Data Science at Home

It's always good to put in perspective all the findings in AI, in order to clear some of the most common misunderstandings and promises. In this episode I make a list of some of the most misleading statements about what artificial intelligence can achieve in the near future.

In this episode - which I advise to consume at night, in a quite place - I speak about private machine learning and blockchain, while I sip a cup of coffee in my home office. There are several reasons why I believe we should start thinking about private machine learning... It doesn't really matter what approach becomes successful and gets adopted, as long as it makes private machine learning possible. If people own their data, they should also own the by-product of such data. Decentralized machine learning makes this scenario possible.

Today I am having a conversation with Filip Piękniewski, researcher working on computer vision and AI at Koh Young Research America. His adventure with AI started in the 90s and since then a long list of experiences at the intersection of computer science and physics, led him to the conclusion that deep learning might not be sufficient nor appropriate to solve the problem of intelligence, specifically artificial intelligence.   I read some of his publications and got familiar with some of his ideas. Honestly, I have been attracted by the fact that Filip does not buy the hype around AI and deep learning in particular. He doesn’t seem to share the vision of folks like Elon Musk who claimed that we are going to see an exponential improvement in self driving cars among other things (he actually said that before a Tesla drove over a pedestrian).

In this episode I continue the conversation from the previous one, about failing machine learning models. When data scientists have access to the distributions of training and testing datasets it becomes relatively easy to assess if a model will perform equally on both datasets. What happens with private datasets, where no access to the data can be granted? At fitchain we might have an answer to this fundamental problem.  

The success of a machine learning model depends on several factors and events. True generalization to data that the model has never seen before is more a chimera than a reality. But under specific conditions a well trained machine learning model can generalize well and perform with testing accuracy that is similar to the one performed during training. In this episode I explain when and why machine learning models fail from training to testing datasets.

In this episode I don't talk about data. In fact, I talk about metadata. While many machine learning models rely on certain amounts of data eg. text, images, audio and video, it has been proved how powerful is the signal carried by metadata, that is all data that is invisible to the end user. Behind a tweet of 140 characters there are more than 140 fields of data that draw a much more detailed profile of the sender and the content she is producing... without ever considering the tweet itself.   References You are your Metadata: Identification and Obfuscation of Social Media Users using Metadata Information https://www.ucl.ac.uk/~ucfamus/papers/icwsm18.pdf

Today’s episode is about text analysis with python. Python is the de facto standard in machine learning. A large community, a generous choice in the set of libraries, at the price of less performant tasks, sometimes. But overall a decent language for typical data science tasks. I am with Rebecca Bilbro, co-author of Applied Text Analysis with Python, with Benjamin Bengfort and Tony Ojeda. We speak about the evolution of applied text analysis, tools and pipelines, chatbots.  

Attacking deep learning models Compromising AI for fun and profit   Deep learning models have shown very promising results in computer vision and sound recognition. As more and more deep learning based systems get integrated in disparate domains, they will keep affecting the life of people. Autonomous vehicles, medical imaging and banking applications, surveillance cameras and drones, digital assistants, are only a few real applications where deep learning plays a fundamental role. A malfunction in any of these applications will affect the quality of such integrated systems and compromise the security of the individuals who directly or indirectly use them. In this episode, we explain how machine learning models can be attacked and what we can do to protect intelligent systems from being  compromised.

Today’s episode  will be about deep learning and reasoning. There has been a lot of discussion about the effectiveness of deep learning models and their capability to generalize, not only across domains but also on data that such models have never seen. But there is a research group from the Department of Computer Science, Duke University that seems to be on something with deep learning and interpretability in computer vision.   References Prediction Analysis Lab Duke University https://users.cs.duke.edu/~cynthia/lab.html This looks like that: deep learning for interpretable image recognition https://arxiv.org/abs/1806.10574

Today’s episode  will be about deep learning and compression of data, and in particular compressing images. We all know how important compressing data is, reducing the size of digital objects without affecting the quality. As a very general rule, the more one compresses an image the lower the quality, due to a number of factors like bitrate, quantization error, etcetera. I am glad to be here with Tong Chen,  researcher at the School of electronic Science and Engineering of Nanjing University, China. Tong developed a deep learning based compression algorithm for images, that seems to improve over state of the art approaches like BPG, JPEG2000 and JPEG.   Reference Deep Image Compression via End-to-End Learning - Haojie Liu, Tong Chen, Qiu Shen, Tao Yue, and Zhan Ma School of Electronic Science and Engineering, Nanjing University, Jiangsu, China