Reflection on Educational Initiatives and Evolving Leadership

As we continue our NeurIPS 2020 series, we’re joined by friend-of-the-show Charles Isbell, Dean, John P. Imlay, Jr. Chair, and professor at the Georgia Tech College of Computing.

This year Charles gave an Invited Talk at this year’s conference, You Can’t Escape Hyperparameters and Latent Variables: Machine Learning as a Software Engineering Enterprise. In our conversation, we explore the success of the Georgia Tech Online Masters program in CS, which now has over 11k students enrolled, and the importance of making the education accessible to as many people as possible. We spend quite a bit speaking about the impact machine learning is beginning to have on the world, and how we should move from thinking of ourselves as compiler hackers, and begin to see the possibilities and opportunities that have been ignored.

We also touch on the fallout from Timnit Gebru being “resignated” and the importance of having diverse voices and different perspectives “in the room,” and what the future holds for machine learning as a discipline.

The complete show notes for this episode can be found at twimlai.com/go/441.