Eye On A.I.

This week I talk to John Platt, a Distinguished Scientist at Google, about twin problems: finding cheap zero-carbon energy sources and mitigating global warming. John is a polymath, having discovered asteroids, helped put the touch in computer touchpads and even won an Academy Award for scientific and technical achievements in computer animation. Now, he is part of a growing movement of machine learning researchers tackling climate change.

This week we return to the world of thinking robots with Chelsea Finn, one of the youngest experts in the field, who talks about her journey, about her work in meta-learning and about lifelong learning for robots.

This week, we look at AI in India. With its massive population, fast-growing economy, English-language education and large supply of brilliant researchers and engineers, it should be competing with China and the U.S. for dominance in the space. But it is not. I talk to Partha Talukdar, a professor at the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore, about the challenges that have kept India from realizing its AI potential.

This week I talk to Yann Lecun, one of the brightest minds in machine learning today. Yann's work lies behind some of the most critical AI applications, most notably computer vision systems that power everything from face recognition software to self-driving cars. He recently won the Turing Award, the highest prize in computer science. We talked about Yann's first computer, about how music led him into computer science, and about his work on self-supervised learning, which he believes will take us to human-level intelligence in machines.

This week I talk to Trae Stephens and Brian Schimpf from Anduril Industries, an AI defense contractor, about the current state of AI research and deployment for national security, including how the US stacks up against China. We also talked about the resistance among US engineers to work on defense applications and whether that hobbles the US in the global AI arms race. 

This week, I talk to Ken Church, a pioneer in Natural Language Processing, whose use of statistical models on part of speech tagging revolutionized the field and is what makes automatic dictation and machine translation so popular today. We talked about his early days at MIT, about explainable AI and about how the Holy See played a role in his probabilistic approach to NLP.

This week, I talk to Sergey Levine, one of the most prolific researchers in robot learning. We talked about developing a robot’s sense of touch and about robot dreams and whether he believes we know what’s happening in the field in Russia and China. 

Thinking robots: that’s how much of the world envisions artificial intelligence and if there is one person on the planet who understands the limitations and promise of intelligence in robots, it's Pieter Abbeel, one of the world’s foremost experts on robotic learning systems. In this episode, Pieter talks about robot memories and the prospect of robots with personalities eventually assisting in the home. Listen and learn about your future.

This week I talk to the Bengio brothers, Samy and Yoshua, in their first interview together. Yoshua recently won the Turing Award with Geoff Hinton and Yann Lecun, while Samy leads a team of researchers at Google Brain. The brothers are well known to people who work in machine learning, but few know how intertwined their professional lives have been. They talked about their unconventional parents and their early collaboration on neural network research, as well as what they see as the challenges ahead.