Today we present the final episode in our AI for the Benefit of Society series, in which we’re joined by Mira Lane, Partner Director for Ethics and Society at Microsoft. Mira and I focus our conversation on the role of culture and human-centered design in AI. We discuss how Mira defines human-centered design, its connections to culture and responsible innovation, and how these ideas can be scalably implemented across large engineering organizations.

Hanna Wallach, Principal Researcher at Microsoft Research, discusses the impact of bias in machine learning, the challenges of deploying fair ML models, and the importance of transparency and interpretability. She highlights the need for diverse stakeholders and fair metrics in model training to address fairness challenges.

In this episode, we’re joined by Peter Lee, Corporate Vice President at Microsoft Research responsible for the company’s healthcare initiatives. Peter and I met back at Microsoft Ignite, where he gave me some really interesting takes on AI development in China, which is linked in the show notes. This conversation centers around impact areas Peter sees for AI in healthcare, namely diagnostics and therapeutics, tools, and the future of precision medicine.

Today, we're joined by Justice Amoh Jr., a Ph.D. student at Dartmouth’s Thayer School of Engineering. Justice presented his work on “An Optimized Recurrent Unit for Ultra-Low Power Acoustic Event Detection.” In our conversation, we discuss his goal of bringing low cost, high-efficiency wearables to market for monitoring asthma. We explore the challenges of using classical machine learning models on microcontrollers, and how he went about developing models optimized for constrained hardware environm

Today, we continue our Black in AI series with Alvin Grissom II, Assistant Professor of Computer Science at Ursinus College. In our conversation, we dive into the paper he presented at the workshop, “Pathologies of Neural Models Make Interpretations Difficult.” We talk through some of the “pathological behaviors” he identified in the paper, how we can better understand the overconfidence of trained deep learning models in certain settings, and how we can improve model training with entropy regulariz

Today we’re joined by Lucas Joppa, Chief Environmental Officer at Microsoft and Zach Parisa, Co-founder and president of Silvia Terra, a Microsoft AI for Earth grantee. In our conversation, we explore the ways that ML & AI can be used to advance our understanding of forests and other ecosystems, supporting conservation efforts. We discuss how Silvia Terra uses computer vision and data from a wide array of sensors, combined with AI, to yield more detailed estimates of the various species in our forests.

Today we’re joined by Wendy Chisholm, a principal accessibility architect at Microsoft, and one of the chief proponents of the AI for Accessibility program, which extends grants to AI-powered accessibility projects the areas of Employment, Daily Life, and Communication & Connection. In our conversation, we discuss the intersection of AI and accessibility, the lasting impact that innovation in AI can have for people with disabilities and society as a whole, and the importance of projects in this area.

Today we're joined by Justin Spelhaug, General Manager of Technology for Social Impact at Microsoft. In our conversation, we discuss the company’s efforts in AI for Humanitarian Action, covering Microsoft’s overall approach to technology for social impact, how his group helps mission-driven organizations best leverage technologies like AI, and how AI is being used at places like the World Bank, Operation Smile, and Mission Measurement to create greater impact.

Today, in the first episode of our Black in AI series, we’re joined by Randi Williams, PhD student at the MIT Media Lab. At the Black in AI workshop Randi presented her research on Popbots: A Early Childhood AI Curriculum, which is geared towards teaching preschoolers the fundamentals of artificial intelligence. In our conversation, we discuss the origins of the project, the three AI concepts that are taught in the program, and the goals that Randi hopes to accomplish with her work.

Today we’re joined by Tim Jurka, Head of Feed AI at LinkedIn. In our conversation, Tim describes the holistic optimization of the feed and we discuss some of the interesting technical and business challenges associated with trying to do this. We talk through some of the specific techniques used at LinkedIn like Multi-arm Bandits and Content Embeddings, and also jump into a really interesting discussion about organizing for machine learning at scale.