Kathryn Hume is Vice President Digital Investments Technology at the Royal Bank of Canada (RBC). At the time of recording, she was Interim Head of Borealis AI, RBC's research institute for machine learning. Kathryn and Lukas talk about ML applications in finance, from building a personal finance forecasting model to applying reinforcement learning to trade execution, and take a philosophical detour into the 17th century as they speculate on what Newton and Descartes would have thought about mach...
Dec 16, 2021•52 min•Transcript available on Metacast Sean McClain is the founder and CEO, and Gregory Hannum is the VP of AI Research at Absci, a biotech company that's using deep learning to expedite drug discovery and development. Lukas, Sean, and Greg talk about why Absci started investing so heavily in ML research (it all comes back to the data), what it'll take to build the GPT-3 of DNA, and where the future of pharma is headed. Sean and Greg also share some of the challenges of building cross-functional teams and combining two highly special...
Dec 02, 2021•55 min•Transcript available on Metacast You might know him as the host of Gradient Dissent, but Lukas is also the CEO of Weights & Biases, a developer-first ML tools platform! In this special episode, the three W&B co-founders — Chris (CVP), Shawn (CTO), and Lukas (CEO) — sit down to tell the company's origin stories, reflect on the highs and lows, and give advice to engineers looking to start their own business. Chris reveals the W&B server architecture (tl;dr - React + GraphQL), Shawn shares his favorite product feature ...
Nov 05, 2021•49 min•Transcript available on Metacast Pete is the Technical Lead of the TensorFlow Micro team, which works on deep learning for mobile and embedded devices. Lukas and Pete talk about hacking a Raspberry Pi to run AlexNet, the power and size constraints of embedded devices, and techniques to reduce model size. Pete also explains real world applications of TensorFlow Lite Micro and shares what it's been like to work on TensorFlow from the beginning. The complete show notes (transcript and links) can be found here: http://wandb.me/gd-p...
Oct 21, 2021•53 min•Transcript available on Metacast Pieter is the Chief Scientist and Co-founder at Covariant, where his team is building universal AI for robotic manipulation. Pieter also hosts The Robot Brains Podcast, in which he explores how far humanity has come in its mission to create conscious computers, mindful machines, and rational robots. Lukas and Pieter explore the state of affairs of robotics in 2021, the challenges of achieving consistency and reliability, and what it'll take to make robotics more ubiquitous. Pieter also shares so...
Oct 07, 2021•57 min•Transcript available on Metacast In this episode we're joined by Chris Albon, Director of Machine Learning at the Wikimedia Foundation. Lukas and Chris talk about Wikimedia's approach to content moderation, what it's like to work in a place so transparent that even internal chats are public, how Wikimedia uses machine learning (spoiler: they do a lot of models to help editors), and why they're switching to Kubeflow and Docker. Chris also shares how his focus on outcomes has shaped his career and his approach to technical interv...
Sep 23, 2021•56 min•Transcript available on Metacast In this episode, Emily and Lukas dive into the problems with bigger and bigger language models, the difference between form and meaning, the limits of benchmarks, and why it's important to name the languages we study. Show notes (links to papers and transcript): http://wandb.me/gd-emily-m-bender --- Emily M. Bender is a Professor of Linguistics at and Faculty Director of the Master's Program in Computational Linguistics at University of Washington. Her research areas include multilingual grammar...
Sep 09, 2021•1 hr 13 min•Transcript available on Metacast Jeff talks about building Facebook's early data team, founding Cloudera, and transitioning into biomedicine with Hammer Lab and Related Sciences. (Read more: http://wandb.me/gd-jeff-hammerbacher) --- Jeff Hammerbacher is a scientist, software developer, entrepreneur, and investor. Jeff's current work focuses on drug discovery at Related Sciences, a biotech venture creation firm that he co-founded in 2020. Prior to his work at Related Sciences, Jeff was the Principal Investigator of Hammer Lab, a...
Aug 26, 2021•57 min•Transcript available on Metacast Josh explains how astronomy and machine learning have informed each other, their current limitations, and where their intersection goes from here. ( Read more: http://wandb.me/gd-josh-bloom ) --- Josh is a Professor of Astronomy and Chair of the Astronomy Department at UC Berkeley. His research interests include the intersection of machine learning and physics, time-domain transients events, artificial intelligence, and optical/infared instrumentation. --- Follow Gradient Dissent on Twitter: htt...
Aug 20, 2021•1 hr 8 min•Transcript available on Metacast Xavier shares his experience deploying healthcare models, augmenting primary care with AI, the challenges of "ground truth" in medicine, and robustness in ML. --- Xavier Amatriain is co-founder and CTO of Curai, an ML-based primary care chat system. Previously, he was VP of Engineering at Quora, and Research/Engineering Director at Neflix, where he started and led the Algorithms team responsible for Netflix's recommendation systems. --- ⏳ Timestamps: 0:00 Sneak peak, intro 0:49 What is Curai? 5:...
Jul 30, 2021•50 min•Transcript available on Metacast Spence shares his experience creating a product around human-in-the-loop machine translation, and explains how machine translation has evolved over the years. --- Spence Green is co-founder and CEO of Lilt, an AI-powered language translation platform. Lilt combines human translators and machine translation in order to produce high-quality translations more efficiently. --- 🌟 Show notes: - http://wandb.me/gd-spence-green - Transcription of the episode - Links to papers, projects, and people ⏳ Ti...
Jul 16, 2021•44 min•Transcript available on Metacast Roger and DJ share some of the history behind data science as we know it today, and reflect on their experiences working on California's COVID-19 response. --- Roger Magoulas is Senior Director of Data Strategy at Astronomer, where he works on data infrastructure, analytics, and community development. Previously, he was VP of Research at O'Reilly and co-chair of O'Reilly's Strata Data and AI Conference. DJ Patil is a board member and former CTO of Devoted Health, a healthcare company for seniors...
Jul 08, 2021•1 hr 5 min•Transcript available on Metacast Amelia and Filip give insights into the recommender systems powering Pandora, from developing models to balancing effectiveness and efficiency in production. --- Amelia Nybakke is a Software Engineer at Pandora. Her team is responsible for the production system that serves models to listeners. Filip Korzeniowski is a Senior Scientist at Pandora working on recommender systems. Before that, he was a PhD student working on deep neural networks for acoustic and language modeling applied to musical a...
Jul 01, 2021•41 min•Transcript available on Metacast From Apache TVM to OctoML, Luis gives direct insight into the world of ML hardware optimization, and where systems optimization is heading. --- Luis Ceze is co-founder and CEO of OctoML, co-author of the Apache TVM Project, and Professor of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Washington. His research focuses on the intersection of computer architecture, programming languages, machine learning, and molecular biology. Connect with Luis: 📍 Twitter: https://twitter.com/luisceze 📍...
Jun 24, 2021•48 min•Transcript available on Metacast Matthew explains how combining machine learning and computational biology can provide mainstream medicine with better diagnostics and insights. --- Matthew Davis is Head of AI at Invitae, the largest and fastest growing genetic testing company in the world. His research includes bioinformatics, computational biology, NLP, reinforcement learning, and information retrieval. Matthew was previously at IBM Research AI, where he led a research team focused on improving AI systems. Connect with Matthew...
Jun 17, 2021•43 min•Transcript available on Metacast Clem explains the virtuous cycles behind the creation and success of Hugging Face, and shares his thoughts on where NLP is heading. --- Clément Delangue is co-founder and CEO of Hugging Face, the AI community building the future. Hugging Face started as an open source NLP library and has quickly grown into a commercial product used by over 5,000 companies. Connect with Clem: 📍 Twitter: https://twitter.com/ClementDelangue 📍 LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/clementdelangue/ --- 🌟 Transcrip...
Jun 10, 2021•47 min•Transcript available on Metacast Wojciech joins us to talk the principles behind OpenAI, the Fermi Paradox, and the future stages of developments in AGI. --- Wojciech Zaremba is a co-founder of OpenAI, a research company dedicated to discovering and enacting the path to safe artificial general intelligence. He was also Head of Robotics, where his team developed general-purpose robots through new approaches to transfer learning, and taught robots complex behaviors. Connect with Wojciech: Personal website: https://wojzaremba.com/...
Jun 03, 2021•44 min•Transcript available on Metacast Phil shares some of the approaches, like sparsity and low precision, behind the breakthrough performance of Graphcore's Intelligence Processing Units (IPUs). --- Phil Brown leads the Applications team at Graphcore, where they're building high-performance machine learning applications for their Intelligence Processing Units (IPUs), new processors specifically designed for AI compute. Connect with Phil: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/philipsbrown/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/phil_s_brown -...
May 27, 2021•57 min•Transcript available on Metacast From working on COVID-19 vaccine rollout to writing a book on responsible ML, Alyssa shares her thoughts on meaningful projects and the importance of teamwork. --- Alyssa Simpson Rochwerger is as a Director of Product at Blue Shield of California, pursuing her dream of using technology to improve healthcare. She has over a decade of experience in building technical data-driven products and has held numerous leadership roles for machine learning organizations, including VP of AI and Data at Appen...
May 20, 2021•45 min•Transcript available on Metacast Sean joins us to chat about ML models and tools at Lyft Rideshare Labs, Python vs R, time series forecasting with Prophet, and election forecasting. --- Sean Taylor is a Data Scientist at (and former Head of) Lyft Rideshare Labs, and specializes in methods for solving causal inference and business decision problems. Previously, he was a Research Scientist on Facebook's Core Data Science team. His interests include experiments, causal inference, statistics, machine learning, and economics. Connec...
May 13, 2021•46 min•Transcript available on Metacast Polly explains how microfluidics allow bioengineering researchers to create high throughput data, and shares her experiences with biology and machine learning. --- Polly Fordyce is an Assistant Professor of Genetics and Bioengineering and fellow of the ChEM-H Institute at Stanford. She is the Principal Investigator of The Fordyce Lab, which focuses on developing and applying new microfluidic platforms for quantitative, high-throughput biophysics and biochemistry. Twitter: https://twitter.com/for...
Apr 29, 2021•46 min•Transcript available on Metacast Adrien Gaidon shares his approach to building teams and taking state-of-the-art research from conception to production at Toyota Research Institute. --- Adrien Gaidon is the Head of Machine Learning Research at the Toyota Research Institute (TRI). His research focuses on scaling up ML for robot autonomy, spanning Scene and Behavior Understanding, Simulation for Deep Learning, 3D Computer Vision, and Self-Supervised Learning. Connect with Adrien: Twitter: https://twitter.com/adnothing LinkedIn : ...
Apr 22, 2021•48 min•Transcript available on Metacast A look at how Nimrod and the team at Nanit are building smart baby monitor systems, from data collection to model deployment and production monitoring. --- Nimrod Shabtay is a Senior Computer Vision Algorithm Developer at Nanit, a New York-based company that's developing better baby monitoring devices. Connect with Nimrod: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/nimrod-shabtay-76072840/ --- Links Discussed: Guidelines for building an accurate and robust ML/DL model in production: https://engineeri...
Apr 15, 2021•34 min•Transcript available on Metacast Chris shares some of the incredible work and innovations behind deep space exploration at NASA JPL and reflects on the past, present, and future of machine learning. --- Chris Mattmann is the Chief Technology and Innovation Officer at NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, where he focuses on organizational innovation through technology. He's worked on space missions such as the Orbiting Carbon Observatory 2 and Soil Moisture Active Passive satellites. Chris is also a co-creator of Apache Tika, a conte...
Apr 08, 2021•42 min•Transcript available on Metacast From legged locomotion to autonomous driving, Vladlen explains how simulation and abstraction help us understand embodied intelligence. --- Vladlen Koltun is the Chief Scientist for Intelligent Systems at Intel, where he leads an international lab of researchers working in machine learning, robotics, computer vision, computational science, and related areas. Connect with Vladlen: Personal website: http://vladlen.info/ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/vladlenkoltun/ --- 0:00 Sneak peek and i...
Apr 01, 2021•49 min•Transcript available on Metacast Dominik shares the story and principles behind Vega and Vega-Lite, and explains how visualization and machine learning help each other. --- Dominik is a co-author of Vega-Lite, a high-level visualization grammar for building interactive plots. He's also a professor at the Human-Computer Interaction Institute Institute at Carnegie Mellon University and an ML researcher at Apple. Connect with Dominik Twitter : https://twitter.com/domoritz GitHub : https://github.com/domoritz Personal website: http...
Mar 25, 2021•39 min•Transcript available on Metacast How Cade got access to the stories behind some of the biggest advancements in AI, and the dynamic playing out between leaders at companies like Google, Microsoft, and Facebook. Cade Metz is a New York Times reporter covering artificial intelligence, driverless cars, robotics, virtual reality, and other emerging areas. Previously, he was a senior staff writer with Wired magazine and the U.S. editor of The Register, one of Britain’s leading science and technology news sites. His first book, "Geniu...
Mar 18, 2021•49 min•Transcript available on Metacast Learn why traditional home security systems tend to fail and how Dave’s love of tinkering and deep learning are helping him and the team at Deep Sentinel avoid those same pitfalls. He also discusses the importance of combatting racial bias by designing race-agnostic systems and what their approach is to solving that problem. Dave Selinger is the co-founder and CEO of Deep Sentinel, an intelligent crime prediction and prevention system that stops crime before it happens using deep learning vision...
Mar 11, 2021•56 min•Transcript available on Metacast Since reinforcement learning requires hefty compute resources, it can be tough to keep up without a serious budget of your own. Find out how the team at Facebook AI Research (FAIR) is looking to increase access and level the playing field with the help of NetHack, an archaic rogue-like video game from the late 80s. Links discussed: The NetHack Learning Environment: https://ai.facebook.com/blog/nethack-learning-environment-to-advance-deep-reinforcement-learning/ Reinforcement learning, intrinsic ...
Mar 04, 2021•54 min•Transcript available on Metacast From teaching at Stanford to co-founding Coursera, insitro, and Engageli, Daphne Koller reflects on the importance of education, giving back, and cross-functional research. Daphne Koller is the founder and CEO of insitro, a company using machine learning to rethink drug discovery and development. She is a MacArthur Fellowship recipient, member of the National Academy of Engineering, member of the American Academy of Arts and Science, and has been a Professor in the Department of Computer Science...
Feb 18, 2021•46 min•Transcript available on Metacast 
