

Data Skeptic
Kyle Polich
The Data Skeptic Podcast features interviews and discussion of topics related to data science, statistics, machine learning, artificial intelligence and the like, all from the perspective of applying critical thinking and the scientific method to evaluate the veracity of claims and efficacy of approaches.
Episodes
Mentioned books

May 2, 2020 • 32min
Self-Explaining AI
Dan Elton joins us to discuss self-explaining AI. What could be better than an interpretable model? How about a model wich explains itself in a conversational way, engaging in a back and forth with the user. We discuss the paper Self-explaining AI as an alternative to interpretable AI which presents a framework for self-explainging AI.

Apr 24, 2020 • 35min
Plastic Bag Bans
Becca Taylor joins us to discuss her work studying the impact of plastic bag bans as published in Bag Leakage: The Effect of Disposable Carryout Bag Regulations on Unregulated Bags from the Journal of Environmental Economics and Management. How does one measure the impact of these bans? Are they achieving their intended goals? Join us and find out!

Apr 18, 2020 • 31min
Self Driving Cars and Pedestrians
We are joined by Arash Kalatian to discuss Decoding pedestrian and automated vehicle interactions using immersive virtual reality and interpretable deep learning.

Apr 10, 2020 • 26min
Computer Vision is Not Perfect
Computer Vision is not Perfect Julia Evans joins us help answer the question why do neural networks think a panda is a vulture. Kyle talks to Julia about her hands-on work fooling neural networks. Julia runs Wizard Zines which publishes works such as Your Linux Toolbox. You can find her on Twitter @b0rk

Apr 4, 2020 • 40min
Uncertainty Representations
Jessica Hullman joins us to share her expertise on data visualization and communication of data in the media. We discuss Jessica’s work on visualizing uncertainty, interviewing visualization designers on why they don't visualize uncertainty, and modeling interactions with visualizations as Bayesian updates. Homepage: http://users.eecs.northwestern.edu/~jhullman/ Lab: MU Collective

Mar 28, 2020 • 34min
AlphaGo, COVID-19 Contact Tracing and New Data Set
Announcing Journal Club I am pleased to announce Data Skeptic is launching a new spin-off show called "Journal Club" with similar themes but a very different format to the Data Skeptic everyone is used to. In Journal Club, we will have a regular panel and occasional guest panelists to discuss interesting news items and one featured journal article every week in a roundtable discussion. Each week, I'll be joined by Lan Guo and George Kemp for a discussion of interesting data science related news articles and a featured journal or pre-print article. We hope that this podcast will give listeners an introduction to the works we cover and how people discuss these works. Our topics will often coincide with the original Data Skeptic podcast's current Interpretability theme, but we have few rules right now or what we pick. We enjoy discussing these items with each other and we hope you will do. In the coming weeks, we will start opening up the guest chair more often to bring new voices to our discussion. After that we'll be looking for ways we can engage with our audience. Keep reading and thanks for listening! Kyle

Mar 20, 2020 • 33min
Visualizing Uncertainty

Mar 13, 2020 • 43min
Interpretability Tooling
Pramit Choudhary joins us to talk about the methodologies and tools used to assist with model interpretability.

Mar 6, 2020 • 20min
Shapley Values
Kyle and Linhda discuss how Shapley Values might be a good tool for determining what makes the cut for a home renovation.

Feb 28, 2020 • 37min
Anchors as Explanations
We welcome back Marco Tulio Ribeiro to discuss research he has done since our original discussion on LIME. In particular, we ask the question Are Red Roses Red? and discuss how Anchors provide high precision model-agnostic explanations. Please take our listener survey.