
Practical AI
Making artificial intelligence practical, productive & accessible to everyone. Practical AI is a show in which technology professionals, business people, students, enthusiasts, and expert guests engage in lively discussions about Artificial Intelligence and related topics (Machine Learning, Deep Learning, Neural Networks, GANs, MLOps, AIOps, LLMs & more).
The focus is on productive implementations and real-world scenarios that are accessible to everyone. If you want to keep up with the latest advances in AI, while keeping one foot in the real world, then this is the show for you!
Latest episodes

Nov 19, 2018 • 29min
UBER and Intel’s Machine Learning platforms
We recently met up with Cormac Brick (Intel) and Mike Del Balso (Uber) at O’Reilly AI in SF. As the director of machine intelligence in Intel’s Movidius group, Cormac is an expert in porting deep learning models to all sorts of embedded devices (cameras, robots, drones, etc.). He helped us understand some of the techniques for developing portable networks to maximize performance on different compute architectures.
In our discussion with Mike, we talked about the ins and outs of Michelangelo, Uber’s machine learning platform, which he manages. He also described why it was necessary for Uber to build out a machine learning platform and some of the new features they are exploring.
Join the discussionChangelog++ members support our work, get closer to the metal, and make the ads disappear. Join today!Sponsors:DigitalOcean – DigitalOcean is simplicity at scale. Whether your business is running one virtual machine or ten thousand, DigitalOcean gets out of your way so your team can build, deploy, and scale faster and more efficiently. New accounts get $100 in credit to use in your first 60 days.
Fastly – Our bandwidth partner. Fastly powers fast, secure, and scalable digital experiences. Move beyond your content delivery network to their powerful edge cloud platform. Learn more at fastly.com.
Rollbar – We catch our errors before our users do because of Rollbar. Resolve errors in minutes, and deploy your code with confidence. Learn more at rollbar.com/changelog.
Linode – Our cloud server of choice. Deploy a fast, efficient, native SSD cloud server for only $5/month. Get 4 months free using the code changelog2018. Start your server - head to linode.com/changelog
Featuring:Cormac Brick – Website, XMike Del Balso – WebsiteChris Benson – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, XDaniel Whitenack – Website, GitHub, XShow Notes:
Intel’s Movidius Group
OpenVINO Toolkit
ngraph
Uber’s Michelangelo
Something missing or broken? PRs welcome!

Nov 12, 2018 • 44min
Analyzing AI's impact on society through art and film
Brett Gaylor joins Chris and Daniel to chat about the recently announced winners of Mozilla’s creative media awards, which focuses on exposing the impact of AI on society. These winners include a film that responds to the audience (via AI recognized emotions) and an interesting chatbot called Wanda.
Join the discussionChangelog++ members support our work, get closer to the metal, and make the ads disappear. Join today!Sponsors:DigitalOcean – DigitalOcean is simplicity at scale. Whether your business is running one virtual machine or ten thousand, DigitalOcean gets out of your way so your team can build, deploy, and scale faster and more efficiently. New accounts get $100 in credit to use in your first 60 days.
Fastly – Our bandwidth partner. Fastly powers fast, secure, and scalable digital experiences. Move beyond your content delivery network to their powerful edge cloud platform. Learn more at fastly.com.
Rollbar – We catch our errors before our users do because of Rollbar. Resolve errors in minutes, and deploy your code with confidence. Learn more at rollbar.com/changelog.
Linode – Our cloud server of choice. Deploy a fast, efficient, native SSD cloud server for only $5/month. Get 4 months free using the code changelog2018. Start your server - head to linode.com/changelog
Featuring:Brett Gaylor – Website, XChris Benson – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, XDaniel Whitenack – Website, GitHub, XShow Notes:
Winners of the Creative Media Awards
Do not track movie
The Science behind Cambridge Analytica
Mozilla manifesto
Machine bias article from ProPublica
Practical AI episode from Lindsey Zuloaga about bias
Something missing or broken? PRs welcome!

Nov 5, 2018 • 30min
Getting into data science and AI
Himani Agrawal joins Daniel and Chris to talk about how she got into data science and artificial intelligence, and offers advice to others getting into these fields. She goes on to describe the role of artificial intelligence and machine learning within AT&T and telecom in general.
Join the discussionChangelog++ members support our work, get closer to the metal, and make the ads disappear. Join today!Sponsors:DigitalOcean – DigitalOcean is simplicity at scale. Whether your business is running one virtual machine or ten thousand, DigitalOcean gets out of your way so your team can build, deploy, and scale faster and more efficiently. New accounts get $100 in credit to use in your first 60 days.
Fastly – Our bandwidth partner. Fastly powers fast, secure, and scalable digital experiences. Move beyond your content delivery network to their powerful edge cloud platform. Learn more at fastly.com.
Rollbar – We catch our errors before our users do because of Rollbar. Resolve errors in minutes, and deploy your code with confidence. Learn more at rollbar.com/changelog.
Linode – Our cloud server of choice. Deploy a fast, efficient, native SSD cloud server for only $5/month. Get 4 months free using the code changelog2018. Start your server - head to linode.com/changelog
Featuring:Himani Agrawal – Website, GitHubChris Benson – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, XDaniel Whitenack – Website, GitHub, XShow Notes:
MLConf SF
Grace Hopper Celebration
Galvanize
Fast.ai
Thinkful bootcamp
Magenta project
Something missing or broken? PRs welcome!

Oct 31, 2018 • 35min
AIs that look human and create portraits of humans
In this new and updates show, Daniel and Chris discuss, among other things, efforts to use AI in art and efforts to make AI interfaces look human. They also discuss some learning resources related to neural nets, AI fairness, and reinforcement learning.
Join the discussionChangelog++ members support our work, get closer to the metal, and make the ads disappear. Join today!Sponsors:DigitalOcean – DigitalOcean is simplicity at scale. Whether your business is running one virtual machine or ten thousand, DigitalOcean gets out of your way so your team can build, deploy, and scale faster and more efficiently. New accounts get $100 in credit to use in your first 60 days.
Fastly – Our bandwidth partner. Fastly powers fast, secure, and scalable digital experiences. Move beyond your content delivery network to their powerful edge cloud platform. Learn more at fastly.com.
Rollbar – We catch our errors before our users do because of Rollbar. Resolve errors in minutes, and deploy your code with confidence. Learn more at rollbar.com/changelog.
Linode – Our cloud server of choice. Deploy a fast, efficient, native SSD cloud server for only $5/month. Get 4 months free using the code changelog2018. Start your server - head to linode.com/changelog
Featuring:Chris Benson – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, XDaniel Whitenack – Website, GitHub, XShow Notes:News from Daniel:
AI portrait up for auction
Graph ML related things:
Deepmind Graphnet library
Knowledge Graphs and ML
Semantic Scholar
CSV conf
News from Chris:
Magic Leap’s new AI assistant looks alarmingly human
MIT Stephen A. Schwarzman College of Computing
Deep-learning algorithm identifies dense tissue in mammograms
Learning resources:
Neural network playground
IBM AI Fairness 360
Towards Data Science
Artificial Intelligence: What’s The Difference Between Deep Learning And Reinforcement Learning?
Something missing or broken? PRs welcome!

Oct 22, 2018 • 41min
Fighting bias in AI (and in hiring)
Lindsey Zuloaga joins us to discuss bias in hiring, bias in AI, and how we can fight bias in hiring with AI. Lindsey tells us about her experiences fighting bias at HireVue, where she is director of data science, and she gives some practical advice to AI practitioners about fairness in models and data.
Join the discussionChangelog++ members support our work, get closer to the metal, and make the ads disappear. Join today!Sponsors:DigitalOcean – DigitalOcean is simplicity at scale. Whether your business is running one virtual machine or ten thousand, DigitalOcean gets out of your way so your team can build, deploy, and scale faster and more efficiently. New accounts get $100 in credit to use in your first 60 days.
Fastly – Our bandwidth partner. Fastly powers fast, secure, and scalable digital experiences. Move beyond your content delivery network to their powerful edge cloud platform. Learn more at fastly.com.
Rollbar – We catch our errors before our users do because of Rollbar. Resolve errors in minutes, and deploy your code with confidence. Learn more at rollbar.com/changelog.
Linode – Our cloud server of choice. Deploy a fast, efficient, native SSD cloud server for only $5/month. Get 4 months free using the code changelog2018. Start your server - head to linode.com/changelog
Featuring:Lindsey Zuloaga – Website, XChris Benson – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, XDaniel Whitenack – Website, GitHub, XShow Notes:
Compas recidivism model
HireVue
IBM fairness 360
Attacking discrimination with smarter machine learning
Something missing or broken? PRs welcome!

Oct 15, 2018 • 44min
PyTorch 1.0 vs TensorFlow 2.0
Chris and Daniel are back together in another news/updates show. They discuss PyTorch v1.0, some disturbing uses of AI for tracking social credit, and learning resources to get you started with machine learning.
Join the discussionChangelog++ members support our work, get closer to the metal, and make the ads disappear. Join today!Sponsors:DigitalOcean – DigitalOcean is simplicity at scale. Whether your business is running one virtual machine or ten thousand, DigitalOcean gets out of your way so your team can build, deploy, and scale faster and more efficiently. New accounts get $100 in credit to use in your first 60 days.
Fastly – Our bandwidth partner. Fastly powers fast, secure, and scalable digital experiences. Move beyond your content delivery network to their powerful edge cloud platform. Learn more at fastly.com.
Rollbar – We catch our errors before our users do because of Rollbar. Resolve errors in minutes, and deploy your code with confidence. Learn more at rollbar.com/changelog.
Linode – Our cloud server of choice. Deploy a fast, efficient, native SSD cloud server for only $5/month. Get 4 months free using the code changelog2018. Start your server - head to linode.com/changelog
Featuring:Chris Benson – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, XDaniel Whitenack – Website, GitHub, XShow Notes:News from Daniel:
Introducing PyTorch across Google cloud
VentureBeat article about PyTorch v1.0
Google’s general recommended practices for AI
Deep learning made easier with transfer learning
Decision tree visualization
Anatomy of an AI system
It’s hacktoberfest!
Conference calls:
AMLD
O’Reilly AI NY
CPVR
News from Chris:
TensorFlow RoadMap, TensorFlow 2
Leave No Dark Corner
The 5 Steps To Build A Business’s Deep Learning Workflow
The Pentagon is investing $2 billion into artificial intelligence
Google Dataset Search
What do you get when you mix sugar water, 3D printing and deep learning?
Learning resources:
Udacity Machine Learning Course by GA Tech
Machine learning cheat sheets
Something missing or broken? PRs welcome!

Oct 8, 2018 • 45min
Artificial intelligence at NVIDIA
NVIDIA Chief Scientist Bill Dally joins Daniel Whitenack and Chris Benson for an in-depth conversation about ‘everything AI’ at NVIDIA. As the leader of NVIDIA Research, Bill schools us on GPUs, and then goes on to address everything from AI-enabled robots and self-driving vehicles, to new AI research innovations in algorithm development and model architectures. This episode is so packed with information, you may want to listen to it multiple times.
Join the discussionChangelog++ members support our work, get closer to the metal, and make the ads disappear. Join today!Sponsors:DigitalOcean – DigitalOcean is simplicity at scale. Whether your business is running one virtual machine or ten thousand, DigitalOcean gets out of your way so your team can build, deploy, and scale faster and more efficiently. New accounts get $100 in credit to use in your first 60 days.
Fastly – Our bandwidth partner. Fastly powers fast, secure, and scalable digital experiences. Move beyond your content delivery network to their powerful edge cloud platform. Learn more at fastly.com.
Rollbar – We catch our errors before our users do because of Rollbar. Resolve errors in minutes, and deploy your code with confidence. Learn more at rollbar.com/changelog.
Linode – Our cloud server of choice. Deploy a fast, efficient, native SSD cloud server for only $5/month. Get 4 months free using the code changelog2018. Start your server - head to linode.com/changelog
Featuring:Bill Dally – WebsiteChris Benson – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, XDaniel Whitenack – Website, GitHub, XShow Notes:
NVIDIA Research
NVIDIA Deep Learning Accelerator (NVDLA)
CUDA
AI-Powered Self-Driving Cars
Progressive GANs
Optical Flow and Deep Learning
TensorRT
Deep Learning Super Sampling
NVIDIA DGX2
NVSwitch and NVLink
NVIDIA Deep Learning Institute
Something missing or broken? PRs welcome!

Oct 1, 2018 • 33min
OpenAI, reinforcement learning, robots, safety
We met up with Wojciech Zaremba at the O’Reilly AI conference in SF. He took some time to talk to us about some of his recent research related to reinforcement learning and robots. We also discussed AI safety and the hype around OpenAI.
Join the discussionChangelog++ members support our work, get closer to the metal, and make the ads disappear. Join today!Sponsors:Fastly – Our bandwidth partner. Fastly powers fast, secure, and scalable digital experiences. Move beyond your content delivery network to their powerful edge cloud platform. Learn more at fastly.com.
Rollbar – We catch our errors before our users do because of Rollbar. Resolve errors in minutes, and deploy your code with confidence. Learn more at rollbar.com/changelog.
Linode – Our cloud server of choice. Deploy a fast, efficient, native SSD cloud server for only $5/month. Get 4 months free using the code changelog2018. Start your server - head to linode.com/changelog
Featuring:Wojciech Zaremba – Website, GitHub, XDaniel Whitenack – Website, GitHub, XShow Notes:
Woj’s talk at O’Reilly AI
OpenAI
OpenAI blog
The Dota playing team of AIs from OpenAI
Microsoft Tay Chatbot
Reinforcement learning Wikipedia
Berkeley course CS294-112 on Reinforcement learning. Includes pdf notes and YouTube videos of the lectures.
Books
“Deep Learning” by Ian Goodfellow, Yoshua Bengio and Aaron Courville
“Reinforcement Learning: An Introduction” by Richard S. Sutton and Andrew G. Barto
Something missing or broken? PRs welcome!

Sep 18, 2018 • 49min
Answering recent AI questions from Quora
An amazing panel of AI innovators joined us at the O’Reilly AI conference to answer the most pressing AI questions from Quora. We also discussed trends in the industry and some exciting new advances in FPGA hardware.
Join the discussionChangelog++ members support our work, get closer to the metal, and make the ads disappear. Join today!Sponsors:DigitalOcean – DigitalOcean is simplicity at scale. Whether your business is running one virtual machine or ten thousand, DigitalOcean gets out of your way so your team can build, deploy, and scale faster and more efficiently. New accounts get $100 in credit to use in your first 60 days.
Rollbar – We catch our errors before our users do because of Rollbar. Resolve errors in minutes, and deploy your code with confidence. Learn more at rollbar.com/changelog.
Fastly – Our bandwidth partner. Fastly powers fast, secure, and scalable digital experiences. Move beyond your content delivery network to their powerful edge cloud platform. Learn more at fastly.com.
Linode – Our cloud server of choice. Deploy a fast, efficient, native SSD cloud server for only $5/month. Get 4 months free using the code changelog2018. Start your server - head to linode.com/changelog
Featuring:Wes Jensen – WebsitePeter Ma – WebsiteDavid Ojika – XVinay Rao – Website, XOsamah Mohammed Ali – WebsiteDaniel Whitenack – Website, GitHub, XShow Notes:
Intel AI Academy
Intel DevCloud
Movidius Neural Compute Stick
Cloud AutoML
Google’s AutoML: Cutting Through the Hype
MLPerf
OpenVino, OpenCV SDK
Something missing or broken? PRs welcome!

Sep 3, 2018 • 21min
AI in healthcare, synthesizing dance moves, hardware acceleration
Chris and Daniel discuss new advances in AI research (including a creepy dancing video), how AI is creating opportunity for new chip startups, and uses of deep learning in healthcare. They also share some great learning resources, including one of Chris’s favorite online courses.
Join the discussionChangelog++ members support our work, get closer to the metal, and make the ads disappear. Join today!Sponsors:DigitalOcean – Enjoy CPU optimized droplets with dedicated hyper-threads from best in class Intel CPUs for all your machine learning and batch processing needs. Easily spin up a one-click Machine Learning and AI application image and get immediate access to Python3, R, Jupyter Notebook, TensorFlow, SciKit, and PyTorch. Our listeners get $100 in credit!
Fastly – Our bandwidth partner. Fastly powers fast, secure, and scalable digital experiences. Move beyond your content delivery network to their powerful edge cloud platform. Learn more at fastly.com.
Linode – Our cloud server of choice. Deploy a fast, efficient, native SSD cloud server for only $5/month. Get 4 months free using the code changelog2018. Start your server - head to linode.com/changelog
Rollbar – We catch our errors before our users do because of Rollbar. Resolve errors in minutes, and deploy your code with confidence. Learn more at rollbar.com/changelog.
Featuring:Chris Benson – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, XDaniel Whitenack – Website, GitHub, XShow Notes:News/Updates:
New seq2seq architecture without explicit encoder/decoder
Dancing video synthesis
O’Reilly AI SF
How AI is decommoditizing the chip industry
Johns Hopkins researchers use deep learning to combat pancreatic cancer
Artificial intelligence system designs drugs from scratch
Learning Resources:
Hands on ML books dataviz
Udemy - Complete Guide to TensorFlow for Deep Learning with Python
Books
“Hands-On Machine Learning” by Aurélien Géron
Something missing or broken? PRs welcome!