The more advanced modern technologies become, the more they can help us understand the past. Chris Downum and Leszek Pawlowicz, researchers in the Department of Anthropology at Northern Arizona University, are using GPU-based deep learning algorithms to categorize sherds — tiny fragments of ancient pottery. They spoke with NVIDIA AI Podcast host Noah Kravitz about analyzing sherds to learn more about American Southwest culture, circa 825 to 1300 A.D. https://blogs.nvidia.com/blog/2021/10/20/ai-p...
Oct 20, 2021•26 min•Transcript available on Metacast Lennon and McCartney. Ashford and Simpson. Many of our all-time favorite tunes have come from songwriting duos. Now, anyone can find a snazzy compositional partner in AI. Maya Ackerman is the CEO of WaveAI, a Silicon Valley startup using AI and machine learning to, as the company motto puts it, “unlock new heights of human creative expression.” She spoke with NVIDIA AI Podcast host Noah Kravitz about WaveAI’s LyricStudio software, an AI-based lyric and poetry writing assistant. https://blogs.nvi...
Oct 01, 2021•23 min•Transcript available on Metacast Endangered species can be difficult to study, as they are elusive, and the very act of observing them can disrupt their lives. Now, scientists can take a closer look at endangered species by studying AI-generated 3D representations of them. Sifei Liu, a senior research scientist at NVIDIA, has worked with her team to create an algorithm that can reconstruct 3D meshes — graphics models used to display the edges, vertices and overall shape of an object — from 2D inputs like images and videos. Liu ...
Sep 20, 2021•21 min•Transcript available on Metacast Machines have long played games - think of Deep Blue or AlphaGo. Now they're building them. GANTheftAuto creator Harrison Kinsley talks about his creation on the latest episode of the AI Podcast. https://blogs.nvidia.com/blog/2021/09/08/gantheftauto/
Sep 08, 2021•30 min•Transcript available on Metacast At GE Renewable Energy, CTO Danielle Merfeld and technical leader Arvind Rangarajan are among those making advances throughout renewable energy. Merfeld and Rangarajan spoke with NVIDIA AI Podcast host Noah Kravitz about how the company uses AI and a human-in-the-loop process to make renewable energy more widespread. The International Energy Agency has set a goal to reach a net zero energy sector by 2050. To reach this goal, 88 percent of electricity needs to come from renewable sources. Wind en...
Aug 20, 2021•31 min•Transcript available on Metacast Path-breaking work that translates an amputee’s thoughts into finger motions, and even commands in video games, holds open the possibility of humans controlling just about anything digital with their minds. Using GPUs, a group of researchers trained an AI neural decoder able to run on a compact, power-efficient NVIDIA Jetson Nano system on module (SOM) to translate 46-year-old Shawn Findley’s thoughts into individual finger motions. And if that breakthrough weren’t enough, the team then plugged ...
Aug 11, 2021•37 min•Transcript available on Metacast Following a long string of victories for computers in other games — chess in 1997, go in 2016 and Texas hold’em poker in 2019 — a GPU-powered AI has beaten some of the world’s most competitive word nerds at the crossword puzzles that are a staple of every Sunday paper. Dr.Fill, the crossword puzzle-playing AI created by Matt Ginsberg — a serial entrepreneur, pioneering AI researcher and former research professor — scored higher than any humans earlier this year at the American Crossword Puzzle T...
Jul 28, 2021•28 min•Transcript available on Metacast Robots are not just limited to the assembly line. At NVIDIA, Liila Torabi works on making the next generation of robotics possible. Torabi is the senior product manager for Isaac Sim, a robotics and AI simulation platform powered by NVIDIA Omniverse. Torabi spoke with NVIDIA AI Podcast host Noah Kravitz about the new era of robotics, one driven by making robots smarter through AI. https://blogs.nvidia.com/blog/2021/07/14/liila-isaac-sim/
Jul 13, 2021•28 min•Transcript available on Metacast We all know about the applications for digital humans for films and video games, but at NVIDIA, Simon Yuen has discovered the vast need and potential for digital humans beyond the entertainment industry. Yuen spoke with NVIDIA AI Podcast host Noah Kravitz about how we’re getting to a point where the simulation of digital humans is possible as opposed to just the visual representation. Yuen leads the Digital Human project at NVIDIA. One of the first products the team is developing is Audio2Face, ...
Jun 29, 2021•34 min•Transcript available on Metacast What do radiology and wastewater have in common? Hopefully, not much. But at startup Opseyes, founder Bryan Arndt and data scientist Robin Schlenga are putting the AI that’s revolutionizing medical imaging to work on analyzing wastewater samples. Arndt and Schlenga spoke with NVIDIA AI Podcast host Noah Kravitz about the inspiration for Opseyes, which began with Arndt’s career at wastewater industry leader Ramboll. Effluent has typically been analyzed by sending tightly sealed samples through th...
Jun 16, 2021•33 min•Transcript available on Metacast 3D deep learning holds the potential to accelerate progress in everything from robotics to medical imaging. But until now, researchers haven’t had the right tools to easily manage and visualize different types of 3D data. NVIDIA Kaolin is a collection of tools within the NVIDIA Omniverse simulation and collaboration platform that allows researchers to visualize and generate datasets, move between 3D tools and retain basic functions for other users. NVIDIA AI Podcast host Noah Kravitz spoke with ...
Jun 01, 2021•24 min•Transcript available on Metacast For a particle physicist, the world’s biggest questions — how did the universe originate and what’s beyond it — can only be answered with help from the world’s smallest building blocks. James Kahn, a consultant with German research platform Helmholtz AI and a collaborator on the global Belle II particle physics experiment, uses deep learning to understand the fundamental rules governing particle decay. Kahn spoke with AI Podcast host Noah Kravitz about the specifics of how AI is accelerating par...
May 19, 2021•23 min•Transcript available on Metacast With only one U.S. state without a Walmart supercenter — and over 4,600 stores across the country — the retail giant’s prediction analytics work with data on an enormous scale. Grant Gelven, a machine learning engineer at Walmart Global Tech, joined NVIDIA AI Podcast host Noah Kravitz for the latest episode of the AI Podcast. Gelven spoke about the big data and machine learning methods making it possible to improve everything from the customer experience to stocking to item pricing. https://blog...
May 05, 2021•23 min•Transcript available on Metacast Julie Bernauer — senior solutions architect for machine learning and deep learning at NVIDIA — led the small team that successfully built Selene, the world’s fifth-fastest supercomputer. Adding to an already impressive feat, Bernauer’s team brought up Selene as the world went into lockdown in early 2020. They used skeleton crews, social distancing protocols, and remote cable validation to achieve what typically takes months with a larger install team in a few weeks. Bernauer told NVIDIA AI Podca...
Apr 21, 2021•30 min•Transcript available on Metacast Shalini De Mello, a principal research scientist at NVIDIA who’s made her mark inventing computer vision technology that contributes to driver safety, finished 2020 with a bang — presenting two posters at the prestigious NeurIPS conference in December. A 10-year NVIDIA veteran, De Mello works on self-supervised and few-shot learning, 3D reconstruction, viewpoint estimation and human-computer interaction. She told NVIDIA AI Podcast host Noah Kravitz about her NeurIPS submissions on reconstructing...
Apr 07, 2021•36 min•Transcript available on Metacast Drawing on his trifecta of degrees in math, music and music technology, Tlacael Esparza, co-founder and CTO of Sunhouse, is revolutionizing electronic drumming. Esparza has created Sensory Percussion, a combination of hardware and software that uses sensors and AI to allow a single drum to produce a complex range of sounds depending on where and how the musician hits it. In the latest installment of the NVIDIA AI Podcast, Esparza spoke with host Noah Kravitz about the tech behind the tool, and w...
Mar 31, 2021•32 min•Transcript available on Metacast Call it Moneyball for AI. In his just released book, "Genius Makers," New York Times writer Cade Metz tells the funny, inspiring — and ultimately triumphant — tale of how a dogged group of AI researchers bet their careers on the long-dismissed technology of deep learning. https://blogs.nvidia.com/blog/2021/03/17/ai-cade-metz
Mar 16, 2021•34 min•Transcript available on Metacast Since NVIDIA announced construction of the U.K.’s most powerful supercomputer — Cambridge-1 — Marc Hamilton, vice president of solutions architecture and engineering, has been (remotely) overseeing its building across the pond. Cambridge-1, which will be available for U.K. healthcare researchers to work on pressing problems, is being built on NVIDIA DGX SuperPOD architecture for a whopping 400 petaflops of AI performance. Located at KAO Data, a data center using 100% renewable energy, Cambridge-...
Mar 02, 2021•27 min•Transcript available on Metacast Pooja Rao, a doctor, data scientist and entrepreneur, wants to make cutting-edge medical care available to communities around the world, regardless of their resources. Her startup, Qure.ai, is doing exactly that, with technology that’s used in 150+ healthcare facilities in 27 countries. Rao is the cofounder and head of research and development at the Mumbai-based company, which started in 2016. The company develops AI technology that interprets medical images, with a focus on pulmonary and neuro...
Feb 18, 2021•29 min•Transcript available on Metacast Not many can claim to be a computer programmer, nonfiction author and poet, but Brian Christian has established himself as all three. Christian has just released his newest book, The Alignment Problem, which delves into the disparity that occurs when AI models don’t do exactly what they’re intended to do. The book follows on the success of Christian’s previous work, "The Most Human Human and Algorithms to Live By." Now a visiting scholar at UC Berkeley, Christian joined AI Podcast host Noah Krav...
Feb 01, 2021•35 min•Transcript available on Metacast Sam Liang is making things easier for the creators of the NVIDIA AI Podcast — and just about every remote worker. He’s the CEO and co-founder of Otter.ai, which uses AI to produce speech-to-text transcriptions in real time or from recording uploads. The platform has a range of capabilities, from differentiating between multiple people, to understanding accents, to parsing through various background noises. And now, Otter.ai is making live captioning possible on a variety of platforms, including ...
Jan 21, 2021•24 min•Transcript available on Metacast Canadian high schooler Ana DuCristea has a clever solution for the quarantine blues, as days blur into weeks. Using AI and natural language processing, she programmed an app capable of setting customizable reminders so you won’t miss any important activities, like baking banana bread or whipping up Dalgona coffee. DuCristea, who’s familiar with Python and has taken a variety of online AI courses, set to work on the app after winning a Jetson Nano Developer Kit this summer at AI4ALL, an AI summer...
Jan 06, 2021•22 min•Transcript available on Metacast Brendon Cassidy, CTO and chief scientist at Super Hi-Fi, uses AI to give everyone the experience of a radio station tailored to their unique tastes. Super Hi-Fi, an AI startup and member of the NVIDIA Inception program, develops technology that produces smooth transitions, intersperses content meaningfully and adjusts volume and crossfade. Started three years ago, Super Hi-Fi first partnered with iHeartRadio and is now also used by companies such as Peloton and Sonos. Results are showing that us...
Dec 23, 2020•36 min•Transcript available on Metacast Anima Anandkumar is setting a personal record this week with seven of her team’s research papers accepted to NeurIPS 2020. The 34th annual Neural Information Processing Systems conference is taking place virtually from Dec. 6-12. The premier event on neural networks, NeurIPS draws thousands of the world’s best researchers every year. Anandkumar, NVIDIA’s director of machine learning research and Bren professor at CalTech’s CMS Department, joined AI Podcast host Noah Kravitz to talk about what to...
Dec 07, 2020•30 min•Transcript available on Metacast We've got an expert on AI powered translation joining us on the show today. Spence Green is CEO at Lilt, a Silicon Valley based AI-powered enterprise translation software and services company. Lilt's mission is to make more of the world's information accessible to more of the world's people, regardless of where they were born and what language they speak. Spence is here to talk to us about how they're doing it.
Oct 06, 2020•27 min•Transcript available on Metacast Pindar Van Arman, an American artist and roboticist, designs painting robots that explore the differences between human and computational creativity. Since his first system in 2005 he has built multiple artificially-creative robots. The most famous, Cloud Painter, was awarded first place at Robotart 2018. PIndar, his robots, and their work have been featured all over the media, including on NPR, BBC, HBO, Vice, and the documentary "Machine" a film about artificial intelligence. You can see and l...
Oct 01, 2020•34 min•Transcript available on Metacast Jeff Herbst is a fixture of the AI startup ecosystem. Which makes sense since he’s the VP of business development at NVIDIA and head of NVIDIA Inception, a virtual accelerator that currently has over 6,000 members in a wide range of industries. Ahead of the GPU Technology Conference, taking place Oct. 5-9, Herbst joined AI Podcast host Noah Kravitz to talk about what opportunities are available to startups at the conference, and how NVIDIA Inception is accelerating startups in every industry. Le...
Sep 23, 2020•34 min•Transcript available on Metacast Today we're talking graphics, the intersection of AI and graphics specifically. There may be no better guest to talk AI and graphics than our guest today, David Luebke. David is vice president of graphics research at NVIDIA. He co-founded NVIDIA Research in 2006, after eight years on the faculty of the University of Virginia.
Sep 09, 2020•43 min•Transcript available on Metacast It’s a modern television trope – detectives trying to solve a case “enhance” a blurry image, digitally, giving them a crystal clear image of their suspect. Until recently, this was little more than science fiction. Now, however, it’s a key tool for photographers around the world. Topaz Labs pioneered the intersection of deep learning and photo noise reduction. Their sprawling suite of image editing plugins are relied by pro and amateur photographers alike. We spoke with Topaz founder and CTO, Fe...
Aug 31, 2020•29 min•Transcript available on Metacast It's all come full circle. Real-time graphics technology, namely, GPUs, sparked the modern AI boom. Now modern AI, driven by GPUs, is remaking graphics. This episodes guest is Aaron Lefohn, senior director of realtime rendering research at NVIDIA. Aaron's international team of scientists played a key role in founding the field of AI computer graphics. They were the first to bring AI to real-time computer graphics. They invented key technologies that brought ray tracing to real time computer grap...
Aug 24, 2020•34 min•Transcript available on Metacast 
