Today we kick off our KubeCon ‘19 series joined by Haytham AbuelFutuh and Ketan Umare, a pair of software engineers at Lyft. We caught up with Haytham and Ketan at KubeCo, where they were presenting their newly open-sourced, cloud-native ML and data processing platform, Flyte. We discuss what prompted Ketan to undertake this project and his experience building Flyte, the core value proposition, what type systems mean for the user experience, how it relates to Kubeflow and how Flyte is used across Lyft.

Today Robert Osazuwa Ness, ML Research Engineer at Gamalon and Instructor at Northeastern University joins us to discuss Causality, what it means, and how that meaning changes across domains and users, and our upcoming study group based around his new course sequence, “Causal Modeling in Machine Learning," for which you can find details at twimlai.com/community.

Today we’re joined by Jannis Born, Ph.D. student at ETH & IBM Research Zurich, to discuss his “PaccMann^RL” research. Jannis details how his background in computational neuroscience applies to this research, how RL fits into the goal of anticancer drug discovery, the effect DL has had on his research, and of course, a step-by-step walkthrough of how the framework works to predict the sensitivity of cancer drugs on a cell and then discover new anticancer drugs.

Today we’re joined by Blaise Aguera y Arcas, a distinguished scientist at Google. We had the pleasure of catching up with Blaise at NeurIPS last month, where he was invited to speak on “Social Intelligence.” In our conversation, we discuss his role at Google, and his team’s approach to machine learning, and of course his presentation, in which he touches discussing today’s ML landscape, the gap between AI and ML/DS, the difference between intelligent systems and true intelligence, and much more.

Today we’re joined by Pablo Samuel Castro, Staff Research Software Developer at Google. We cover a lot of ground in our conversation, including his love for music, and how that has guided his work on the Lyric AI project, and a few of his papers including “A Geometric Perspective on Optimal Representations for Reinforcement Learning” and “Estimating Policy Functions in Payments Systems using Deep Reinforcement Learning.”

Today we close out AI Rewind 2019 joined by Amir Zamir, who recently began his tenure as an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology. Amir joined us back in 2018 to discuss his CVPR Best Paper winner, and in today’s conversation, we continue with the thread of Computer Vision. In our conversation, we discuss quite a few topics, including Vision-for-Robotics, the expansion of the field of 3D Vision, Self-Supervised Learning for CV Tasks, and much more!

Today we continue the AI Rewind 2019 joined by friend-of-the-show Nasrin Mostafazadeh, Senior AI Research Scientist at Elemental Cognition. We caught up with Nasrin to discuss the latest and greatest developments and trends in Natural Language Processing, including Interpretability, Ethics, and Bias in NLP, how large pre-trained models have transformed NLP research, and top tools and frameworks in the space.

Research scientist Timnit Gebru discusses trends in fairness and AI ethics, highlighting the diversification of NeurIPS with groups like Black in AI. They explore the evolution of ethics and fairness in AI, balancing democratization and complexity in AI tools, and the debate on whether fairness work should intersect with activism and diversity efforts.

Today we continue to review the year that was 2019 via our AI Rewind series, and do so with friend of the show Chelsea Finn, Assistant Professor in the CS Department at Stanford University. Chelsea’s research focuses on Reinforcement Learning, so we couldn’t think of a better person to join us to discuss the topic. In this conversation, we cover topics like Model-based RL, solving hard exploration problems, along with RL libraries and environments that Chelsea thought moved the needle last year.

Today we kick off our 2019 AI Rewind Series joined by Zack Lipton, Professor at CMU. You might remember Zack from our conversation earlier this year, “Fairwashing” and the Folly of ML Solutionism. In today's conversation, Zack recaps advancements across the vast fields of Machine Learning and Deep Learning, including trends, tools, research papers and more. We want to hear from you! Send your thoughts on the year that was 2019 below in the comments, or via Twitter @samcharrington or @twimlai.