December 14, 2017
Mercedes Benz Machine Learning Research
This episode features an interview with Rigel Smiroldo recorded at NIPS 2017 in Long Beach California.  We discuss data privacy, machine learning use cases, model deployment, and end-to-end machine learning.View More
December 8, 2017
[MINI] Parallel Algorithms
When computers became commodity hardware and storage became incredibly cheap, we entered the era of so-call "big" data. Most definitions of big data will include something about not being able to process all the data on a single machine. Distributed computing is required for such large datasets.View More
December 1, 2017
Quantum Computing
In this week's episode, Scott Aaronson, a professor at the University of Texas at Austin, explains what a quantum computer is, various possible applications, the types of problems they are good at solving and much more. Kyle and Scott have a lively discussion about the capabilities and limits of quantum computers and computational complexity.View More
November 28, 2017
Azure Databricks
I sat down with Ali Ghodsi, CEO and found of Databricks, and John Chirapurath, GM for Data Platform Marketing at Microsoft related to the recent announcement of Azure Databricks.View More
November 24, 2017
[MINI] Exponential Time Algorithms
In this episode we discuss the complexity class of EXP-Time which contains algorithms which require $O(2^{p(n)})$ time to run.  In other words, the worst case runtime is exponential in some polynomial of the input size.  Problems in this class are even more difficult than problems in NP since you can't even verify a solution in polynomial time.View More
November 17, 2017
P vs NP
In this week's episode, host Kyle Polich interviews author Lance Fortnow about whether P will ever be equal to NP and solve all of life’s problems. Fortnow begins the discussion with the example question: Are there 100 people on Facebook who are all friends with each other? Even if you were an employee of Facebook and had access to all its data, answering this question naively would require checking more possibilities than any computer, now or in the future, could possibly do. The P/NP question asks whether there exists a more clever and faster algorithm that can answer this problem and others like it.View More
November 10, 2017
[MINI] Sudoku \in NP
Algorithms with similar runtimes are said to be in the same complexity class. That runtime is measured in the how many steps an algorithm takes relative to the input size.View More
November 3, 2017
The Computational Complexity of Machine Learning
In this episode, Professor Michael Kearns from the University of Pennsylvania joins host Kyle Polich to talk about the computational complexity of machine learning, complexity in game theory, and algorithmic fairness. Michael's doctoral thesis gave an early broad overview of computational learning theory, in which he emphasizes the mathematical study of efficient learning algorithms by machines or computational systems.View More
October 27, 2017
[MINI] Turing Machines
TMs are a model of computation at the heart of algorithmic analysis.  A Turing Machine has two components.  An infinitely long piece of tape (memory) with re-writable squares and a read/write head which is programmed to change it's state as it processes the input.  This exceptionally simple mechanical computer can compute anything that is intuitively computable, thus says the Church-Turing Thesis.View More
October 20, 2017
The Complexity of Learning Neural Networks
Over the past several years, we have seen many success stories in machine learning brought about by deep learning techniques. While the practical success of deep learning has been phenomenal, the formal guarantees have been lacking. Our current theoretical understanding of the many techniques that are central to the current ongoing big-data revolution is far from being sufficient for rigorous analysis, at best. In this episode of Data Skeptic, our host Kyle Polich welcomes guest John Wilmes, a mathematics post-doctoral researcher at Georgia Tech, to discuss the efficiency of neural network learning through complexity theory.View More
October 13, 2017
[MINI] Big Oh Analysis
How long an algorithm takes to run depends on many factors including implementation details and hardware.  However, the formal analysis of algorithms focuses on how they will perform in the worst case as the input size grows.  We refer to an algorithm's runtime as it's "O" which is a function of its input size "n".  For example, O(n) represents a linear algorithm - one that takes roughly twice as long to run if you double the input size.  In this episode, we discuss a few everyday examples of algorithmic analysis including sorting, search a shuffled deck of cards, and verifying if a grocery list was successfully completed.View More
October 6, 2017
Data science tools and other announcements from Ignite
In this episode, Microsoft's Corporate Vice President for Cloud Artificial Intelligence, Joseph Sirosh, joins host Kyle Polich to share some of the Microsoft's latest and most exciting innovations in AI development platforms. Last month, Microsoft launched a set of three powerful new capabilities in Azure Machine Learning for advanced developers to exploit big data, GPUs, data wrangling and container-based model deployment.View More
September 29, 2017
Generative AI for Content Creation
Last year, the film development and production company End Cue produced a short film, called Sunspring, that was entirely written by an artificial intelligence using neural networks. More specifically, it was authored by a recurrent neural network (RNN) called long short-term memory (LSTM). According to End Cue’s Chief Technical Officer, Deb Ray, the company has come a long way in improving the generative AI aspect of the bot. In this episode, Deb Ray joins host Kyle Polich to discuss how generative AI models are being applied in creative processes, such as screenwriting. Their discussion also explores how data science for analyzing development projects, such as financing and selecting scripts, as well as optimizing the content production process.View More
September 22, 2017
[MINI] One Shot Learning
One Shot Learning is the class of machine learning procedures that focuses learning something from a small number of examples.  This is in contrast to "traditional" machine learning which typically requires a very large training set to build a reasonable model.View More
September 15, 2017
Recommender Systems Live from FARCON 2017
Recommender systems play an important role in providing personalized content to online users. Yet, typical data mining techniques are not well suited for the unique challenges that recommender systems face. In this episode, host Kyle Polich joins Dr. Joseph Konstan from the University of Minnesota at a live recording at FARCON 2017 in Minneapolis to discuss recommender systems and how machine learning can create better user experiences. View More
September 8, 2017
[MINI] Long Short Term Memory
September 1, 2017
Zillow Zestimate
Zillow is a leading real estate information and home-related marketplace. We interviewed Andrew Martin, a data science Research Manager at Zillow, to learn more about how Zillow uses data science and big data to make real estate predictions.View More
August 25, 2017
Cardiologist Level Arrhythmia Detection with CNNs
Our guest Pranav Rajpurkar and his coauthored recently published Cardiologist-Level Arrhythmia Detection with Convolutional Neural Networks, a paper in which they demonstrate the use of Convolutional Neural Networks which outperform board certified cardiologists in detecting a wide range of heart arrhythmias from ECG data.View More
August 18, 2017
[MINI] Recurrent Neural Networks
RNNs are a class of deep learning models designed to capture sequential behavior.  An RNN trains a set of weights which depend not just on new input but also on the previous state of the neural network.  This directed cycle allows the training phase to find solutions which rely on the state at a previous time, thus giving the network a form of memory.  RNNs have been used effectively in language analysis, translation, speech recognition, and many other tasks.View More
August 11, 2017
Project Common Voice
Thanks to our sponsor Springboard.View More
August 4, 2017
[MINI] Bayesian Belief Networks
A Bayesian Belief Network is an acyclic directed graph composed of nodes that represent random variables and edges that imply a conditional dependence between them. It's an intuitive way of encoding your statistical knowledge about a system and is efficient to propagate belief updates throughout the network when new information is added.View More
July 28, 2017
pix2code
In this episode, Tony Beltramelli of UIzard Technologies joins our host, Kyle Polich, to talk about the ideas behind his latest app that can transform graphic design into functioning code, as well as his previous work on spying with wearables.View More
July 21, 2017
[MINI] Conditional Independence
In statistics, two random variables might depend on one another (for example, interest rates and new home purchases). We call this conditional dependence. An important related concept exists called conditional independence. This phrase describes situations in which two variables are independent of one another given some other variable.View More
July 14, 2017
Estimating Sheep Pain with Facial Recognition
Animals can't tell us when they're experiencing pain, so we have to rely on other cues to help treat their discomfort. But it is often difficult to tell how much an animal is suffering. The sheep, for instance, is the most inscrutable of animals. However, scientists have figured out a way to understand sheep facial expressions using artificial intelligence.View More
July 7, 2017
CosmosDB
This episode collects interviews from my recent trip to Microsoft Build where I had the opportunity to speak with Dharma Shukla and Syam Nair about the recently announced CosmosDB. CosmosDB is a globally consistent, distributed datastore that supports all the popular persistent storage formats (relational, key/value pair, document database, and graph) under a single streamlined API. The system provides tunable consistency, allowing the user to make choices about how consistency trade-offs are managed under the hood, if a consumer wants to go beyond the selected defaults.View More
June 30, 2017
This episode discusses the vanishing gradient - a problem that arises when training deep neural networks in which nearly all the gradients are very close to zero by the time back-propagation has reached the first hidden layer. This makes learning virtually impossible without some clever trick or improved methodology to help earlier layers begin to learn.View More
June 23, 2017
Doctor AI
hen faced with medical issues, would you want to be seen by a human or a machine? In this episode, guest Edward Choi, co-author of the study titled Doctor AI: Predicting Clinical Events via Recurrent Neural Network shares his thoughts. Edward presents his team’s efforts in developing a temporal model that can learn from human doctors based on their collective knowledge, i.e. the large amount of Electronic Health Record (EHR) data.View More
June 16, 2017
[MINI] Activation Functions
In a neural network, the output value of a neuron is almost always transformed in some way using a function. A trivial choice would be a linear transformation which can only scale the data. However, other transformations, like a step function allow for non-linear properties to be introduced.View More
June 9, 2017
MS Build 2017
This episode recaps the Microsoft Build Conference.  Kyle recently attended and shares some thoughts on cloud, databases, cognitive services, and artificial intelligence.  The episode includes interviews with Rohan Kumar and David Carmona.View More
June 2, 2017
[MINI] Max-pooling
Max-pooling is a procedure in a neural network which has several benefits. It performs dimensionality reduction by taking a collection of neurons and reducing them to a single value for future layers to receive as input. It can also prevent overfitting, since it takes a large set of inputs and admits only one value, making it harder to memorize the input. In this episode, we discuss the intuitive interpretation of max-pooling and why it's more common than mean-pooling or (theoretically) quartile-pooling.View More
May 26, 2017
Unsupervised Depth Perception
This episode is an interview with Tinghui Zhou.  In the recent paper "Unsupervised Learning of Depth and Ego-motion from Video", Tinghui and collaborators propose a deep learning architecture which is able to learn depth and pose information from unlabeled videos.  We discuss details of this project and its applications.View More
May 19, 2017
[MINI] Convolutional Neural Networks
CNNs are characterized by their use of a group of neurons typically referred to as a filter or kernel.  In image recognition, this kernel is repeated over the entire image.  In this way, CNNs may achieve the property of translational invariance - once trained to recognize certain things, changing the position of that thing in an image should not disrupt the CNN's ability to recognize it.  In this episode, we discuss a few high-level details of this important architecture.View More
May 12, 2017
Despite the success of GANs in imaging, one of its major drawbacks is the problem of 'mode collapse,' where the generator learns to produce samples with extremely low variety.View More
May 5, 2017
GANs are an unsupervised learning method involving two neural networks iteratively competing. The discriminator is a typical learning system. It attempts to develop the ability to recognize members of a certain class, such as all photos which have birds in them. The generator attempts to create false examples which the discriminator incorrectly classifies. In successive training rounds, the networks examine each and play a mini-max game of trying to harm the performance of the other.View More
April 28, 2017
Opinion Polls for Presidential Elections
Recently, we've seen opinion polls come under some skepticism.  But is that skepticism truly justified?  The recent Brexit referendum and US 2016 Presidential Election are examples where some claims the polls "got it wrong".  This episode explores this idea.View More
April 21, 2017
OpenHouse
No reliable, complete database cataloging home sales data at a transaction level is available for the average person to access. To a data scientist interesting in studying this data, our hands are complete tied. Opportunities like testing sociological theories, exploring economic impacts, study market forces, or simply research the value of an investment when buying a home are all blocked by the lack of easy access to this dataset. OpenHouse seeks to correct that by centralizing and standardizing all publicly available home sales transactional data. In this episode, we discuss the achievements of OpenHouse to date, and what plans exist for the future.View More
April 14, 2017
[MINI] GPU CPU
There's more than one type of computer processor. The central processing unit (CPU) is typically what one means when they say "processor". GPUs were introduced to be highly optimized for doing floating point computations in parallel. These types of operations were very useful for high end video games, but as it turns out, those same processors are extremely useful for machine learning. In this mini-episode we discuss why.View More
April 7, 2017
[MINI] Backpropagation
Backpropagation is a common algorithm for training a neural network.  It works by computing the gradient of each weight with respect to the overall error, and using stochastic gradient descent to iteratively fine tune the weights of the network.  In this episode, we compare this concept to finding a location on a map, marble maze games, and golf.View More
March 31, 2017
Data Science at Patreon
In this week's episode of Data Skeptic, host Kyle Polich talks with guest Maura Church, Patreon's data science manager. Patreon is a fast-growing crowdfunding platform that allows artists and creators of all kinds build their own subscription content service. The platform allows fans to become patrons of their favorite artists- an idea similar the Renaissance times, when musicians would rely on benefactors to become their patrons so they could make more art. At Patreon, Maura's data science team strives to provide creators with insight, information, and tools, so that creators can focus on what they do best-- making art.View More
March 24, 2017
[MINI] Feed Forward Neural Networks
Feed Forward Neural Networks In a feed forward neural network, neurons cannot form a cycle. In this episode, we explore how such a network would be able to represent three common logical operators: OR, AND, and XOR. The XOR operation is the interesting case.View More
March 17, 2017
In this Data Skeptic episode, Kyle is joined by guest Ruggiero Cavallo to discuss his latest efforts to mitigate the problems presented in this new world of online advertising. Working with his collaborators, Ruggiero reconsiders the search ad allocation and pricing problems from the ground up and redesigns a search ad selling system. He discusses a mechanism that optimizes an entire page of ads globally based on efficiency-maximizing search allocation and a novel technical approach to computing prices.View More
March 10, 2017
[MINI] The Perceptron
Today's episode overviews the perceptron algorithm. This rather simple approach is characterized by a few particular features. It updates its weights after seeing every example, rather than as a batch. It uses a step function as an activation function. It's only appropriate for linearly separable data, and it will converge to a solution if the data meets these criteria. Being a fairly simple algorithm, it can run very efficiently. Although we don't discuss it in this episode, multi-layer perceptron networks are what makes this technique most attractive.View More
March 3, 2017
The Data Refuge Project
DataRefuge is a public collaborative, grassroots effort around the United States in which scientists, researchers, computer scientists, librarians and other volunteers are working to download, save, and re-upload government data. The DataRefuge Project, which is led by the UPenn Program in Environmental Humanities and the Penn Libraries group at University of Pennsylvania, aims to foster resilience in an era of anthropogenic global climate change and raise awareness of how social and political events affect transparency.View More
February 24, 2017
[MINI] Automated Feature Engineering
If a CEO wants to know the state of their business, they ask their highest ranking executives. These executives, in turn, should know the state of the business through reports from their subordinates. This structure is roughly analogous to a process observed in deep learning, where each layer of the business reports up different types of observations, KPIs, and reports to be interpreted by the next layer of the business. In deep learning, this process can be thought of as automated feature engineering. DNNs built to recognize objects in images may learn structures that behave like edge detectors in the first hidden layer. Proceeding layers learn to compose more abstract features from lower level outputs. This episode explore that analogy in the context of automated feature engineering.View More
February 17, 2017
Big Data Tools and Trends
In this episode, I speak with Raghu Ramakrishnan, CTO for Data at Microsoft.  We discuss services, tools, and developments in the big data sphere as well as the underlying needs that drove these innovations.View More
February 10, 2017
[MINI] Primer on Deep Learning
In this episode, we talk about a high-level description of deep learning.  Kyle presents a simple game (pictured below), which is more of a puzzle really, to try and give  Linh Da the basic concept.View More
February 3, 2017
Data Provenance and Reproducibility with Pachyderm
Versioning isn't just for source code. Being able to track changes to data is critical for answering questions about data provenance, quality, and reproducibility. Daniel Whitenack joins me this week to talk about these concepts and share his work on Pachyderm. Pachyderm is an open source containerized data lake.View More
January 27, 2017
[MINI] Logistic Regression on Audio Data
Logistic Regression is a popular classification algorithm. In this episode we discuss how it can be used to determine if an audio clip represents one of two given speakers. It assumes an output variable (isLinhda) is a linear combination of available features, which are spectral bands in the discussion on this episode.View More
January 20, 2017
Studying Competition and Gender Through Chess
Prior work has shown that people's response to competition is in part predicted by their gender. Understanding why and when this occurs is important in areas such as labor market outcomes. A well structured study is challenging due to numerous confounding factors. Peter Backus and his colleagues have identified competitive chess as an ideal arena to study the topic. Find out why and what conclusions they reached.View More
January 13, 2017
[MINI] Dropout
Deep learning can be prone to overfit a given problem. This is especially frustrating given how much time and computational resources are often required to converge. One technique for fighting overfitting is to use dropout. Dropout is the method of randomly selecting some neurons in one's network to set to zero during iterations of learning. The core idea is that each particular input in a given layer is not always available and therefore not a signal that can be relied on too heavily.View More
January 6, 2017
The Police Data and the Data Driven Justice Initiatives
In this episode I speak with Clarence Wardell and Kelly Jin about their mutual service as part of the White House's Police Data Initiative and Data Driven Justice Initiative respectively.View More