
Data Skeptic
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.
Latest episodes

May 25, 2019 • 25min
Neural Turing Machines
Kyle and Linh Da discuss the concepts behind the neural Turing machine.

May 18, 2019 • 30min
Data Infrastructure in the Cloud
Kyle chats with Rohan Kumar about hyperscale, data at the edge, and a variety of other trends in data engineering in the cloud.

May 11, 2019 • 24min
NCAA Predictions on Spark
In this episode, Kyle interviews Laura Edell at MS Build 2019. The conversation covers a number of topics, notably her NCAA Final 4 prediction model.

May 3, 2019 • 15min
The Transformer
Kyle and Linhda discuss attention and the transformer - an encoder/decoder architecture that extends the basic ideas of vector embeddings like word2vec into a more contextual use case.

Apr 26, 2019 • 25min
Mapping Dialects with Twitter Data
When users on Twitter post with geographic tags, it creates the opportunity for a variety of interesting questions to be posed having to do with language, dialects, and location. In this episode, Kyle interviews Bruno Gonçalves about his work studying language in this way.

Apr 20, 2019 • 27min
Sentiment Analysis
This is an interview with Ellen Loeshelle, Director of Product Management at Clarabridge. We primarily discuss sentiment analysis.

Apr 13, 2019 • 15min
Attention Primer
A gentle introduction to the very high-level idea of "attention" in machine learning, as it will play a major role in some upcoming episodes over the next few weeks.

Apr 5, 2019 • 25min
Cross-lingual Short-text Matching
Modern messaging technology has facilitated a trend towards highly compact, short messages send by users who can presume a great amount of context held between the communicating parties. The rules of grammar may be discarded and often visible errors are a normal part of the conversation. >>> Good mornink >>> morning Yet such short messages are also important for businesses whose users are unlikely to read a large block of text upon completing an order. Similarly, a business might want to offer assistance and effective question and answering solutions in an automated and ideally multi-lingual way. In this episode, we discuss techniques for designing solutions like that.

Mar 29, 2019 • 24min
ELMo
ELMo (Embeddings from Language Models) introduced the idea of deep contextualized word representations. It extends previous ideas like word2vec and GloVe. The ELMo model is a neural network able to map natural language into a vector space. This vector space, out of box, proved to be incredibly useful in a wide variety of seemingly unrelated NLP tasks like sentiment analysis and name entity recognition.

Mar 23, 2019 • 42min
BLEU
Bilingual evaluation understudy (or BLEU) is a metric for evaluating the quality of machine translation using human translation as examples of acceptable quality results. This metric has become a widely used standard in the research literature. But is it the perfect measure of quality of machine translation?