

Practical AI
Practical AI LLC
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!
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!
Episodes
Mentioned books

Mar 4, 2019 • 51min
Staving off disaster through AI safety research
While covering Applied Machine Learning Days in Switzerland, Chris met El Mahdi El Mhamdi by chance, and was fascinated with his work doing AI safety research at EPFL. El Mahdi agreed to come on the show to share his research into the vulnerabilities in machine learning that bad actors can take advantage of. We cover everything from poisoned data sets and hacked machines to AI-generated propaganda and fake news, so grab your James Bond 007 kit from Q Branch, and join us for this important conversation on the dark side of artificial intelligence.
Join the discussionChangelog++ members support our work, get closer to the metal, and make the ads disappear. Join today!Sponsors: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 move fast and fix things because of Rollbar. Resolve errors in minutes. Deploy 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.
Featuring:El Mahdi El Mhamdi – Website, XChris Benson – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, XShow Notes:
El Mahdi El Mhamdi on LinkedIn
Google Scholar
Personal blog
World Health Organization | Ten threats to global health in 2019
AggregaThor
The Hidden Vulnerability of Distributed Learning in Byzantium
Machine Learning with Adversaries: Byzantine Tolerant Gradient Descent
Asynchronous Byzantine Machine Learning (the case of SGD)
Something missing or broken? PRs welcome!

Feb 25, 2019 • 41min
OpenAI's new "dangerous" GPT-2 language model
This week we discuss GPT-2, a new transformer-based language model from OpenAI that has everyone talking. It’s capable of generating incredibly realistic text, and the AI community has lots of concerns about potential malicious applications. We help you understand GPT-2 and we discuss ethical concerns, responsible release of AI research, and resources that we have found useful in learning about language models.
Join the discussionChangelog++ members support our work, get closer to the metal, and make the ads disappear. Join today!Sponsors: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 move fast and fix things because of Rollbar. Resolve errors in minutes. Deploy 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.
Featuring:Chris Benson – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, XDaniel Whitenack – Website, GitHub, XShow Notes:Relevant learning resources:
Jay Alammar “Illustrated” blog articles:
The illustrated transformer
The illustrated BERT, elmo, and co
Machine Learning Explained blog:
An In-Depth Tutorial to AllenNLP (From Basics to ELMo and BERT)
Paper Dissected: “BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding” Explained
References/notes:
GPT-2 blog post from OpenAI
GPT-2 Paper
GPT-2 GitHub Repo
GPT-2 PyTorch implementation
Episode 22 of Practical AI about BERT
OpenAI’s GPT-2: the model, the hype, and the controversy (towardsdatascience)
The AI Text Generator That’s Too Dangerous to Make Public (Wired)
Transformer paper
Preparing for malicious uses of AI (OpenAI blog)
Something missing or broken? PRs welcome!

Feb 20, 2019 • 38min
AI for social good at Intel
While at Applied Machine Learning Days in Lausanne, Switzerland, Chris had an inspiring conversation with Anna Bethke, Head of AI for Social Good at Intel. Anna reveals how she started the AI for Social Good program at Intel, and goes on to share the positive impact this program has had - from stopping animal poachers, to helping the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children. Through this AI for Social Good program, Intel clearly demonstrates how a for-profit business can effectively use AI to make the world a better place for us all.
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 move fast and fix things because of Rollbar. Resolve errors in minutes. Deploy 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
Algolia – Our search partner. Algolia’s full suite search APIs enable teams to develop unique search and discovery experiences across all platforms and devices. We’re using Algolia to power our site search here at Changelog.com. Get started for free and learn more at algolia.com.
Featuring:Anna Bethke – LinkedIn, XChris Benson – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, XShow Notes:
AI for Social Good at Intel
National Center for Missing & Exploited Children
Data for Democracy
Data Kind
Delta Analytics
Driven Data
Partnership on AI
Tech Jobs for Good
Applied Machine Learning Days
Something missing or broken? PRs welcome!

Feb 13, 2019 • 41min
GirlsCoding.org empowers young women to embrace computer science
Chris sat down with Marta Martinez-Cámara and Miranda Kreković to learn how GirlsCoding.org is inspiring 9–16-year-old girls to learn about computer science. The site is successfully empowering young women to recognize computer science as a valid career choice through hands-on workshops, role models, and by smashing prevalent gender stereotypes. This is an episode that you’ll want to listen to with your daughter!
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 move fast and fix things because of Rollbar. Resolve errors in minutes. Deploy 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
Algolia – Our search partner. Algolia’s full suite search APIs enable teams to develop unique search and discovery experiences across all platforms and devices. We’re using Algolia to power our site search here at Changelog.com. Get started for free and learn more at algolia.com.
Featuring:Marta Martinez-Cámara – WebsiteMiranda Kreković – WebsiteChris Benson – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, XShow Notes:
GirlsCoding.org
GirlsCoding.org on Twitter
GirlsCoding.org on LinkedIn
GirlsCoding on Facebook
GirlsCoding.org at Applied Machine Learning Days
Applied Machine Learning Days
École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne
Something missing or broken? PRs welcome!

Feb 4, 2019 • 45min
How Microsoft is using AI to help the Earth
Chris caught up with Jennifer Marsman, Principal Engineer on the AI for Earth team at Microsoft, right before her speech at Applied Machine Learning Days 2019 in Lausanne, Switzerland. She relayed how the team came into being, what they do, and some of the good deeds they have done for Mother Earth. They are giving away $50 million (US) in grants over five years! It was another excellent example of AI for good!
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 move fast and fix things because of Rollbar. Resolve errors in minutes. Deploy 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
Algolia – Our search partner. Algolia’s full suite search APIs enable teams to develop unique search and discovery experiences across all platforms and devices. We’re using Algolia to power our site search here at Changelog.com. Get started for free and learn more at algolia.com.
Featuring:Jennifer Marsman – GitHub, XChris Benson – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, XShow Notes:
Jennifer Marsman’s blog
AI for Earth
Project Premonition (mosquitos/genomics)
FarmBeats (agriculture)
Wildbook (recognizing individual animals) #1
Wildbook (recognizing individual animals) #2
Repository of data sets
Microsoft Green Twitter
Something missing or broken? PRs welcome!

Jan 28, 2019 • 36min
New year’s resolution: dive into deep learning!
Fully Connected – a series where Chris and Daniel keep you up to date with everything that’s happening in the AI community.
If you’re anything like us, your New Year’s resolutions probably included an AI section, so this week we explore some of the learning resources available for artificial intelligence and deep learning. Where you go with it depends upon what you want to achieve, so we discuss academic versus industry career paths, and try to set you on the Practical AI path that will help you level up.
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 move fast and fix things because of Rollbar. Resolve errors in minutes. Deploy 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
Algolia – Our search partner. Algolia’s full suite search APIs enable teams to develop unique search and discovery experiences across all platforms and devices. We’re using Algolia to power our site search here at Changelog.com. Get started for free and learn more at algolia.com.
Featuring:Chris Benson – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, XDaniel Whitenack – Website, GitHub, XShow Notes:Courses
Amazon Machine Learning with AWS
Google Machine Learning Crash Course with TensorFlow APIs
Microsoft Professional Program for Artificial Intelligence
Coursera / deeplearning.ai
NVIDIA Deep Learning Institute
Google, Amazon, Microsoft: How do their free machine-learning courses compare?
Stanford Machine Learning Videos on YouTube
Books
“Deep Learning” by Ian Goodfellow, Yoshua Bengio, and Aaron Courville
“Natural Language Processing with PyTorch” by Delip Rao and Brian McMahan
“Machine Learning With Go” by Daniel Whitenack and Janani Selvaraj
(Daniel is too humble to put his own book in this list, so Chris inserted it above without Daniel’s knowledge - because it’s a damn fine book!)
Hybrid resources
Machine learning with TensorFlow crash course
Intro to deep learning with PyTorch
Spinning Up in Deep RL
Meetups
PyData
Atlanta Deep Learning Meetup
Something missing or broken? PRs welcome!

Jan 21, 2019 • 42min
IBM's AI for detecting neurological state
Ajay Royyuru and Guillermo Cecchi from IBM Healthcare join Chris and Daniel to discuss the emerging field of computational psychiatry. They talk about how researchers at IBM are applying AI to measure mental and neurological health based on speech, and they give us their perspectives on things like bias in healthcare data, AI augmentation for doctors, and encodings of language structure.
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
Algolia – Our search partner. Algolia’s full suite search APIs enable teams to develop unique search and discovery experiences across all platforms and devices. We’re using Algolia to power our site search here at Changelog.com. Get started for free and learn more at algolia.com.
Featuring:Ajay Royyuru – WebsiteGuillermo Cecchi – Chris Benson – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, XDaniel Whitenack – Website, GitHub, XShow Notes:
IBM 5 in 5: With AI, our words will be a window into our mental health
Predicting Cognitive Impairments with a Mobile Application
Automated analysis of recent-onset and prodromal schizophrenia
Prediction of psychosis across protocols and risk cohorts using automated language analysis
Something missing or broken? PRs welcome!

Jan 14, 2019 • 42min
2018 in review and bold predictions for 2019
Fully Connected – a series where Chris and Daniel keep you up to date with everything that’s happening in the AI community.
This week we look back at 2018 - from the GDPR and the Cambridge Analytica scandal, to advances in natural language processing and new open source tools. Then we offer our predications for what we expect in the year ahead, touching on just about everything in the world of AI.
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
Algolia – Our search partner. Algolia’s full suite search APIs enable teams to develop unique search and discovery experiences across all platforms and devices. We’re using Algolia to power our site search here at Changelog.com. Get started for free and learn more at algolia.com.
Featuring:Chris Benson – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, XDaniel Whitenack – Website, GitHub, XShow Notes:2018 in Review
Focus on more challenging ML problems
Semi-supervised learning
Domain adaptation
Generative models
Reinforcement learning
NLP
ELMO
BERT
Fear about AI
GDPR, trust and privacy
Cambridge analytica
Facial recognition
Tons of open sourced tooling, models
Predictions for 2019
Focus on trust and transparency
Bias
Regulation
GDPR and transparency, interpretability
What will other countries do regarding regulation?
AI for good
Better voice and conversational results
AI assistants
Voice interfaces
NLP advances
More focus on product development, less on research
Deep learning will explode in production product / service development
Computer vision, NLP, speech recognition will be table stakes
Increased accessibility of DL to software engineers / developers
More testing/tooling
Better training for data scientists
Better integrations and infrastructure
AutoML
Organizational / Cultural Shifts
New roles for data-based leadership - CDO, CAIO, etc.,
Strategy - AI becoming first-class concern
Competitive Analysis - AI and data assessments mandatory
Fragmentation into distinct subfields - AI, analytics, data science, prognostics
A changing relationship between humans and automation
AI + robotics - first steps
Pervasive AI + IoT - first steps
The importance of creative expertise for humans
How to school your child today to prep for tomorrow
Narrowly-scoped, highly-specific job functions at most risk
Something missing or broken? PRs welcome!

Dec 17, 2018 • 41min
Finding success with AI in the enterprise
Susan Etlinger, an Industry Analyst at Altimeter, a Prophet company, joins us to discuss The AI Maturity Playbook: Five Pillars of Enterprise Success. This playbook covers trends affecting AI, and offers a maturity model that practitioners can use within their own organizations - addressing everything from strategy and product development, to culture and ethics.
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
Algolia – Our search partner. Algolia’s full suite search APIs enable teams to develop unique search and discovery experiences across all platforms and devices. We’re using Algolia to power our site search here at Changelog.com. Get started for free and learn more at algolia.com.
Featuring:Susan Etlinger – XChris Benson – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, XDaniel Whitenack – Website, GitHub, XShow Notes:
Machine Learning for fair decisions
Bias examples - programmer, black male
Increasing Trust in AI Services through Supplier’s Declarations of Conformity
Introducing AI Fairness 360
The AI Maturity Playbook: Five Pillars of Enterprise Success
AI Now - Algorithmic Impact Assessments: A Practical Framework for Public Agency Accountability
Amazon’s Facial Recognition Wrongly Identifies 28 Lawmakers, A.C.L.U. Says
General Data Protection Regulation
Something missing or broken? PRs welcome!

Dec 10, 2018 • 40min
So you have an AI model, now what?
Fully Connected – a series where Chris and Daniel keep you up to date with everything that’s happening in the AI community.
This week we discuss all things inference, which involves utilizing an already trained AI model and integrating it into the software stack. First, we focus on some new hardware from Amazon for inference and NVIDIA’s open sourcing of TensorRT for GPU-optimized inference. Then we talk about performing inference at the edge and in the browser with things like the recently announced ONNX JS.
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:
NVIDIA’s open sourcing of TensorRT
Amazon launches a machine learning chip
The recently announced ONNX JS project
Snapdragon Neural Processing Engine SDK
Learning resources:
Rise of the model servers
TensorRT server tutorial
ONNX JS on GitHub
TensorFlow JS tutorials
Something missing or broken? PRs welcome!


