Talking Machines

In Episode 10 we talk with David Blei of Columbia University. We talk about his work on latent dirichlet allocation, topic models, the PhD program in data that he’s helping to create at Columbia and why exploring data is inherently multidisciplinary. We learn about Markov Chain Monte Carlo and take a listener question about how machine learning can make humans more creative.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In episode nine we talk with George Dahl, of  the University of Toronto, about his work on the Merck molecular activity challenge on kaggle and speech recognition. George recently successfully defended his thesis at the end of March 2015. (Congrats George!) We learn about how networks and graphs can help us understand latent properties of relationships, and we take a listener question about just how you find the right algorithm to solve a problem (Spoiler: start simple.)See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

On episode eight we talk with Charles Sutton, a professor in the School of Informatics University of Edinburgh about computer programming and using machine learning how to better understand how it’s done well. Ryan introduces us to collaborative filtering, a process that helps to make predictions about taste. Netflix and Amazon use it to recommend movies and items. It's the process that the Netflix Prize competition further helped to hone. Plus, we take a listener question on creativity in algorithms.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In episode seven of Talking Machines we talk with Zoubin Ghahramani, professor of Information Engineering in the Department of Engineering at the University of Cambridge. His project, The Automatic Statistician, aims to use machine learning to take raw data and give you statistical reports and natural languages summaries of what trends that data shows. We get really hungry exploring Bayesian Non-parametrics through the stories of the Chinese Restaurant Process and the Indian Buffet Process (but remember, there’s no free lunch). Plus we take a listener question about how much we should rely on ourselves and our ideas about what intelligence in electrified meat looks like when we try to build machine intelligences.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

We hear the second part of our conversation with with Geoffrey Hinton (Google and University of Toronto), Yoshua Bengio (University of Montreal) and Yann LeCun (Facebook and NYU). They talk with us about this history (and future) of research on neural nets. We explore how to use Determinantal Point Processes. Alex Kulesza  and Ben Taskar (who passed away recently) have done some really exciting work in this area, for more on DPPs check out their paper on the topic. Also, we take a listener question about machine learning and function approximation (spoiler alert: it is, and then again, it isn’t).See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In episode five of Talking Machines, we hear the first part of our conversation with Geoffrey Hinton (Google and University of Toronto), Yoshua Bengio (University of Montreal) and Yann LeCun (Facebook and NYU). Ryan introduces us to the ideas in tensor factorization methods for learning latent variable models (which is both a tongue twister and and one of the new tools in ML). To find out more on the topic, the paper Tensor decompositions for learning latent variable models is a good place to start. You can also take a look at the work of Daniel Hsu, Animashree Anandkumar and Sham M. Kakade Plus we take a listener question about just where statistics stops and machine learning begins.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In episode four we talk with Hanna Wallach, of Microsoft Research. She's also a professor in the Department of Computer Science, University of Massachusetts Amherst and one of the founders of Women in Machine Learning (better known as WiML). We take a listener question about scalability and the size of data sets. And Ryan takes us through topic modeling using Latent Dirichlet allocation (say that five times fast).See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

On episode three of Talking Machines we sit down with Kevin Murphy who is currently a research scientist at Google. We talk with him about the work he’s doing there on the Knowledge Vault, his textbook, Machine Learning: A Probabilistic Perspective (and its arch nemesis which we won’t link to), and how to learn about machine learning (Metacademy is a great place to start). We tackle a listener question about the dream of a one step solution to strong Artificial Intelligence and if Deep Neural Networks might be it. Plus, Ryan introduces us to a new way of thinking about questions in machine learning from Yoshua Bengio’s Lab at the University of Montreal out lined in their new paper, Identifying and attacking the saddle point problem in high-dimensional non-convex optimization, and Katherine brings up Facebook’s release of open source machine learning tools and we talk about what it might mean. If you want to explore some open source tools for machine learning we also recommend giving these a try:Super big list

Today on Talking Machines we hear from Google researcher Ilya Sutskever about his work, how he became interested in machine learning, and why it takes a little bit of magical thinking. We take your questions, and explore where the line between human programming and computer learning actually is. And we sift through some news from the field, Ryan explains the concepts behind one of the best papers  at NIPS this year, A * Sampling, and Katherine brings up an open letter about research priorities and ethical questions that was recently published.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In the first episode of Talking Machines we meet our hosts, Katherine Gorman (nerd, journalist) and Ryan Adams (nerd, Harvard computer science professor), and explore some of the interviews you'll be able to hear this season. Today we hear some short clips on big issues, we'll get technical, but today is all about introductions.We start with Kevin Murphy of Google talking about his textbook that has become a standard in the field. Then we turn to Hanna Wallach of Microsoft Research NYC and UMass Amherst and hear about the founding of WiML (Women in Machine Learning). Next we discuss academia's relationship with business with Max Welling from the University of Amsterdam, program co-chair of  the 2013 NIPS conference (Neural Information Processing Systems). Finally, we sit down with three pillars of the field Yann LeCun, Yoshua Bengio, and Geoff Hinton to hear about where the field has been and where it might be headed.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy f