Data Skeptic

Kyle sits down with Jen Stirrup to inquire about her experiences helping companies deploy data science solutions in a variety of different settings.

Video annotation is an expensive and time-consuming process. As a consequence, the available video datasets are useful but small. The availability of machine transcribed explainer videos offers a unique opportunity to rapidly develop a useful, if dirty, corpus of videos that are "self annotating", as hosts explain the actions they are taking on the screen. This episode is a discussion of the HowTo100m dataset - a project which has assembled a video corpus of 136M video clips with captions covering 23k activities. Related Links The paper will be presented at ICCV 2019 @antoine77340 Antoine on Github Antoine's homepage

Kyle provides a non-technical overview of why Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT) is a powerful tool for natural language processing projects.

Prasanth Pulavarthi, Product Management Lead at Microsoft for AI frameworks, dives into the transformative ONNX format for deep learning models. He discusses how ONNX promotes model interoperability across various frameworks like TensorFlow and PyTorch, making tech accessible for all. Prasanth highlights the challenges of deploying models like BERT and the efficiencies of Protocol Buffers. He also shares the benefits of using ONNX Runtime for optimizing performance, containerization with Docker, and enhancing deployment flexibility.

Kyle and Linhda discuss some high level theory of mind and overview the concept machine learning concept of catastrophic forgetting.

Sebastian Ruder is a research scientist at DeepMind.  In this episode, he joins us to discuss the state of the art in transfer learning and his contributions to it.

In 2017, Facebook published a paper called Deal or No Deal? End-to-End Learning for Negotiation Dialogues. In this research, the reinforcement learning agents developed a mechanism of communication (which could be called a language) that made them able to optimize their scores in the negotiation game. Many media sources reported this as if it were a first step towards Skynet taking over. In this episode, Kyle discusses bargaining agents and the actual results of this research.

Priyanka Biswas joins us in this episode to discuss natural language processing for languages that do not have as many resources as those that are more commonly studied such as English.  Successful NLP projects benefit from the availability of like large corpora, well-annotated corpora, software libraries, and pre-trained models.  For languages that researchers have not paid as much attention to, these tools are not always available.

Kyle and Linh Da discuss the class of approaches called "Named Entity Recognition" or NER.  NER algorithms take any string as input and return a list of "entities" - specific facts and agents in the text along with a classification of the type (e.g. person, date, place).

USC students from the CAIS++ student organization have created a variety of novel projects under the mission statement of "artificial intelligence for social good". In this episode, Kyle interviews Zane and Leena about the Endangered Languages Project.