We are joined by Maximilian Mozes, a PhD student at the University College, London. His PhD research focuses on Natural Language Processing (NLP), particularly the intersection of adversarial machine learning and NLP. He joins us to discuss his latest research, Use of LLMs for Illicit Purposes: Threats, Prevention Measures, and Vulnerabilities.
Sep 25, 2023•26 min•Transcript available on Metacast Our guest today is Vid Kocijan, a Machine Learning Engineer at Kumo AI. Vid has a Ph.D. in Computer Science at the University of Oxford. His research focused on common sense reasoning, pre-training in LLMs, pretraining in knowledge-based completion, and how these pre-trainings impact societal bias. He joins us to discuss how he built a BERT model that solved the Winograd Schema Challenge.
Sep 11, 2023•31 min•Transcript available on Metacast Today, We are joined by Petter Törnberg, an Assistant Professor in Computational Social Science at the University of Amsterdam and a Senior Researcher at the University of Neuchatel. His research is centered on the intersection of computational methods and their applications in social sciences. He joins us to discuss findings from his research papers, ChatGPT-4 Outperforms Experts and Crowd Workers in Annotating Political Twitter Messages with Zero-Shot Learning, and How to use LLMs for Text Ana...
Sep 04, 2023•34 min•Transcript available on Metacast In this episode, we are joined by Carlos Hernández Oliván, a Ph.D. student at the University of Zaragoza. Carlos’s interest focuses on building new models for symbolic music generation. Carlos shared his thoughts on whether these models are genuinely creative. He revealed situations where AI-generated music can pass the Turing test. He also shared some essential considerations when constructing models for music composition.
Aug 28, 2023•34 min•Transcript available on Metacast Hongyi Wang, a Senior Researcher at the Machine Learning Department at Carnegie Mellon University, joins us. His research is in the intersection of systems and machine learning. He discussed his research paper, Cuttlefish: Low-Rank Model Training without All the Tuning, on today’s show. Hogyi started by sharing his thoughts on whether developers need to learn how to fine-tune models. He then spoke about the need to optimize the training of ML models, especially as these models grow bigger. He di...
Aug 21, 2023•27 min•Transcript available on Metacast On today’s episode, we have Daniel Rock, an Assistant Professor of Operations Information and Decisions at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. Daniel’s research focuses on the economics of AI and ML, specifically how digital technologies are changing the economy. Daniel discussed how AI has disrupted the job market in the past years. He also explained that it had created more winners than losers. Daniel spoke about the empirical study he and his coauthors did to quantify the th...
Aug 15, 2023•39 min•Transcript available on Metacast We are excited to be joined by J.D. Zamfirescu-Pereira, a Ph.D. student at UC Berkeley. He focuses on the intersection of human-computer interaction (HCI) and artificial intelligence (AI). He joins us to share his work in his paper, Why Johnny can’t prompt: how non-AI experts try (and fail) to design LLM prompts. The discussion also explores lessons learned and achievements related to BotDesigner, a tool for creating chat bots.
Aug 08, 2023•49 min•Transcript available on Metacast In this episode, we are joined by Ryan Liu, a Computer Science graduate of Carnegie Mellon University. Ryan will begin his Ph.D. program at Princeton University this fall. His Ph.D. will focus on the intersection of large language models and how humans think. Ryan joins us to discuss his research titled "ReviewerGPT? An Exploratory Study on Using Large Language Models for Paper Reviewing"
Jul 31, 2023•36 min•Transcript available on Metacast The creators of large language models impose restrictions on some of the types of requests one might make of them. LLMs commonly refuse to give advice on committing crimes, producting adult content, or respond with any details about a variety of sensitive subjects. As with any content filtering system, you have false positives and false negatives. Today's interview with Max Reuter and William Schulze discusses their paper "I'm Afraid I Can't Do That: Predicting Prompt Refusal in Black-Box Genera...
Jul 24, 2023•44 min•Transcript available on Metacast Our guest today is Maciej Świechowski. Maciej is affiliated with QED Software and QED Games. He has a Ph.D. in Systems Research from the Polish Academy of Sciences. Maciej joins us to discuss findings from his study, Deep Learning and Artificial General Intelligence: Still a Long Way to Go.
Jul 18, 2023•37 min•Transcript available on Metacast Today on the show, we are joined by Lin Zhao and Lu Zhang. Lin is a Senior Research Scientist at United Imaging Intelligence, while Lu is a Ph.D. candidate at the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Texas. They both shared findings from their work When Brain-inspired AI Meets AGI . Lin and Lu began by discussing the connections between the brain and neural networks. They mentioned the similarities as well as the differences. They also shared whether there is a pos...
Jul 11, 2023•36 min•Transcript available on Metacast On today’s show, we are joined by Michael Timothy Bennett, a Ph.D. student at the Australian National University. Michael’s research is centered around Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), specifically the mathematical formalism of AGIs. He joins us to discuss findings from his study, Computable Artificial General Intelligence.
Jul 03, 2023•36 min•Transcript available on Metacast We are joined by Koen Holtman, an independent AI researcher focusing on AI safety. Koen is the Founder of Holtman Systems Research, a research company based in the Netherlands. Koen started the conversation with his take on an AI apocalypse in the coming years. He discussed the obedience problem with AI models and the safe form of obedience. Koen explained the concept of Markov Decision Process (MDP) and how it is used to build machine learning models. Koen spoke about the problem of AGIs not be...
Jun 26, 2023•46 min•Transcript available on Metacast An assistant professor of Psychology at Harvard University, Tomer Ullman, joins us. Tomer discussed the theory of mind and whether machines can indeed pass it. Using variations of the Sally-Anne test and the Smarties tube test, he explained how LLMs could fail the theory of mind test.
Jun 19, 2023•52 min•Transcript available on Metacast The application of LLMs cuts across various industries. Today, we are joined by Steven Van Vaerenbergh, who discussed the application of AI in mathematics education. He discussed how AI tools have changed the landscape of solving mathematical problems. He also shared LLMs' current strengths and weaknesses in solving math problems.
Jun 12, 2023•36 min•Transcript available on Metacast Fabricio Goes, a Lecturer in Creative Computing at the University of Leicester, joins us today. Fabricio discussed what creativity entails and how to evaluate jokes with LLMs. He specifically shared the process of evaluating jokes with GPT-3 and GPT-4. He concluded with his thoughts on the future of LLMs for creative tasks.
Jun 06, 2023•43 min•Transcript available on Metacast Barry Smith and Jobst Landgrebe, authors of the book “Why Machines will never Rule the World,” join us today. They discussed the limitations of AI systems in today’s world. They also shared elaborate reasons AI will struggle to attain the level of human intelligence.
May 29, 2023•55 min•Transcript available on Metacast While the possibilities with AGI emergence seem great, it also calls for safety concerns. On the show, Vahid Behzadan, an Assistant Professor of Computer Science and Data Science, joins us to discuss the complexities of modeling AGIs to accurately achieve objective functions. He touched on tangent issues such as abstractions during training, the problem of unpredictability, communications among agents, and so on.
May 23, 2023•49 min•Transcript available on Metacast Julian Michael, a postdoc at the Center for Data Science, New York University, joins us today. Julian’s conversation with Kyle was centered on the NLP community metasurvey: a survey aimed at understanding expert opinions on controversial NLP issues. He shared the process of preparing the survey as well as some shocking results.
May 15, 2023•50 min•Transcript available on Metacast Kyle shares his own perspectives on challenges getting insight from surveys. The discussion ranges from commentary on the market research industry to specific advice for detecting disingenuous or fraudulent responses and filtering them from your analysis. Finally, he shares some quick thoughts on the usage of the Chi-Square test for interpreting cross tab results in survey analysis....
May 10, 2023•22 min•Transcript available on Metacast Jeff Jones, a Senior Editor at Gallup, joins us today. His conversation with Kyle spanned a range of topics on Gallup’s poll creation process. He discussed how Gallup generates unbiased questionnaires, gets respondents, analyzes results, and everything in between.
May 01, 2023•40 min•Transcript available on Metacast Gireeja Ranade, a University of California at Berkeley professor, speaks with us today. She presented her study on implementing inclusive study groups at scale and shared the observed student performance improvements after the intervention.
Apr 25, 2023•32 min•Transcript available on Metacast Today, we are joined by David Bourget. David is an Associate Professor in Philosophy at Western University in London, Ontario. David is also the co-director of the PhilPapers Foundation and Director of the Center for Digital Philosophy. He joins us to discuss the PhilPapers Survey project. The PhilPapers survey was initially taken in 2009, but there was a follow-up survey in 2020. David discussed the need for the subsequent survey and what changed. He mentioned the metric for measuring the opini...
Apr 21, 2023•32 min•Transcript available on Metacast Today’s show focused on an essential part of surveys — missing values. This is typically caused by a low response rate or non-response from respondents. Yajuan Si is a Research Associate Professor at the Survey Research Center at the University of Michigan. She joins us to discuss dealing with bias from low survey response rates.
Apr 10, 2023•36 min•Transcript available on Metacast We are joined by two guests today, Mariah, a Ph.D. student in the CORE Robotics Lab at Georgia Tech, and Matthew Gombolay, the Director of the CORE Robotics Lab. They both discuss practices for measuring a respondent’s perception in a survey.
Apr 03, 2023•47 min•Transcript available on Metacast Ever wondered what your next career would be? Today, Keyon Vafa, a computer science Ph.D. student at Columbia University, joins us to discuss his latest research on developing a machine-learning model for career prediction. Keyon extensively spoke about how the model was developed and the possibilities it brings.
Mar 27, 2023•41 min•Transcript available on Metacast Noura Insolera, a Research Investigator with the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID), joins us to share how PSID conducts longitudinal household surveys. She also shared some interesting findings from their data exploration, particularly on the observation and trends in food insecurity.
Mar 21, 2023•34 min•Transcript available on Metacast Susan Gerbic joins Kyle to review some of the surveys Data Skeptic has launch, draft a new survey about podcast listening habits, and then review the results of that survey. You can see those results at the link below. https://survey.dataskeptic.com/survey/result/1675102237053 Watch the videos Susan mentioned on her Youtube page at the link below. https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL7VAuaQDhPTVaLeI1IcpYph5lH19xA1u4...
Mar 14, 2023•1 hr 2 min•Transcript available on Metacast The use of social bots to fill out online surveys is becoming prevalent. Today, we speak with Sara Bybee, a postdoctoral research scholar at the University of Utah. Sara shares from her research, how she detected social bots, the strategies to curb them, and how underrepresented groups can be more represented in surveys.
Mar 06, 2023•35 min•Transcript available on Metacast Our guest today is Zoltán Kekecs, a Ph.D. holder in Behavioural Science. Zoltán highlights the problem of low replicability in journal papers and illustrates how researchers can better ensure complete replication of their research and findings. He used Bem’s experiment as an example, extensively talking about his methodology and results.
Feb 20, 2023•47 min•Transcript available on Metacast