Data Skeptic

Last year, the film development and production company End Cue produced a short film, called Sunspring, that was entirely written by an artificial intelligence using neural networks. More specifically, it was authored by a recurrent neural network (RNN) called long short-term memory (LSTM). According to End Cue’s Chief Technical Officer, Deb Ray, the company has come a long way in improving the generative AI aspect of the bot. In this episode, Deb Ray joins host Kyle Polich to discuss how generative AI models are being applied in creative processes, such as screenwriting. Their discussion also explores how data science for analyzing development projects, such as financing and selecting scripts, as well as optimizing the content production process.

One Shot Learning is the class of machine learning procedures that focuses learning something from a small number of examples.  This is in contrast to "traditional" machine learning which typically requires a very large training set to build a reasonable model. In this episode, Kyle presents a coded message to Linhda who is able to recognize that many of these new symbols created are likely to be the same symbol, despite having extremely few examples of each.  Why can the human brain recognize a new symbol with relative ease while most machine learning algorithms require large training data?  We discuss some of the reasons why and approaches to One Shot Learning.

Recommender systems play an important role in providing personalized content to online users. Yet, typical data mining techniques are not well suited for the unique challenges that recommender systems face. In this episode, host Kyle Polich joins Dr. Joseph Konstan from the University of Minnesota at a live recording at FARCON 2017 in Minneapolis to discuss recommender systems and how machine learning can create better user experiences. 

Thanks to our sponsor brilliant.org/dataskeptics A Long Short Term Memory (LSTM) is a neural unit, often used in Recurrent Neural Network (RNN) which attempts to provide the network the capacity to store information for longer periods of time. An LSTM unit remembers values for either long or short time periods. The key to this ability is that it uses no activation function within its recurrent components. Thus, the stored value is not iteratively modified and the gradient does not tend to vanish when trained with backpropagation through time.

Zillow is a leading real estate information and home-related marketplace. We interviewed Andrew Martin, a data science Research Manager at Zillow, to learn more about how Zillow uses data science and big data to make real estate predictions.

Our guest Pranav Rajpurkar and his coauthored recently published Cardiologist-Level Arrhythmia Detection with Convolutional Neural Networks, a paper in which they demonstrate the use of Convolutional Neural Networks which outperform board certified cardiologists in detecting a wide range of heart arrhythmias from ECG data.

RNNs are a class of deep learning models designed to capture sequential behavior.  An RNN trains a set of weights which depend not just on new input but also on the previous state of the neural network.  This directed cycle allows the training phase to find solutions which rely on the state at a previous time, thus giving the network a form of memory.  RNNs have been used effectively in language analysis, translation, speech recognition, and many other tasks.

Thanks to our sponsor Springboard. In this week's episode, guest Andre Natal from Mozilla joins our host, Kyle Polich, to discuss a couple exciting new developments in open source speech recognition systems, which include Project Common Voice. In June 2017, Mozilla launched a new open source project, Common Voice, a novel complementary project to the TensorFlow-based DeepSpeech implementation. DeepSpeech is a deep learning-based voice recognition system that was designed by Baidu, which they describe in greater detail in their research paper. DeepSpeech is a speech-to-text engine, and Mozilla hopes that, in the future, they can use Common Voice data to train their DeepSpeech engine.

A Bayesian Belief Network is an acyclic directed graph composed of nodes that represent random variables and edges that imply a conditional dependence between them. It's an intuitive way of encoding your statistical knowledge about a system and is efficient to propagate belief updates throughout the network when new information is added.

In this episode, Tony Beltramelli of UIzard Technologies joins our host, Kyle Polich, to talk about the ideas behind his latest app that can transform graphic design into functioning code, as well as his previous work on spying with wearables.