In episode 20 we chat with Pedro Domingos of the University of Washington, he's just published a book The Master Algorithm: How the Quest for the Ultimate Learning Machine Will Remake Our World. We get some insight into Linear Dynamical Systems which the Datta Lab at Harvard Medical School is doing some interesting work with. Plus, we take a listener question about using video games to generate labeled data (spoiler alert, it's an awesome idea!)We're in the final hours of our Fundraising Campaig...
Sep 24, 2015•46 min
In episode nineteen we chat with Hugo Larochelle about his work on unsupervised learning, the International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR), and his teaching style. His Youtube courses are not to be missed, and his twitter feed @Hugo_Larochelle is a great source for paper reviews. Ryan introduces us to autoencoders (for more, turn to the work of Richard Zemel) plus we tackle the question of what is standing in the way of strong AI. Talking Machines is beginning development of seaso...
Sep 10, 2015•36 min
In episode eighteen we talk with Sham Kakade, of Microsoft Research New England, about his expansive work which touches on everything from neuroscience to theoretical machine learning. Ryan introduces us to active learning (great tutorial here) and we take a question on evolutionary algorithms. Today we're announcing that season two of Talking Machines is moving into development, but we need your help! In order to raise funds, we've opened the show up to sponsorship and started a Kickstarter and...
Aug 27, 2015•54 min
In episode seventeen we talk with Jennifer Listgarten of Microsoft Research New England about her work using machine learning to answer questions in biology. Recently, With her collaborator Nicolo Fusi, she used machine learning to make CRISPR more efficient and correct for latent population structure in GWAS studies. We take a question from a listener about the development of computational biology and Ryan gives us some great advice on how to get into grad school (Spoiler alert: apply to the la...
Aug 13, 2015•48 min
In episode sixteen we chat with Danny Tarlow of Microsoft Research Cambridge (in the UK not MA). Danny (along with Chris Maddison and Tom Minka) won best paper at NIPS 2014 for his paper A* Sampling. We talk with him about his work in applying machine learning to sports and politics. Plus we take a listener question on making real time predictions using machine learning, and we demystify backpropagation. You can use Torch, Theano or Autograd to explore backprop more. See omnystudio.com/listener ...
Jul 30, 2015•29 min
In episode fifteen we talk with Max Welling, of the University of Amsterdam and University of California Irvine. We talk with him about his work with extremely large data and big business and machine learning. Max was program co-chair for NIPS in 2013 when Mark Zuckerberg visited the conference, an event which Max wrote very thoughtfully about. We also take a listener question about the relationship between machine learning and artificial intelligence. Plus, we get an introduction to change poin...
Jul 16, 2015•24 min
In episode fourteen we talk with Nando de Freitas. He’s a professor of Computer Science at the University of Oxford and a senior staff research scientist Google DeepMind. Right now he’s focusing on solving intelligence. (No biggie) Ryan introduces us to anchor words and how they can help us expand our ability to explore topic models. Plus, we take a question about the fundamentals of tackling a problem with machine learning. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information. Hosted on Acast. S...
Jul 02, 2015•30 min
In episode thirteen we talk with Claudia Perlich, Chief Scientist at Dstillery. We talk about her work using machine learning in digital advertising and her approach to data in competitions. We take a look at information leakage in competitions after ImageNet Challenge this year. The New York Times covered the events, and Neil Lawrence has been writing thoughtfully about it and its impact. Plus, we take a listener question about trends in data size. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy inform...
Jun 18, 2015•39 min
In episode twelve we talk with Andrew Ng, Chief Scientist at Baidu, about how speech recognition is going to explode the way we use mobile devices and his approach to working on the problem. We also discuss why we need to prepare for the economic impacts of machine learning. We’re introduced to Random Features for Large-Scale Kernel Machines, and talk about how using this twist on the Kernel trick can help you dig into big data. Plus, we take a listener question about the size of computing power...
Jun 04, 2015•41 min
In episode eleven we chat with Neil Lawrence from the University of Sheffield. We talk about the problems of privacy in the age of machine learning, the responsibilities that come with using ML tools and making data more open. We learn about the Markov decision process (and what happens when you use it in the real world and it becomes a partially observable Markov decision process) and take a listener question about finding insights into features in the black boxes of deep learning. See omnystud...
May 21, 2015•34 min
In Episode 10 we talk with David Blei of Columbia University. We talk about his work on latent dirichlet allocation, topic models, the PhD program in data that he’s helping to create at Columbia and why exploring data is inherently multidisciplinary. We learn about Markov Chain Monte Carlo and take a listener question about how machine learning can make humans more creative. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information....
May 07, 2015•34 min
In episode nine we talk with George Dahl, of the University of Toronto, about his work on the Merck molecular activity challenge on kaggle and speech recognition. George recently successfully defended his thesis at the end of March 2015. (Congrats George!) We learn about how networks and graphs can help us understand latent properties of relationships, and we take a listener question about just how you find the right algorithm to solve a problem (Spoiler: start simple.) See omnystudio.com/listen...
Apr 23, 2015•38 min
On episode eight we talk with Charles Sutton, a professor in the School of Informatics University of Edinburgh about computer programming and using machine learning how to better understand how it’s done well. Ryan introduces us to collaborative filtering, a process that helps to make predictions about taste. Netflix and Amazon use it to recommend movies and items. It's the process that the Netflix Prize competition further helped to hone. Plus, we take a listener question on creativity in algor...
Apr 09, 2015•35 min
In episode seven of Talking Machines we talk with Zoubin Ghahramani, professor of Information Engineering in the Department of Engineering at the University of Cambridge. His project, The Automatic Statistician, aims to use machine learning to take raw data and give you statistical reports and natural languages summaries of what trends that data shows. We get really hungry exploring Bayesian Non-parametrics through the stories of the Chinese Restaurant Process and the Indian Buffet Process (but ...
Mar 26, 2015•46 min
We hear the second part of our conversation with with Geoffrey Hinton (Google and University of Toronto), Yoshua Bengio (University of Montreal) and Yann LeCun (Facebook and NYU). They talk with us about this history (and future) of research on neural nets. We explore how to use Determinantal Point Processes. Alex Kulesza and Ben Taskar (who passed away recently) have done some really exciting work in this area, for more on DPPs check out their paper on the topic. Also, we take a listener questi...
Mar 13, 2015•28 min
In episode five of Talking Machines, we hear the first part of our conversation with Geoffrey Hinton (Google and University of Toronto), Yoshua Bengio (University of Montreal) and Yann LeCun (Facebook and NYU). Ryan introduces us to the ideas in tensor factorization methods for learning latent variable models (which is both a tongue twister and and one of the new tools in ML). To find out more on the topic, the paper Tensor decompositions for learning latent variable models is a good place to st...
Feb 26, 2015•33 min
In episode four we talk with Hanna Wallach, of Microsoft Research. She's also a professor in the Department of Computer Science, University of Massachusetts Amherst and one of the founders of Women in Machine Learning (better known as WiML). We take a listener question about scalability and the size of data sets. And Ryan takes us through topic modeling using Latent Dirichlet allocation (say that five times fast). See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information. Hosted on Acast. See acast.co...
Feb 12, 2015•45 min
On episode three of Talking Machines we sit down with Kevin Murphy who is currently a research scientist at Google. We talk with him about the work he’s doing there on the Knowledge Vault, his textbook, Machine Learning: A Probabilistic Perspective (and its arch nemesis which we won’t link to), and how to learn about machine learning (Metacademy is a great place to start). We tackle a listener question about the dream of a one step solution to strong Artificial Intelligence and if Deep Neural Ne...
Jan 29, 2015•41 min
Today on Talking Machines we hear from Google researcher Ilya Sutskever about his work, how he became interested in machine learning, and why it takes a little bit of magical thinking. We take your questions, and explore where the line between human programming and computer learning actually is. And we sift through some news from the field, Ryan explains the concepts behind one of the best papers at NIPS this year, A * Sampling, and Katherine brings up an open letter about research priorities an...
Jan 15, 2015•35 min
In the first episode of Talking Machines we meet our hosts, Katherine Gorman (nerd, journalist) and Ryan Adams (nerd, Harvard computer science professor), and explore some of the interviews you'll be able to hear this season. Today we hear some short clips on big issues, we'll get technical, but today is all about introductions.We start with Kevin Murphy of Google talking about his textbook that has become a standard in the field. Then we turn to Hanna Wallach of Microsoft Research NYC and UMass...
Jan 01, 2015•41 min
