Today we’re joined by Elena Nieddu, Phd Student at Roma Tre University, who presented on her project “In Codice Ratio” at the TF Dev Summit. In our conversation, Elena provides an overview of the project, which aims to annotate and transcribe Vatican secret archive documents via machine learning. We discuss the many challenges associated with transcribing this vast archive of handwritten documents, including overcoming the high cost of data annotation.

Today we're joined by Paige Bailey, TensorFlow developer advocate at Google, to discuss the TensorFlow 2.0 alpha release. Paige and I talk through the latest TensorFlow updates, including the evolution of the TensorFlow APIs and the role of eager mode, tf.keras and tf.function, the evolution of TensorFlow for Swift and its inclusion in the new fast.ai course, new updates to TFX (or TensorFlow Extended), Google’s end-to-end ML platform, the emphasis on community collaboration with TF 2.0, and more.

Today we’re joined by Andrew Trask, PhD student at the University of Oxford and Leader of the OpenMined Project, an open-source community focused on researching, developing, and promoting tools for secure, privacy-preserving, value-aligned artificial intelligence. We dig into why OpenMined is important, exploring some of the basic research and technologies supporting Private, Decentralized Data Science, including ideas such as Differential Privacy,and Secure Multi-Party Computation.

Today we’re joined by Jos Van Der Westhuizen, PhD student in Engineering at Cambridge University. Jos’ research focuses on applying LSTMs, or Long Short-Term Memory neural networks, to biological data for various tasks. In our conversation, we discuss his paper "The unreasonable effectiveness of the forget gate," in which he explores the various “gates” that make up an LSTM module and the general impact of getting rid of gates on the computational intensity of training the networks.

Today we’re joined by Andrew Guldman, VP of Product Engineering and R&D at Fluid to discuss Fluid XPS, a user experience built to help the casual shopper decide on the best product choices during online retail interactions. We specifically discuss its origins as a product to assist outerwear retailer The North Face. In our conversation, we discuss their use of heat-sink algorithms and graph databases, challenges associated with staying on top of a constantly changing landscape, and more!

Today we’re joined by Kevin Tran, PhD student at Carnegie Mellon University. In our conversation, we explore the challenges surrounding the creation of renewable energy fuel cells, which is discussed in his recent Nature paper “Active learning across intermetallics to guide discovery of electrocatalysts for CO2 reduction and H2 evolution.” The AI Conference is returning to New York in April and we have one FREE conference pass for a lucky listener! Visit twimlai.com/ainygiveaway to enter!

Today we’re joined by Aydogan Ozcan, Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at UCLA, exploring his group's research into the intersection of deep learning and optics, holography and computational imaging. We specifically look at a really interesting project to create all-optical neural networks which work based on diffraction, where the printed pixels of the network are analogous to neurons. We also explore practical applications for their research and other areas of interest.

Today we’re joined by Hema Raghavan and Scott Meyer of LinkedIn to discuss the graph database and machine learning systems that power LinkedIn features such as “People You May Know” and second-degree connections. Hema shares her insight into the motivations for LinkedIn’s use of graph-based models and some of the challenges surrounding using graphical models at LinkedIn’s scale, while Scott details his work on the software used at the company to support its biggest graph databases.

Today we conclude our Black in AI series with Sicelukwanda Zwane, a masters student at the University of Witwatersrand and graduate research assistant at the CSIR, who presented on “Safer Exploration in Deep Reinforcement Learning using Action Priors” at the workshop. In our conversation, we discuss what “safer exploration” means in this sense, the difference between this work and other techniques like imitation learning, and how this fits in with the goal of “lifelong learning.”

In the inaugural TWiML Live, Sam Charrington is joined by Amanda Askell (OpenAI), Anima Anandkumar (NVIDIA/CalTech), Miles Brundage (OpenAI), Robert Munro (Lilt), and Stephen Merity to discuss the controversial recent release of the OpenAI GPT-2 Language Model. We cover the basics like what language models are and why they’re important, and why this announcement caused such a stir, and dig deep into why the lack of a full release of the model raised concerns for so many.