NVIDIA AI Podcast

Think of it as like a USB port for your body. Emil Hewage is the co-founder and CEO at Cambridge Bio-Augmentation Systems, a neural engineering startup. They UK startup is building interfaces that use AI to help plug medical devices int our nervous systems. CBAS was named one of the top startups at Y Combinator’s Winter ‘17 cohort by TechCrunch and won the top prize with accelerator MassChallenge UK 2015.

Wayne Thompson was into big data, before big data was cool. Now the world — even much of our GPU Technology Conference — revolves around the kinds of challenges the 25-year veteran of analytics software developer SAS Institute has made a career of helping enterprises master. How did that happen? We asked Thomson, Chief Data Scientist of SAS Data Science Technologies to talk about the big data, big models, and big computations driving deep learning, and to give us some perspective about what makes today’s deep learning technologies different.

This week's episode features Bryan Catanzaro, vice president of applied deep learning research at NVIDIA, and if you've been following the podcast for a while, you know that an earlier episode featuring Bryan is one of the most popular podcasts we've done. Bryan is going to walk us through some of the latest developments at NVIDIA research... as well as share a story that involves Andrew Ng and cats.

Grab the goods and go. AiFi co-founder and CEO Steve Gu wants to give every store — from Mom and Pop bodegas to supermarket chains — the ability to let customers saunter out of the door without so much as a wave at a checker. The benefits involve more than just convenience: stores will have a better idea of how their customers behave and get a real-time bead on their inventory. To do that, our latest guests and his team at startup AiFi rely on advanced sensor fusion, simulation, and deep learning.

Clean, cheap fusion energy would change everything for the better. Our next guest, William Tang, has spent a career at the forefront of that field, currently as principal research physicist at the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory. He’s also one of the world’s foremost experts on how the science of fusion energy, and high-performance computing intersect. Now, he sees new tools — deep learning and artificial intelligence — being put to work to enable big-data-driven discovery in key scientific endeavors, such a the quest to deliver Fusion energy.

Deep learning has helped machines understand how to move pieces around a board to master, and win, Go, the most complicated game mankind has ever invented. Now it's helping a new generation of chemists better understand how to move molecules around to model new kinds of materials. Our guest, Olexandr Isayev, an assistant professor at the UNC Eshelman School of Pharmacy, at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, joined our show to explain how deep learning, Go, sci-fi, and computational chemistry intersect.

How do you win a fast-paced first-person shooter? Answer: it helps to have a good GPU, of course. How do you win one of the world’s most high profile robotics competitions? You guessed it, it helps to have a good GPU. Doug Morrison of the Australian Center for Robotic Vision helped lead the team that developed Cartman, a custom-built, cost-effective robotic system that picked and placed its way to victory in the 2017 Amazon Robotics Challenge global finals in Nagoya Japan last year.

We talk a lot about technology, and data, specifically, impacting all facets of modern life. In this episode we're going to look at data's role in addressing one of the biggest threats to life as we know it: cancer. We'll talk to Dr. Richard Wender, chief cancer control officer at the American Cancer Society about how technology is key to redefining how we look at, and fight, cancer.

One of the things that makes the weather so dangerous is that it's so hard to predict. Tornadoes, hail, high winds and flash floods cause billions of dollars worth of property damage, and injure or kill hundreds of people in the United States each year. Knowing when storms may strike can save lives, and property. Our guest is part of a team at the National Center for Atmospheric Research that's doing just that. We spoke with David John Gagne, a postdoctoral fellow at the National Center for Atmospheric Research about his work with deep learning at the GPU Technology Conference in Silicon Valley this week.

Accountants have spreadsheets. Novelists have word processors. Now, deep learning promises to help take some of the grunt out of legal grunt work. Here's how one startup is using deep learning to help lawyers get legal work done faster and more accurately.