Eye On A.I.

The Alexa Prize Socialbot Grand Challenge is a competition for university students to create a social bot that can converse coherently and engagingly with humans. This year's prize goes to the team from Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia. I speak with Prem Natarajan, vice president of natural understanding in the Alexa AI organization, about the prize, the evolution of conversational AI, its current challenges and its future promise

Qualcomm Technologies is powering the shift to fifth generation wireless communications, known as 5G. In this sponsored episode, I speak to two of the company's product managers leading the company's efforts to use AI to enhance 5G, reduce on-device power consumption, and give developers the tools necessary to make devices smarter and faster.

This week I speak to Lieutenant General Jack Shanahan, recently retired Director of the Pentagon's Joint Artificial Intelligence Center,or JAIC. He was instrumental in starting Project Maven to integrate state-of-the-art computer vision into drone technology. He then started the JAIC, the central hub for the military's AI efforts. Gen. Shanahan spoke about the challenges of nurturing innovation within a rigid and multilayered organization like the DOD and the threats the US faces ahead.

This week I speak to Stanford professor Fei-Fei Li, one of the people responsible for the current AI revolution. Fei-Fei talked about her early days running a New Jersey dry cleaner to finance her Princeton education, her creation of ImageNet, the world's first large labeled image data set, which allowed the validation of neural networks, and her latest work on ambient intelligence, which promises to transform elder care.

Pietro Perona, a professor at the California Institute of Technology, is one of the brains behind a pair of smartphone apps that help you do just that: eBird and iNaturalist. But simple as the apps are to use in identifying tens of thousands of species, the science behind them is complex. Gathering enough examples for each species to train a neural network is impossible, so much of Prof. Perona's work has been focused on making machines more efficient learners, requiring less training data.

In this week's episode, the last in a series of six, we talked to Eric Horvitz. Commissioner at the National Security Commission on AI and Chief Research Scientist at Microsoft, about the commission's recommendations to Congress about the need for training, standards and documentation to govern the application of AI in the national security space.

In this week's episode, we talk with NSCAI Commissioner Gilman Louie about line of effort's recommendations to Congress on how to maintain US leadership in AI hardware and 5G. He spoke about the need for a national microelectronic strategy and policies that would advance spectrum sharing for 5G to create a global alternative to the Chinese telecommunications giant Huawei.

NSCAI Commissioner Jason Matheny talks about his line of effort regarding cooperation on AI with key allies and partners. He spoke about his group's recommendations that the government establish a senior national security point of contact for AI and convene a multilateral working group for AI collaboration and interoperability - as well as the need for AI war games.

In the third episode of six episodes looking at the National Security Commission on AI 's first quarter recommendations to Congress, we speak with Katharina McFarland, a former Assistant Secretary of Defense for Acquisition, about the commission's recommendation that the Department of Defense and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence establish a steering committee on emerging technology to ensure that AI for national security gets top priority in the years ahead.

In this week's episode, we speak to Jose-Marie Griffiths, a commissioner on the National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence, about the commission's recommendations on how to strengthen the federal government's AI workforce. The recommendations focused on raising understanding of AI within the government and the need to streamline government hiring practices in order to attract and retain talent.