ep. 37
While at the NVIDIA GPU Technology Conference 2019 in Silicon Valley, Chris enjoyed an inspiring conversation with Anima Anandkumar. Clearly a role model - not only for women - but for anyone in the world of AI, Anima relayed how her lifelong passion for mathematics and engineering started when she was only 3 years old in India, and ultimately led to her pioneering deep learning research at Amazon Web Services, CalTech, and NVIDIA. Sponsors: DigitalOcean – Check out DigitalOcean’s dedicated vCPU...
Mar 25, 2019•1 hr 6 min•Ep. 36
Clément Delangue, the co-founder & CEO of Hugging Face, joined us to discuss fun, social, and conversational AI. Clem explained why social AI is important, what products they are building (social AIs who learn to chit-chat, talk sassy and trades selfies with you), and how this intersects with the latest research in AI for natural language. He also shared his vision for how AI for natural language with develop over the next few years. Sponsors: DigitalOcean – Check out DigitalOcean’s dedicate...
Mar 18, 2019•39 min•Ep. 35
The White House recently published an “Executive Order on Maintaining American Leadership in Artificial Intelligence.” In this fully connected episode, we discuss the executive order in general and criticism from the AI community. We also draw some comparisons between this US executive order and other national strategies for leadership in AI. Sponsors: Linode – Our cloud server of choice. Deploy a fast, efficient, native SSD cloud server for only $5/month. Get 4 months free using the code change...
Mar 11, 2019•41 min•Ep. 34
While covering Applied Machine Learning Days in Switzerland, Chris met El Mahdi El Mhamdi by chance, and was fascinated with his work doing AI safety research at EPFL. El Mahdi agreed to come on the show to share his research into the vulnerabilities in machine learning that bad actors can take advantage of. We cover everything from poisoned data sets and hacked machines to AI-generated propaganda and fake news, so grab your James Bond 007 kit from Q Branch, and join us for this important conver...
Mar 04, 2019•51 min•Ep. 33
This week we discuss GPT-2, a new transformer-based language model from OpenAI that has everyone talking. It’s capable of generating incredibly realistic text, and the AI community has lots of concerns about potential malicious applications. We help you understand GPT-2 and we discuss ethical concerns, responsible release of AI research, and resources that we have found useful in learning about language models. Sponsors: Linode – Our cloud server of choice. Deploy a fast, efficient, native SSD c...
Feb 25, 2019•41 min•Ep. 32
