Data Skeptic

Cat observes great apes in the wild and in the lab to crack the code of their gestural communication. We discussed the challenges and benefits of studying apes in the wild vs in the lab. Cat also shared how her lab identifies and studies ape gestures. It turns out that humans are pretty good at guessing what apes are trying to communicate with one another. Join us in this episode to learn more about the evolution of communication in great apes, and what we can learn from our closest relatives. 

In this episode, Kozzy discusses his endeavors to compare the cognitive abilities of humans, animals, and AI programs. Specifically, we discussed object permanence, the ability to understand an object still exists in space even when you can’t see it. Our conversation traverses both philosophical and practical questions surrounding AI evaluation. We also learned about Animal AI 3, a gaming environment developed in Unity where AI programs and humans can go head-to-head to solve different problems in a gaming environment.

Théo Michelot has made a career out of tackling tough ecological questions using time-series data. How do scientists turn a series of GPS location observations over time into useful behavioral data? GPS tech has improved to the point that modern data sets are large and complex. In this episode, Théo takes us through his research and the application of Hidden Markov Models to complex time series data. If you have ever wondered what biologists do with data from those GPS collars you have seen on TV, this is the episode for you! 

Brian Taylor shares his research on magnetoreception. Animals like birds and sea turtles use magnetoreception to use the Earth’s magnetic field for navigation, but it’s not a sense that’s well understood. Brian uses animal magnetoreception to engineer new ways to navigate the globe. Even cooler, he also takes hypotheses for how magnetoreception works in animals and uses computational simulations to digitally test them. Check out this episode to hear more about Brian’s research and learn more about this little known sensory ability. 

Modeling evolutionary processes goes way beyond the Hardy-Weinberg Equilibrium we all learned in biology class. Natural selection comes from many sources like resources availability, mate preferences, competition. Modeling entire populations of organisms of different species is the holy grail of digital evolution. Join our discussion with evolutionary biologist and software engineer Ben Haller to learn about his work on SLiM and how it helps other biologists model population genetics over time. 

It’s almost impossible to think about animal behavior without thinking of dogs! Our canine friends are a subspecies of wolf that has been co-evolving with us for tens of thousands of years. The transition from wolf to pet has required intense natural and artificial selection for behaviors that allow dogs to live alongside humans, but behavior is not so simple. Join us for a discussion with Dr. Jessica Hekman and learn about dog welfare, behavioral genetics, and the quest to understand the dogs in our lives. 

In this episode, we are joined by Barbara Webb and Anna Hadjitofi. Barbara runs the Insect Robotics lab at the University of Edinburgh, and Anna is a PhD student at the School of Informatics at the university. She is interested in studying and understanding the neural mechanism of the honeybee waggle dance. They join us to discuss the paper: Dynamic antennal positioning allows honeybee followers to decode the dance.

Many researchers and students have painstakingly labeled precise details about the body positions of the creatures they study. Can AI be used for this labeling? Of course it can! Today's episode discusses Social LEAP Estimates Animal Poses (SLEAP), a software solution to train AI to perform this tedious but important labeling work.

Our guest in this episode is Sebastien Motsch, an assistant professor at Arizona State University, working in the School of Mathematical and Statistical Science. He works on modeling self-organized biological systems to understand how complex patterns emerge.

Our guest in this episode is Ryan Hanscom. Ryan is a Ph.D. candidate in a joint doctoral evolution program at San Diego State University and the University of California, Riverside. He is a terrestrial ecologist with a focus on herpetology and mammalogy.  Ryan discussed how the behavior of rattlesnakes is studied in the natural world, particularly with an increase in temperature.

We are joined by Hank Schlinger, a professor of psychology at California State University, Los Angeles. His research revolves around theoretical issues in psychology and behavioral analysis.  Hank establishes that words have references and questions the reference for intelligence. He discussed how intelligence can be observed in animals. He also discussed how intelligence is measured in a given context.

On today’s episode, we are joined by Aimee Dunlap. Aimee is an assistant professor at the University of Missouri–St. Louis and the interim director at the Whitney R. Harris World Ecology Center.

Aimee discussed how animals perceive information and what they use it for. She discussed the connection between their environment and learning for decision-making. She also discussed the costs required for learning and factors that affect animal learning.

We are joined by Tamar Gutnick, a visiting professor at the University of Naples Federico II, Napoli, Italy. She studies the octopus nervous system and their behavior, focusing on cognition and learning behaviors.

Tamar gave a background to the kind of research she does — lab research. She discussed some challenges with observing octopuses in the lab. She discussed some patterns observed by the octopus lifestyle in a controlled setting.

Tamar discussed what they know about octopus intelligence. She discussed the octopus nervous system and why they are unique compared to other animals. She discussed how they measure the behavior of octopuses using a video recording and a logger to track brain activity.

Claire Hemmingway, an assistant professor in the Department of Psychology and Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville, is our guest today. Her research is on decision-making in animal cognition, focusing on neotropical bats and bumblebees.

Claire discussed how bumblebees make foraging decisions and how they communicate when foraging. She discussed how they set up experiments in the lab to address questions about bumblebees foraging. She also discussed some nuances between bees in the lab and those in the wild.

Claire discussed factors that drive an animal's foraging decisions. She explained the foraging theory and how a colony works together to optimize its foraging. She also touched on some irrational foraging behaviors she observed in her study.

Claire discussed some techniques bees use to learn from past behaviors. She discussed the effect of climate change on foraging bees' learning behavior.

Claire discussed how bats respond to calling frogs when foraging. She also spoke about choice overload in that they make detrimental decisions when loaded with too many options.

On today’s show, we are joined by our co-host, Becky Hansis-O’Neil. Becky is a Ph.D. student at the University of Missouri, St Louis, where she studies bumblebees and tarantulas to understand their learning and cognitive work.

She joins us to discuss the paper: Perception in Chess. The paper aimed to understand how chess players perceive the positions of chess pieces on a chess board. She discussed the findings paper. She spoke about situations where grandmasters had better recall of chess positions than beginners and situations where they did not.

Becky and Kyle discussed the use of chess engines for cheating. They also discussed how chess players use chunking. Becky discussed some approaches to studying chess cognition, including eye tracking, EEG, and MRI. 

## Paper in Focus

Perception in chess

## Resources

Detecting Cheating in Chess with Ken Regan

On this episode, we are joined by Stephen Larson, the CEO of MetaCell and an affiliate of the OpenWorm foundation. Stephen discussed what the Openworm project is about. They hope to use a digital C. elegans nematode (C. elegans for short) to study the basics of life.

Stephen discussed why C. elegans is an ideal organism for studying life in the lab. He also discussed the steps involved in simulating a digital organism. He mentioned the constraints on the cellular scale that informed their development of a digital C. elegans.

Stephen discussed the validation process of the simulation. He discussed how they discovered the best parameters to capture the behavior of natural C. elegans. He also discussed how biologists embraced the project.

Stephen discussed the computational requirements for improving the simulation parameters of the model and the kind of data they require to scale up. Stephen discussed some findings that the machine-learning communities can take away from the project. He also mentioned how students can get involved in the Openworm project. Rounding up, he shared future plans for the project.

Our guest is Becky Hansis-O’Neil, a Ph.D. student at the University of Missouri, St Louis, and our co-host for the new "Animal Intelligence" season. Becky shares her background on how she got into the field of behavioral intelligence and biology.

Kyle is joined by friends and former guests Pramit Choudhary and Frank Bell to have an open discussion of the impacts LLMs and machine learning have had in the past year on industry, and where things may go in the current year.

We are joined by Darren McKee, a Policy Advisor and the host of Reality Check — a critical thinking podcast. Darren gave a background about himself and how he got into the AI space.

Darren shared his thoughts on AGI's achievements in the coming years. He defined AGI and discussed how to differentiate an AGI system. He also shared whether AI needs consciousness to be AGI.

Darren discussed his worry about AI surpassing human understanding of the universe and potentially causing harm to humanity. He also shared examples of how AI is already used for nefarious purposes. He explored whether AI possesses inherently evil intentions and gave his thoughts on regulating AI.

It took a massive financial investment for the first large language models (LLMs) to be created.  Did their corporate backers lock these tools away for all but the richest?  No.  They provided comodity priced API options for using them.  Anyone can talk to Chat GPT or Bing.  What if you want to go a step beyond that and do something programatic?  Kyle explores your options in this episode.

We celebrate episode 1000000000 with some Q&A from host Kyle Polich.  We boil this episode down to four key questions:

1) How do you find guests

2) What is Data Skeptic all about?

3) What is Kyle all about?

4) What are Kyle's thoughts on AGI?

Thanks to our sponsorsdataannotation.tech/programmers https://www.webai.com/dataskeptic

In this episode, we are joined by Amir Netz, a Technical Fellow at Microsoft and the CTO of Microsoft Fabric. He discusses how companies can use Microsoft's latest tools for business intelligence.

Amir started by discussing how business intelligence has progressed in relevance over the years. Amir gave a brief introduction into what Power BI and Fabric are. He also discussed how Fabric distinguishes from other BI tools by building an end-to-end tool for the data journey.

Amir spoke about the process of building and deploying machine learning models with Microsoft Fabric. He shared the difference between Software as a Service (SaaS) and Platform as a Service (PaaS).

Amir discussed the benefits of Fabric's auto-integration and auto-optimization abilities. He also discussed the capabilities of Copilot in Fabric. He also discussed exciting future developments planned for Fabric. Amir shared techniques for limiting Copilot hallucination.

Our guest today is Eric Boyd, the Corporate Vice President of AI at Microsoft. Eric joins us to share how organizations can leverage AI for faster development.

Eric shared the benefits of using natural language to build products. He discussed the future of version control and the level of AI background required to get started with Azure AI. He mentioned some foundational models in Azure AI and their capabilities. Follow Eric on LinkedIn to learn more about his work.

Visit today's sponsor at https://webai.com/dataskeptic

We are excited to be joined by Aaron Reich and Priyanka Shah. Aaron is the CTO at Avanade, while Priyanka leads their AI/IoT offering for the SEA Region. Priyanka is also the MVP for Microsoft AI. They join us to discuss how LLMs are deployed in organizations.

In this episode, we are joined by Jenny Liang, a PhD student at Carnegie Mellon University, where she studies the usability of code generation tools. She discusses her recent survey on the usability of AI programming assistants.

Jenny discussed the method she used to gather people to complete her survey. She also shared some questions in her survey alongside vital takeaways. She shared the major reasons for developers not wanting to us code-generation tools. She stressed that the code-generation tools might access the software developers' in-house code, which is intellectual property.

Learn more about Jenny Liang via https://jennyliang.me/

We are joined by Aman Madaan and Shuyan Zhou. They are both PhD students at the Language Technology Institute at Carnegie Mellon University. They join us to discuss their latest published paper, PAL: Program-aided Language Models.

Aman and Shuyan started by sharing how the application of LLMs has evolved. They talked about the performance of LLMs on arithmetic tasks in contrast to coding tasks. Aman introduced their PAL model and how it helps LLMs improve at arithmetic tasks. He shared examples of the tasks PAL was tested on. Shuyan discussed how PAL’s performance was evaluated using Big Bench hard tasks.

They discussed the kind of mistakes LLMs tend to make and how the PAL’s model circumvents these limitations. They also discussed how these developments in LLMS can improve kids learning.

Rounding up, Aman discussed the CoCoGen project, a project that enables NLP tasks to be converted to graphs. Shuyan and Aman shared their next research steps.

Follow Shuyan on Twitter @shuyanzhxyc. Follow Aman on @aman_madaan.

In this episode, we have Alessio Buscemi, a software engineer at Lifeware SA. Alessio was a post-doctoral researcher at the University of Luxembourg. He joins us to discuss his paper, A Comparative Study of Code Generation using ChatGPT 3.5 across 10 Programming Languages.  Alessio shared his thoughts on whether ChatGPT is a threat to software engineers. He discussed how LLMs can help software engineers become more efficient.

On the show today, we are joined by Jianan Zhao, a Computer Science student at Mila and the University of Montreal. His research focus is on graph databases and natural language processing. He joins us to discuss how to use graphs with LLMs efficiently.

Today, we are joined by Rajiv Movva, a PhD student in Computer Science at Cornell Tech University. His research interest lies in the intersection of responsible AI and computational social science. He joins to discuss the findings of this work that analyzed LLM publication patterns.

He shared the dataset he used for the survey. He also discussed the conditions for determining the papers to analyze. Rajiv shared some of the trends he observed from his analysis. For one, he observed there has been an increase in LLMs research. He also shared the proportions of papers published by universities, organizations, and industry leaders in LLMs such as OpenAI and Google. He mentioned the majority of the papers are centered on the social impact of LLMs. He also discussed other exciting application of LLMs such as in education.

We are excited to be joined by Josh Albrecht, the CTO of Imbue. Imbue is a research company whose mission is to create AI agents that are more robust, safer, and easier to use. He joins us to share findings of his work; Despite "super-human" performance, current LLMs are unsuited for decisions about ethics and safety.

On today’s show, we are joined by Thilo Hagendorff, a Research Group Leader of Ethics of Generative AI at the University of Stuttgart. He joins us to discuss his research, Deception Abilities Emerged in Large Language Models.

Thilo discussed how machine psychology is useful in machine learning tasks. He shared examples of cognitive tasks that LLMs have improved at solving. He shared his thoughts on whether there’s a ceiling to the tasks ML can solve.

Nieves Montes, a Ph.D. student at the Artificial Intelligence Research Institute in Barcelona, Spain, joins us. Her PhD research revolves around value-based reasoning in relation to norms. She shares her latest study, Combining theory of mind and abductive reasoning in agent‑oriented programming.

We are joined by Maximilian Mozes, a PhD student at the University College, London. His PhD research focuses on Natural Language Processing (NLP), particularly the intersection of adversarial machine learning and NLP. He joins us to discuss his latest research, Use of LLMs for Illicit Purposes: Threats, Prevention Measures, and Vulnerabilities.

Our guest today is Vid Kocijan, a Machine Learning Engineer at Kumo AI. Vid has a Ph.D. in Computer Science at the University of Oxford. His research focused on common sense reasoning, pre-training in LLMs, pretraining in knowledge-based completion, and how these pre-trainings impact societal bias. He joins us to discuss how he built a BERT model that solved the Winograd Schema Challenge.

Today, We are joined by Petter Törnberg, an Assistant Professor in Computational Social Science at the University of Amsterdam and a Senior Researcher at the University of Neuchatel. His research is centered on the intersection of computational methods and their applications in social sciences. He joins us to discuss findings from his research papers, ChatGPT-4 Outperforms Experts and Crowd Workers in Annotating Political Twitter Messages with Zero-Shot Learning, and How to use LLMs for Text Analysis.

In this episode, we are joined by Carlos Hernández Oliván, a Ph.D. student at the University of Zaragoza. Carlos’s interest focuses on building new models for symbolic music generation.

Carlos shared his thoughts on whether these models are genuinely creative. He revealed situations where AI-generated music can pass the Turing test. He also shared some essential considerations when constructing models for music composition.

Hongyi Wang, a Senior Researcher at the Machine Learning Department at Carnegie Mellon University, joins us. His research is in the intersection of systems and machine learning. He discussed his research paper, Cuttlefish: Low-Rank Model Training without All the Tuning, on today’s show.

Hogyi started by sharing his thoughts on whether developers need to learn how to fine-tune models. He then spoke about the need to optimize the training of ML models, especially as these models grow bigger. He discussed how data centers have the hardware to train these large models but not the community. He then spoke about the Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRa) technique and where it is used.

Hongyi discussed the Cuttlefish model and how it edges LoRa. He shared the use cases of Cattlefish and who should use it. Rounding up, he gave his advice on how people can get into the machine learning field. He also shared his future research ideas.

On today’s episode, we have Daniel Rock, an Assistant Professor of Operations Information and Decisions at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. Daniel’s research focuses on the economics of AI and ML, specifically how digital technologies are changing the economy.

Daniel discussed how AI has disrupted the job market in the past years. He also explained that it had created more winners than losers.

Daniel spoke about the empirical study he and his coauthors did to quantify the threat LLMs pose to professionals. He shared how they used the O-NET dataset and the BLS occupational employment survey to measure the impact of LLMs on different professions. Using the radiology profession as an example, he listed tasks that LLMs could assume.

Daniel broadly highlighted professions that are most and least exposed to LLMs proliferation. He also spoke about the risks of LLMs and his thoughts on implementing policies for regulating LLMs.

We are excited to be joined by J.D. Zamfirescu-Pereira, a Ph.D. student at UC Berkeley. He focuses on the intersection of human-computer interaction (HCI) and artificial intelligence (AI). He joins us to share his work in his paper, Why Johnny can’t prompt: how non-AI experts try (and fail) to design LLM prompts.  The discussion also explores lessons learned and achievements related to BotDesigner, a tool for creating chat bots.

In this episode, we are joined by Ryan Liu, a Computer Science graduate of Carnegie Mellon University. Ryan will begin his Ph.D. program at Princeton University this fall. His Ph.D. will focus on the intersection of large language models and how humans think. Ryan joins us to discuss his research titled "ReviewerGPT? An Exploratory Study on Using Large Language Models for Paper Reviewing"

The creators of large language models impose restrictions on some of the types of requests one might make of them.  LLMs commonly refuse to give advice on committing crimes, producting adult content, or respond with any details about a variety of sensitive subjects.  As with any content filtering system, you have false positives and false negatives.

Today's interview with Max Reuter and William Schulze discusses their paper "I'm Afraid I Can't Do That: Predicting Prompt Refusal in Black-Box Generative Language Models".  In this work, they explore what types of prompts get refused and build a machine learning classifier adept at predicting if a particular prompt will be refused or not.

Our guest today is Maciej Świechowski. Maciej is affiliated with QED Software and QED Games. He has a Ph.D. in Systems Research from the Polish Academy of Sciences. Maciej joins us to discuss findings from his study, Deep Learning and Artificial General Intelligence: Still a Long Way to Go.

Today on the show, we are joined by Lin Zhao and Lu Zhang. Lin is a Senior Research Scientist at United Imaging Intelligence, while Lu is a Ph.D. candidate at the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Texas. They both shared findings from their work When Brain-inspired AI Meets AGI.

Lin and Lu began by discussing the connections between the brain and neural networks. They mentioned the similarities as well as the differences. They also shared whether there is a possibility for solid advancements in neural networks to the point of AGI. They shared how understanding the brain more can help drive robust artificial intelligence systems.

Lin and Lu shared how the brain inspired popular machine learning algorithms like transformers. They also shared how AI models can learn alignment from the human brain. They juxtaposed the low energy usage of the brain compared to high-end computers and whether computers can become more energy efficient.

On today’s show, we are joined by Michael Timothy Bennett, a Ph.D. student at the Australian National University. Michael’s research is centered around Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), specifically the mathematical formalism of AGIs. He joins us to discuss findings from his study, Computable Artificial General Intelligence.

We are joined by Koen Holtman, an independent AI researcher focusing on AI safety. Koen is the Founder of Holtman Systems Research, a research company based in the Netherlands.

Koen started the conversation with his take on an AI apocalypse in the coming years. He discussed the obedience problem with AI models and the safe form of obedience.

Koen explained the concept of Markov Decision Process (MDP) and how it is used to build machine learning models.

Koen spoke about the problem of AGIs not being able to allow changing their utility function after the model is deployed. He shared another alternative approach to solving the problem. He shared how to engineer AGI systems now and in the future safely. He also spoke about how to implement safety layers on AI models.

Koen discussed the ultimate goal of a safe AI system and how to check that an AI system is indeed safe. He discussed the intersection between large language Models (LLMs) and MDPs. He shared the key ingredients to scale the current AI implementations.

An assistant professor of Psychology at Harvard University, Tomer Ullman, joins us. Tomer discussed the theory of mind and whether machines can indeed pass it. Using variations of the Sally-Anne test and the Smarties tube test, he explained how LLMs could fail the theory of mind test.

The application of LLMs cuts across various industries. Today, we are joined by Steven Van Vaerenbergh, who discussed the application of AI in mathematics education. He discussed how AI tools have changed the landscape of solving mathematical problems. He also shared LLMs' current strengths and weaknesses in solving math problems.

Fabricio Goes, a Lecturer in Creative Computing at the University of Leicester, joins us today. Fabricio discussed what creativity entails and how to evaluate jokes with LLMs. He specifically shared the process of evaluating jokes with GPT-3 and GPT-4. He concluded with his thoughts on the future of LLMs for creative tasks.

Barry Smith and Jobst Landgrebe, authors of the book “Why Machines will never Rule the World,” join us today. They discussed the limitations of AI systems in today’s world. They also shared elaborate reasons AI will struggle to attain the level of human intelligence.

While the possibilities with AGI emergence seem great, it also calls for safety concerns. On the show, Vahid Behzadan, an Assistant Professor of Computer Science and Data Science, joins us to discuss the complexities of modeling AGIs to accurately achieve objective functions. He touched on tangent issues such as abstractions during training, the problem of unpredictability, communications among agents, and so on.

Julian Michael, a postdoc at the Center for Data Science, New York University, joins us today. Julian’s conversation with Kyle was centered on the NLP community metasurvey: a survey aimed at understanding expert opinions on controversial NLP issues. He shared the process of preparing the survey as well as some shocking results.

Kyle shares his own perspectives on challenges getting insight from surveys. The discussion ranges from commentary on the market research industry to specific advice for detecting disingenuous or fraudulent responses and filtering them from your analysis. Finally, he shares some quick thoughts on the usage of the Chi-Square test for interpreting cross tab results in survey analysis.

Jeff Jones, a Senior Editor at Gallup, joins us today. His conversation with Kyle spanned a range of topics on Gallup’s poll creation process. He discussed how Gallup generates unbiased questionnaires, gets respondents, analyzes results, and everything in between.

Gireeja Ranade, a University of California at Berkeley professor, speaks with us today. She presented her study on implementing inclusive study groups at scale and shared the observed student performance improvements after the intervention.

Today, we are joined by David Bourget. David is an Associate Professor in Philosophy at Western University in London, Ontario. David is also the co-director of the PhilPapers Foundation and Director of the Center for Digital Philosophy. He joins us to discuss the PhilPapers Survey project.

The PhilPapers survey was initially taken in 2009, but there was a follow-up survey in 2020. David discussed the need for the subsequent survey and what changed. He mentioned the metric for measuring the opinion changes between the 2009 and 2020 surveys. He also shared future plans for the PhilPapers surveys.

Today’s show focused on an essential part of surveys — missing values. This is typically caused by a low response rate or non-response from respondents. Yajuan Si is a Research Associate Professor at the Survey Research Center at the University of Michigan. She joins us to discuss dealing with bias from low survey response rates.

We are joined by two guests today, Mariah, a Ph.D. student in the CORE Robotics Lab at Georgia Tech, and Matthew Gombolay, the Director of the CORE Robotics Lab. They both discuss practices for measuring a respondent’s perception in a survey.

Ever wondered what your next career would be? Today, Keyon Vafa, a computer science Ph.D. student at Columbia University, joins us to discuss his latest research on developing a machine-learning model for career prediction. Keyon extensively spoke about how the model was developed and the possibilities it brings.

Noura Insolera, a Research Investigator with the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID), joins us to share how PSID conducts longitudinal household surveys. She also shared some interesting findings from their data exploration, particularly on the observation and trends in food insecurity.

Susan Gerbic joins Kyle to review some of the surveys Data Skeptic has launch, draft a new survey about podcast listening habits, and then review the results of that survey. You can see those results at the link below.

https://survey.dataskeptic.com/survey/result/1675102237053

Watch the videos Susan mentioned on her Youtube page at the link below.

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL7VAuaQDhPTVaLeI1IcpYph5lH19xA1u4

The use of social bots to fill out online surveys is becoming prevalent. Today, we speak with Sara Bybee, a postdoctoral research scholar at the University of Utah. Sara shares from her research, how she detected social bots, the strategies to curb them, and how underrepresented groups can be more represented in surveys.

Our guest today is Zoltán Kekecs, a Ph.D. holder in Behavioural Science. Zoltán highlights the problem of low replicability in journal papers and illustrates how researchers can better ensure complete replication of their research and findings. He used Bem’s experiment as an example, extensively talking about his methodology and results.

On the show, Iñigo Martinez, a Ph.D. student at the University of Navarra shares his survey results which investigated how data practitioners perform data science projects. He revealed the methodologies typically used by data practitioners and the success factors in data science projects.

On the show today, Dino Carpentras, a post-doctoral researcher at the Computational Social Science group at ETH Zürich joins us to discuss how opinion dynamics models are built and validated. He explained how quantifying opinions is complex, and strategies to develop robust models for measuring and predicting public opinions.

Crafting survey questions is one thing but getting your audience to fill it is yet another. On the show today, we speak with Alexander Nolte, an Associate Professor at the University of Tartu. Alexander discussed the use of Casual Affective Triggers (CAT) to incentivize people to accept survey invitations and improve the completion rate. He revealed the impact of CATs on survey response rates from a study he conducted.

Traditional surveys have straight-jacket questions to be answered, thus restricting the information that can be gotten. Today, Ziang Xiao, a Postdoc Researcher in the FATE group at Microsoft Research Montréal, talks about conversational surveys, a type of survey that asks questions based on preceding answers. He discussed the benefits of conversational surveys and some of the challenges it poses.

Today, Jenny Tang, a Ph.D. student of societal computing at Carnegie Mellon University discusses her work on the generalization of privacy and security surveys on platforms such as Amazon MTurk and Prolific. Jenny shared the drawbacks of using such online platforms, the discrepancies observed about the samples drawn, and key insights from her results.

This episode kicks off the new season of the show, Data Skeptic: Surveys.  Linhda rejoins the show for a conversation with Kyle about her experience taking surveys and what questions she has for the season.  Lastly, Kyle announces the launch of survey.dataskeptic.com, a new site we're launching to gather your opinions.  Please take a moment and share your thoughts!

It may be intuitive to think crowdfunding a project drives its innovation and novelty, but there are no empirical studies that prove this. On the show, Johannes Wachs shares his research that sought to determine whether crowdfunding truly drives innovation. He used board games as a case study and shared the results he found.

There were reports of Russia’s interference in the 2016 US elections. In today’s episode, Koustuv Saha, a researcher at Microsoft Research walks us through the effect of targeted ads for political campaigns. Using practical examples, he discusses how targeted ads can propagate fake news, its ripple effects on electioneering, and how to find a sweet spot with targeted ads.

There is an unsung kind of ad fraud brewing in the ad tech space — placement laundering fraud. On the show, Jeff Kline discusses what placement laundering fraud is, how it can be identified, and possible solutions to it. Listen to learn more.

Bosko Milekic, the Co-founder of Optable, a data collaboration platform for the media and advertising industry, joins us today. Bosko talked about the clean rooms, the technology driving data privacy during collaboration. He discussed why clean rooms are gaining widespread adoption, and how users can exploit Optable’s clean room platform for a secured data-sharing experience.

Kerstin Bongard-Blanchy is a Research Associate at the University of Luxembourg. She joins us to discuss her study that investigated dark patterns in web designs. She discussed the results, the effect of dark patterns effect on users, whether an average user can detect them, and the way forward to a more ethical web space.

We are joined by Anthony Katsur, the CEO of IAB Tech Lab. Anthony discusses standards within the ad tech industry. He explained how IAB Tech Lab set and propagates global standards, actions to ensure compliance from advertisers, and industry trends for a more privacy-centric ad tech space.

When we navigate a webpage, it is fairly easy for our mouse movement to be tracked and collected. Today, Luis Leiva, a Professor of Computer Science discusses how these mouse tracking data can be used to predict age, gender and user attention. He also discusses the privacy concerns with mouse tracking data and possible ways it can be curtailed.

On the show, Aleksandra Urman and Mykola Makhortykh join us to discuss their work on the comparative analysis of web search behavior using web tracking data. They shared interesting results from their analysis, bordering around the user preferences for search engines, demographic patterns, and differences between how men and women surf the net.

Did Aristotle Use a Laptop?  That's a question from the StrategyQA benchmark which highlights the stretch goals for current artificial intelligence systems.  Answering a question like that requires several cognitive steps and reasoning.  Constructing a dataset of similarly challenging questions is a major undertaking.  On today's episode, Mor Geva returns to share details about the creation of StrategyQA and the larger Big Bench dataset it has been included in.

While at first glance, the use of ad blockers drops the revenue of news publishers, this may not be completely true. On the show today, Shunyao Yan, an Assistant Professor in Marketing at Leavey School of Business, Santa Clara University, discussed the effect of ad blockers on news consumption and how ad blockers can potentially be helpful for news publishers.

People who do not want their data tracked and shared online can pay a token for a cookie paywall. But are the websites keeping to their side of the bargain? Victor Morel, a Postdoc candidate at the Chalmers University of Technology joins us to discuss his work around auditing the activities of cookie paywalls. He discussed the findings from his analysis and proffers some solutions to making cookie paywalls more transparent.

The advancement of generative language models has been a force for good, but also for evil. On the show, Avisha Das, a post-doctoral scholar at the University of Texas Health Center, joins us to discuss how attackers use machine learning to create unsuspecting phishing emails. She also discussed how she used RNN for automated email generation, with the goal of defeating statistical detectors. 

Peter Gloor, a Research Scientist at the MIT Center for Collective Intelligence, takes us on a new world of tribe classification. He extensively discussed the need for such classification on the internet and how he built a machine learning model that does it. Listen to find out more!

We hear about the impeccable achievements of GPT-3 models, but such large generative models come with their bias. On the show today, Conrad Borchers, a Ph.D. student in Human-Computer Interaction, joins us to discuss the bias in GPT-3 for job ads and how such large models can be de-biased. Listen to learn more!

Moses Guttman from Clear ML joins us to share insights about how organizations leveraging machine learning keep their programs on track.  While many parallels exist between the software development life cycle (SWLC) and the machine learning development life cycle, successful deployments of ML in production have demonstrated that a unique set of tools is required.  Moses and I discuss the emergence of ML Ops, success stories, and how modern teams leverage tools like Clear ML's open source solution to maximize the value of ML in the organization.

Data sharing in the ad tech space has largely been a black box system. While it is obvious the data is being collected, the data sharing process is obscure to users. On the show today, Maaz Bin Musa and Rishab, both researchers at the University of Iowa, speak about the importance of data transparency and their tool, ATOM for data transparency. Listen to find out how ATOM uncovers data-sharing relationships in the ad-tech space.

When you accept cookies on a website, you cannot tell whether the cookies are used for tracking your personal data or not. Shaoor Munir’s machine learning model does that. On the show today, the Ph.D student at the University of California, discussed the world of first-party cookies and how he developed a machine learning model that predicts whether a first-party cookie is used for tracking purposes.

Liza Gak, a Ph.D. student at UC Berkeley, joins us to discuss her research on harmful weight loss advertising. She discussed how weight loss ads are not fact-checked, and how they typically target the most vulnerable. She extensively discussed her interview process, data analysis, and results. Listen for more!

Growing your podcast to the point of monetization is not a walk in the park. Today, Rob Walch, the VP of Podcast Relations at Libsyn talks about podcast advertising. He discussed how advertising works, how to grow your audience and some blueprints to being a successful podcaster. Listen for more.

When we search for products in e-commerce stores, we do not care what goes on under the hood to generate the results. However, there may be an intentional algorithmic effort to gravitate us toward a particular product. On the show, today, Abhisek Dash and Saptarshi Ghosh discuss their research on fairness in the search result of Amazon smart speakers.

Chances are that you have bought a product online majorly because of the reviews you saw. Unfortunately, not all reviews are genuine. Today, Rajvardhan Oak shares some insight from his research on fraudulent Amazon reviews. He explained the inner workings of fraudulent reviews and revealed key insights from his qualitative and quantitative study.

While we give attention to textual data on the web, many do not know the unique power of echo interactions with smart devices for ad targeting. Today, our guest, Umar Iqbal joins us to discuss his study on using Amazon Smart Speakers for ad targeting. He gave interesting revelations about how voice data is captured and analysed for ad purposes. Listen to find out more.

Rajan Udwani, an Assistant Professor at the University of California Berkeley joins us to discuss his work on AdWords with unknown budgets. He discussed the previous approaches to ad allocation, as well as his maiden approach that introduced randomization for better results. Listen for more.

Today, we are joined by Piotr Niedźwiedź, Founder and CEO of Neptune.ai. Piotr discusses common MLOps activities by data science teams and how they can take advantage of Neptune.ai for better experiment tracking and efficiency. Listen for more!

Affiliate marketing creates an opportunity for marketers to gain a commission by promoting a product or service.  Cookies are typically used for tracking and the advertiser whose product or service is being featured pays the marketing only on transactions.

Today's episode covers those approaches and is also a story of conflict between two large companies and how one affiliate marketer got caught in the middle.

Cameron Ballard joins us today to discuss his work around YouTube conspiracy theories. He revealed interesting observations about conspiracy theories on YouTube including how predatory ads are most common in conspiracy theory videos and how YouTube’s algorithm subtly works for predatory ads. 

Eric Zeng joins us to discuss his study around understanding bad ads and efforts that can be taken to limit bad ads online. He discussed how he and his co authors scrapped a large amount of ad data, applied a machine learning algorithm, and commensurate statistical results.

NaLette Brodnax, a political scientist and an Assistant Professor in the McCourt School of Public Policy at Georgetown University joins us to discuss her work on analyzing digital advertisements for political campaigns. She used data for electoral campaigns on Facebook to answer questions that help us better understand how digital ads affect the outcome of elections.

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Have you ever wondered what goes on under the hood when you accept a website’s cookies? Today, Maximilian Hils, a PhD student in Computer Science, at the University of Innsbruck, Austria, dissects the ad tech industry and the standards put in place to protect users’ data. He also shares his thoughts on the use of VPNs as well as other tools that help shield your data from prying eyes on the internet.

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Thanks to our sponsor: https://clear.ml/ ClearML is an open-source MLOps solution users love to customize, helping you easily Track, Orchestrate, and Automate ML workflows at scale.

Ravi Krishna joins us today to talk about his recent work on a differentiable NAS framework for ads CTR prediction. He discussed what CTR prediction is about and why his NAS framework helps in building neural networks for better ads recommendation. Listen to learn about methodology, related literature and his results.

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Thanks to our sponsor: https://astrato.io Astrato is a modern BI and analytics platform built for the Snowflake Data Cloud. A next-generation live query data visualization and analytics solution, empowering everyone to make live data decisions.

Effectively managing a large budget of pay per click advertising demands software solutions. When spending multi-million dollar budgets on hundreds of thousands of keywords, an effective algorithmic strategy is required to optimize marketing objectives.

In this episode, Nathan Janos joins us to share insights from his work in the ad tech industry.

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Increasingly, people get most if not all of the information they consume online. Alongside the web sites, videos, apps, and other destinations, we’re consistently served advertisements alongside the organic content we search for or discover. Targetted ads make it possible for you to discover relevant new products you might otherwise not have heard about. Targetting can also open a pandora’s box of ethical considerations. Online advertising is a complex network of automated systems. Algorithms controlling algorithms controlling what we see.

This season of Data Skeptic will focus on the applications of data science to digital advertising technology. In this first episode in particular, Kyle shares some of his own personal experiences and insights working in pay-per-click marketing.

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Our mobile phones generate an incredible amount of data inbound and outbound. In today’s episode, Nishant Kishore, a PhD graduate of Harvard University in Infectious Disease Epidemiology, explains how mobility data from mobile phones can be captured and analysed to understand the spread of infectious diseases.

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The pandemic changed how we lived. And this had a ripple effect on the performance of machine learning models. Ravi Parikh joins us today to discuss how the pandemic has affected the performance of machine learning models in clinical care and some actionable steps to fix it.

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Carly Lupton-Smith joins us today to speak about her research which investigated the consistency between household and county measures of school reopening. Carly is a doctoral researcher in Biostatistics at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. Listen to know about her findings.

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Thanks to our sponsor!ClearML is an open-source MLOps solution users love to customize, helping you easily Track, Orchestrate, and Automate ML workflows at scale.

Astera Centerprise is a no-code data integration platform that allows users to build ETL/ELT pipelines for modern data warehousing and analytics.

Today, we are joined by Alexander Thor, a Product Manager at Vizlib, makers of Astrato. Astrato is a data analytics and business intelligence tool built on the cloud and for the cloud. Alexander discusses the features and capabilities of Astrato for data professionals.

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Emojis are arguably one of the most effective ways to express emotions when texting. In today’s episode, Xuan Lu shares her research on the use of emojis by developers. She explains how the study of emojis can track the emotions of remote workers and predict future behavior. Listen to find out more!

On the show today, we interview Mouhamed Abdulla, a professor of Electrical Engineering at Sheridan Institute of Technology. Mouhamed joins us to discuss his study on remote teaching and learning in applied engineering. He discusses how he embraced the new approach after the pandemic, the challenges he faced and how he tackled them. Listen to find out more.

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Thanks to our sponsor!ClearML is an open-source MLOps solution users love to customize, helping you easily Track, Orchestrate, and Automate ML workflows at scale.

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Thanks to our sponsor!Astrato is a modern BI and analytics platform built for the Snowflake  Data Cloud. A next-generation live query data visualization and analytics solution, empowering everyone to make live data decisions.

Today, we are joined by Jennifer Jacobs and Nadya Peek, who discuss their experience in teaching remote classes for a course that is largely hands-on. The discussion was focused on digital fabrication, why it is important, the prospect for the future, the challenges with remote lectures, and everything in between.

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Today, we are joined by Denae Ford, a Senior Researcher at Microsoft Research and an Affiliate Assistant Professor at the University of Washington. Denae discusses her work around remote work and its culminating impact on workers. She narrowed down her research to how COVID-19 has affected the working system of software engineers and the emerging challenges it brings.

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In this episode, we interview Jonas Landman, a Postdoc candidate at the University of Edinburg. Jonas discusses his study around quantum learning where he attempted to recreate the conventional k-means clustering algorithm and spectral clustering algorithm using quantum computing. 

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Astrato is a modern BI and analytics platform built for the Snowflake Data Cloud. A next-generation live query data visualization and analytics solution, empowering everyone to make live data decisions.

Many people know K-means clustering as a powerful clustering technique but not all listeners will be as familiar with spectral clustering. In today’s episode, Sibylle Hess from the Data Mining group at TU Eindhoven joins us to discuss her work around spectral clustering and how its result could potentially cause a massive shift from the conventional neural networks. Listen to learn about her findings.

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In this episode, we speak with Bernd Fritzke, a proficient financial expert and a Data Science researcher on his recent research - the breathing K-means algorithm. Bernd discussed the perks of the algorithms and what makes it stand out from other K-means variations. He extensively discussed the working principle of the algorithm and the subtle but impactful features that enables it produce top-notch results with low computational resources. Listen to learn about this algorithm.

In today’s episode, Jason, an Assistant Professor of Statistical Science at Duke University talks about his research on K power means. K power means is a newly-developed algorithm by Jason and his team, that aims to solve the problem of local minima in classical K-means, without demanding heavy computational resources. Listen to find out the outcome of Jason's study.

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Springboard Springboard offers end-to-end online data career programs that encompass data science, data analytics, data engineering, and machine learning engineering.

In this episode, Kyle interviews Lucas Murtinho about the paper "Shallow decision treees for explainable k-means clustering" about the use of decision trees to help explain the clustering partitions. 

Have you ever wondered how you can use clustering to extract meaningful insight from a time-series single-feature data? In today’s episode, Ehsan speaks about his recent research on actionable feature extraction using clustering techniques. Want to find out more? Listen to discover the methodologies he used for his research and the commensurate results.

Visit our website for extended show notes!

https://clear.ml/

ClearML is an open-source MLOps solution users love to customize, helping you easily Track, Orchestrate, and Automate ML workflows at scale.

Linh Da joins us to explore how image segmentation can be done using k-means clustering.  Image segmentation involves dividing an image into a distinct set of segments.  One such approach is to do this purely on color, in which case, k-means clustering is a good option. 

In today’s episode, Gregory Glatzer explained his machine learning project that involved the prediction of elephant movement and settlement, in a bid to limit the activities of poachers. He used two machine learning algorithms, DBSCAN and K-Means clustering at different stages of the project. Listen to learn about why these two techniques were useful and what conclusions could be drawn.

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This episode is an overview of the topic presented in several segments.

• Snowflake Essentials: Getting Started with Big Data in the Cloud by Frank Bell, Raj Chirumamilla, Bhaskar B. Joshi, Bjorn Lindstrom, Ruchi Soni, Sameer Videkar
• Snowflake Solutions
• Snoptimizer - Snowflake Cost, Security, and Performance Optimization - Coming Soon!

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Zack Labe, a Post-Doctoral Researcher at Colorado State University, joins us today to discuss his work “Detecting Climate Signals using Explainable AI with Single Forcing Large Ensembles.” Works Mentioned “Detecting Climate Signals using Explainable AI with Single Forcing Large Ensembles” by Zachary M. Labe, Elizabeth A. Barnes Sponsored by: Astrato and BBEdit by Bare Bones Software

Erin Boyle, the Head of Data Science at Myst AI, joins us today to talk about her work with Myst AI, a time series forecasting platform and service with the objective for positively impacting sustainability. https://docs.myst.ai/docs Visit Weights and Biases at wandb.me/dataskeptic Find Better Data Faster with Nomad Data. Visit nomad-data.com

Sean Law, Principle Data Scientist, R&D at a Fortune 500 Company, comes on to talk about his creation of the STUMPY Python Library.

Sponsored by Hello Fresh and mParticle:

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Visit mparticle.com to learn how teams at Postmates, NBCUniversal, Spotify, and Airbnb use mParticle’s customer data infrastructure to accelerate their customer data strategies.

Data scientists and psychics have at least one major thing in common. Both professions attempt to predict the future. In the case of a data scientist, this is done using algorithms, data, and often comes with some measure of quality such as a confidence interval or estimated accuracy. In contrast, psychics rely on their intuition or an appeal to the supernatural as the source for their predictions. Still, in the interest of empirical evidence, the quality of predictions made by psychics can be put to the test.

The Great Australian Psychic Prediction Project seeks to do exactly that. It's the longest known project tracking annual predictions made by psychics, and the accuracy of those predictions in hindsight. Richard Saunders, host of The Skeptic Zone Podcast, joins us to share the results of this decadal study.

Read the full report: https://www.skeptics.com.au/2021/12/09/psychic-project-full-results-released/

And follow the Skeptics Zone: https://www.skepticzone.tv/

Georgia Papacharalampous, Researcher at the National Technical University of Athens, joins us today to talk about her work “Probabilistic water demand forecasting using quantile regression algorithms.”

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John Watson, Principal Software Engineer at Splunk, joins us today to talk about Splunk and OpenTelemetry.

Yusan Lin, a Research Scientist at Visa Research, comes on today to talk about her work "Predicting Next-Season Designs on High Fashion Runway."

Time series topics on Data Skeptic predate our current season.  This holiday special collects three popular mini-episodes from the archive that discuss time series topics with a few new comments from Kyle.

Dr. Darren Shannon, a Lecturer in Quantitative Finance in the Department of Accounting and Finance, University of Limerick, joins us today to talk about his work "Extending the Heston Model to Forecast Motor Vehicle Collision Rates."

Eric Manibardo, PhD Student at the University of the Basque Country in Spain, comes on today to share his work, "Deep Learning for Road Traffic Forecasting: Does it Make a Difference?"

Daniele Gammelli, PhD Student in Machine Learning at Technical University of Denmark and visiting PhD Student at Stanford University, joins us today to talk about his work "Predictive and Prescriptive Performance of Bike-Sharing Demand Forecasts for Inventory Management."

Mahdi Abolghasemi, Lecturer at Monash University, joins us today to talk about his work "Demand forecasting in supply chain: The impact of demand volatility in the presence of promotion."

The retail holiday “black Friday” occurs the day after Thanksgiving in the United States. It’s dubbed this because many retail companies spend the first 10 months of the year running at a loss (in the red) before finally earning as much as 80% of their revenue in the last two months of the year.

This episode features four interviews with guests bringing unique data-driven perspectives on the topic of analyzing this seeming outlier in a time series dataset.

Alex Terenin, Postdoctoral Research Associate at the University of Cambridge, joins us today to talk about his work "Aligning Time Series on Incomparable Spaces."

Today we are joined again by Ben Fulcher, leader of the Dynamics and Neural Systems Group at the University of Sydney in Australia, to talk about hctsa, a software package for running highly comparative time-series analysis.

Gerrit van den Burg, Postdoctoral Researcher at The Alan Turing Institute, joins us today to discuss his work "An Evaluation of Change Point Detection Algorithms."

Bahman Rostami-Tabar, Senior Lecturer in Management Science at Cardiff University, joins us today to talk about his work "Forecasting and its Beneficiaries."

Alex Mallen, Computer Science student at the University of Washington, and Henning Lange, a Postdoctoral Scholar in Applied Math at the University of Washington, join us today to share their work "Deep Probabilistic Koopman: Long-term Time-Series Forecasting Under Periodic Uncertainties."

Fotios Petropoulos, Professor of Management Science at the University of Bath in The U.K., joins us today to talk about his work "Fast and Frugal Time Series Forecasting."

Manie Tadayon, a PhD graduate from the ECE department at University of California, Los Angeles, joins us today to talk about his work “Comparative Analysis of the Hidden Markov Model and LSTM: A Simulative Approach.”

Sankeerth Rao Karingula, ML Researcher at Palo Alto Networks, joins us today to talk about his work “Boosted Embeddings for Time Series Forecasting.”

Works Mentioned Boosted Embeddings for Time Series Forecasting by Sankeerth Rao Karingula, Nandini Ramanan, Rasool Tahmasbi, Mehrnaz Amjadi, Deokwoo Jung, Ricky Si, Charanraj Thimmisetty, Luisa Polania Cabrera, Marjorie Sayer, Claudionor Nunes Coelho Jr

https://www.linkedin.com/in/sankeerthrao/

https://twitter.com/sankeerthrao3 

https://lod2021.icas.cc/ 

David Daly, Performance Engineer at MongoDB, joins us today to discuss "The Use of Change Point Detection to Identify Software Performance Regressions in a Continuous Integration System".

Works Mentioned The Use of Change Point Detection to Identify Software Performance Regressions in a Continuous Integration System by David Daly, William Brown, Henrik Ingo, Jim O’Leary, David BradfordSocial Media

David's Website David's Twitter Mongodb

Samya Tajmouati, a PhD student in Data Science at the University of Science of Kenitra, Morocco, joins us today to discuss her work Applying K-Nearest Neighbors to Time Series Forecasting: Two New Approaches.

Dr. Feng Li, (@f3ngli) is an Associate Professor of Statistics in the School of Statistics and Mathematics at Central University of Finance and Economics in Beijing, China. He joins us today to discuss his work Distributed ARIMA Models for Ultra-long Time Series.

Angus Dempster, PhD Student at Monash University in Australia, comes on today to talk about MINIROCKET: A Very Fast (Almost) Deterministic Transform for Time Series Classification, a fast deterministic transform for time series classification. MINIROCKET reformulates ROCKET, gaining a 75x improvement on larger datasets with essentially the same performance. In this episode, we talk about the insights that realized this speedup as well as use cases.

Chongshou Li, Associate Professor at Southwest Jiaotong University in China, joins us today to talk about his work Why are the ARIMA and SARIMA not Sufficient.

Ben Fulcher, Senior Lecturer at the School of Physics at the University of Sydney in Australia, comes on today to talk about his project Comp Engine.

Follow Ben on Twitter: @bendfulcher For posts about time series analysis : @comptimeseries comp-engine.org

Nitin Pundir, PhD candidate at University Florida and works at the Florida Institute for Cybersecurity Research, comes on today to talk about his work “RanStop: A Hardware-assisted Runtime Crypto-Ransomware Detection Technique.”

FICS Research Lab - https://fics.institute.ufl.edu/ 

LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/nitin-pundir470/

Florian Eckerli, a recent graduate of Zurich University of Applied Sciences, comes on the show today to discuss his work Generative Adversarial Networks in Finance: An Overview.

Today on the show we have Daniel Omeiza, a doctoral student in the computer science department of the University of Oxford, who joins us to talk about his work Efficient Machine Learning for Large-Scale Urban Land-Use Forecasting in Sub-Saharan Africa.

Today on the show we have Elizabeth Barnes, Associate Professor in the department of Atmospheric Science at Colorado State University, who joins us to talk about her work Identifying Opportunities for Skillful Weather Prediction with Interpretable Neural Networks. Find more from the Barnes Research Group on their site.

Weather is notoriously difficult to predict. Complex systems are demanding of computational power. Further, the chaotic nature of, well, nature, makes accurate forecasting especially difficult the longer into the future one wants to look. Yet all is not lost!

In this interview, we explore the use of machine learning to help identify certain conditions under which the weather system has entered an unusually predictable position in it’s normally chaotic state space.

Today on the show we have Andrea Fronzetti Colladon (@iandreafc), currently working at the University of Perugia and inventor of the Semantic Brand Score, joins us to talk about his work studying human communication and social interaction.

We discuss the paper Look inside. Predicting Stock Prices by Analyzing an Enterprise Intranet Social Network and Using Word Co-Occurrence Networks.

Today on the show we have Boris Oreshkin @boreshkin, a Senior Research Scientist at Unity Technologies, who joins us today to talk about his work N-BEATS: Neural Basis Expansion Analysis for Interpretable Time Series Forecasting.

Works Mentioned: N-BEATS: Neural Basis Expansion Analysis for Interpretable Time Series Forecasting By Boris N. Oreshkin, Dmitri Carpov, Nicolas Chapados, Yoshua Bengio https://arxiv.org/abs/1905.10437

Social Media Linkedin Twitter 

Today we are back with another episode discussing AI in the work field. AI has, is, and will continue to facilitate the automation of work done by humans. Sometimes this may be an entire role. Other times it may automate a particular part of their role, scaling their effectiveness.

Carl Stimson, a Freelance Japanese to English translator, comes on the show to talk about his work in translation and his perspective about how AI will change translation in the future. 

Shane Ross, Professor of Aerospace and Ocean Engineering at Virginia Tech University, comes on today to talk about his work “Beach-level 24-hour forecasts of Florida red tide-induced respiratory irritation.”

Lior Shamir, Associate Professor of Computer Science at Kansas University, joins us today to talk about the recent paper Automatic Identification of Outliers in Hubble Space Telescope Galaxy Images.

Follow Lio on Twitter @shamir_lior

Shereen Elsayed and Daniela Thyssens, both are PhD Student at Hildesheim University in Germany, come on today to talk about the work “Do We Really Need Deep Learning Models for Time Series Forecasting?”

Sam Ackerman, Research Data Scientist at IBM Research Labs in Haifa, Israel, joins us today to talk about his work Detection of Data Drift and Outliers Affecting Machine Learning Model Performance Over Time.

Julien Herzen, PhD graduate from EPFL in Switzerland, comes on today to talk about his work with Unit 8 and the development of the Python Library: Darts. 

Welcome to Timeseries! Today’s episode is an interview with Rob Hyndman, Professor of Statistics at Monash University in Australia, and author of Forecasting: Principles and Practices.

Today's experimental episode uses sound to describe some basic ideas from time series.

This episode includes lag, seasonality, trend, noise, heteroskedasticity, decomposition, smoothing, feature engineering, and deep learning.

Today’s show in two parts. First, Linhda joins us to review the episodes from Data Skeptic: Pilot Season and give her feedback on each of the topics.

Second, we introduce our new segment “Orders of Magnitude”. It’s a statistical game show in which participants must identify the true statistic hidden in a list of statistics which are off by at least an order of magnitude. Claudia and Vanessa join as our first contestants.  Below are the sources of our questions.

Heights

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Willis_Tower
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eiffel_Tower
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GreatPyramidof_Giza
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/InternationalSpaceStation

Bird Statistics

• Birds in the US since 2000
• Causes of Bird Mortality

Amounts of Data

Our statistics come from this post

AI has, is, and will continue to facilitate the automation of work done by humans. Sometimes this may be an entire role. Other times it may automate a particular part of their role, scaling their effectiveness. Unless progress in AI inexplicably halts, the tasks done by humans vs. machines will continue to evolve. Today’s episode is a speculative conversation about what the future may hold.

Co-Host of Squaring the Strange Podcast, Caricature Artist, and an Academic Editor, Celestia Ward joins us today! Kyle and Celestia discuss whether or not her jobs as a caricature artist or as an academic editor are under threat from AI automation.

• https://squaringthestrange.wordpress.com/
• https://twitter.com/celestiaward
• The legendary Dr. Jorge Pérez and his work studying unicorns
• Supernormal stimulus
• International Society of Caricature Artists
• Two Heads Studios

Today on the show Derek Driggs, a PhD Student at the University of Cambridge. He comes on to discuss the work Common Pitfalls and Recommendations for Using Machine Learning to Detect and Prognosticate for COVID-19 Using Chest Radiographs and CT Scans.

Help us vote for the next theme of Data Skeptic!

Vote here: https://dataskeptic.com/vote

Given a document in English, how can you estimate the ease with which someone will find they can read it?  Does it require a college-level of reading comprehension or is it something a much younger student could read and understand?

While these questions are useful to ask, they don't admit a simple answer.  One option is to use one of the (essentially identical) two Flesch Kincaid Readability Tests.  These are simple calculations which provide you with a rough estimate of the reading ease.

In this episode, Kyle shares his thoughts on this tool and when it could be appropriate to use as part of your feature engineering pipeline towards a machine learning objective.

For empirical validation of these metrics, the plot below compares English language Wikipedia pages with "Simple English" Wikipedia pages.  The analysis Kyle describes in this episode yields the intuitively pleasing histogram below.  It summarizes the distribution of Flesch reading ease scores for 1000 pages examined from both Wikipedias.

Today on the show we have Shubhranshu Shekar, a Ph. D Student at Carnegie Mellon University, who joins us to talk about his work, FAIROD: Fairness-aware Outlier Detection.

Today on the show Dr. Anders Sandburg, Senior Research Fellow at the Future of Humanity Institute at Oxford University, comes on to share his work “The Timing of Evolutionary Transitions Suggest Intelligent Life is Rare.”

Works Mentioned:

Paper: “The Timing of Evolutionary Transitions Suggest Intelligent Life is Rare.”by Andrew E Snyder-Beattie, Anders Sandberg, K Eric Drexler, Michael B Bonsall 

Twitter: @anderssandburg

Mayank Kejriwal, Research Professor at the University of Southern California and Researcher at the Information Sciences Institute, joins us today to discuss his work and his new book Knowledge, Graphs, Fundamentals, Techniques and Applications by Mayank Kejriwal, Craig A. Knoblock, and Pedro Szekley.

Works Mentioned “Knowledge, Graphs, Fundamentals, Techniques and Applications”by Mayank Kejriwal, Craig A. Knoblock, and Pedro Szekley

QAnon is a conspiracy theory born in the underbelly of the internet.  While easy to disprove, these cryptic ideas captured the minds of many people and (in part) paved the way to the 2021 storming of the US Capital.

This is a contemporary conspiracy which came into existence and grew in a very digital way.  This makes it possible for researchers to study this phenomenon in a way not accessible in previous conspiracy theories of similar popularity.

This episode is not so much a debunking of this debunked theory, but rather an exploration of the metadata and origins of this conspiracy.

This episode is also the first in our 2021 Pilot Season in which we are going to test out a few formats for Data Skeptic to see what our next season should be.  This is the first installment.  In a few weeks, we're going to ask everyone to vote for their favorite theme for our next season.

Karthick Shankar, Masters Student at Carnegie Mellon University, and Somali Chaterji, Assistant Professor at Purdue University, join us today to discuss the paper "JANUS: Benchmarking Commercial and Open-Source Cloud and Edge Platforms for Object and Anomaly Detection Workloads"

Works Mentioned:

https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/9284314 “JANUS: Benchmarking Commercial and Open-Source Cloud and Edge Platforms for Object and Anomaly Detection Workloads.”

by: Karthick Shankar, Pengcheng Wang, Ran Xu, Ashraf Mahgoub, Somali ChaterjiSocial Media

Karthick Shankar https://twitter.com/karthick_sh

Somali Chaterji https://twitter.com/somalichaterji?lang=en https://schaterji.io/

Hal Ashton, a PhD student from the University College of London, joins us today to discuss a recent work Causal Campbell-Goodhart’s law and Reinforcement Learning.

"Only buy honey from a local producer." - Hal Ashton

Works Mentioned:

“Causal Campbell-Goodhart’s law and Reinforcement Learning”by Hal AshtonBook  “The Book of Why”by Judea PearlPaper

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Yuqi Ouyang, in his second year of PhD study at the University of Warwick in England, joins us today to discuss his work “Video Anomaly Detection by Estimating Likelihood of Representations.”Works Mentioned:

Video Anomaly Detection by Estimating Likelihood of Representations https://arxiv.org/abs/2012.01468 by: Yuqi Ouyang, Victor Sanchez

Nirupam Gupta, a Computer Science Post Doctoral Researcher at EDFL University in Switzerland, joins us today to discuss his work “Byzantine Fault-Tolerance in Peer-to-Peer Distributed Gradient-Descent.”

Works Mentioned:  https://arxiv.org/abs/2101.12316

Byzantine Fault-Tolerance in Peer-to-Peer Distributed Gradient-Descent by Nirupam Gupta and Nitin H. Vaidya

Conference Details:

https://georgetown.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJ0sc-2grDwjEtfnLI0zPnN-GwkDvJdaOxXF

Mikko Lauri, Post Doctoral researcher at the University of Hamburg, Germany, comes on the show today to discuss the work Information Gathering in Decentralized POMDPs by Policy Graph Improvements.

Follow Mikko: @mikko_lauri Github https://laurimi.github.io/

Balaji Arun, a PhD Student in the Systems of Software Research Group at Virginia Tech, joins us today to discuss his research of distributed systems through the paper “Taming the Contention in Consensus-based Distributed Systems.” 

Works Mentioned “Taming the Contention in Consensus-based Distributed Systems”  by Balaji Arun, Sebastiano Peluso, Roberto Palmieri, Giuliano Losa, and Binoy Ravindranhttps://www.ssrg.ece.vt.edu/papers/tdsc20-author-version.pdf

“Fast Paxos” by Leslie Lamport  https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00446-006-0005-x

Maartje ter Hoeve, PhD Student at the University of Amsterdam, joins us today to discuss her research in automated summarization through the paper “What Makes a Good Summary? Reconsidering the Focus of Automatic Summarization.” 

Works Mentioned  “What Makes a Good Summary? Reconsidering the Focus of Automatic Summarization.” by Maartje der Hoeve, Juilia Kiseleva, and Maarten de Rijke

Contact Email: [email protected]

Twitter: https://twitter.com/maartjeterhoeve

Website: https://maartjeth.github.io/#get-in-touch

Brian Brubach, Assistant Professor in the Computer Science Department at Wellesley College, joins us today to discuss his work “Meddling Metrics: the Effects of Measuring and Constraining Partisan Gerrymandering on Voter Incentives".

WORKS MENTIONED: Meddling Metrics: the Effects of Measuring and Constraining Partisan Gerrymandering on Voter Incentives by Brian Brubach, Aravind Srinivasan, and Shawn Zhao

Aside from victory questions like “can black force a checkmate on white in 5 moves?” many novel questions can be asked about a game of chess. Some questions are trivial (e.g. “How many pieces does white have?") while more computationally challenging questions can contribute interesting results in computational complexity theory.

In this episode, Josh Brunner, Master's student in Theoretical Computer Science at MIT, joins us to discuss his recent paper Complexity of Retrograde and Helpmate Chess Problems: Even Cooperative Chess is Hard.

Works Mentioned Complexity of Retrograde and Helpmate Chess Problems: Even Cooperative Chess is Hard by Josh Brunner, Erik D. Demaine, Dylan Hendrickson, and Juilian Wellman

1x1 Rush Hour With Fixed Blocks is PSPACE Complete by Josh Brunner, Lily Chung, Erik D. Demaine, Dylan Hendrickson, Adam Hesterberg, Adam Suhl, Avi Zeff

Eil Goldweber, a graduate student at the University of Michigan, comes on today to share his work in applying formal verification to systems and a modification to the Paxos protocol discussed in the paper Significance on Consecutive Ballots in Paxos.

Works Mentioned : Previous Episode on Paxos  https://dataskeptic.com/blog/episodes/2020/distributed-consensus

Paper: On the Significance on Consecutive Ballots in Paxos by: Eli Goldweber, Nuda Zhang, and Manos Kapritsos

Thanks to our sponsor: Nord VPN : 68% off a 2-year plan and one month free! With NordVPN, all the data you send and receive online travels through an encrypted tunnel. This way, no one can get their hands on your private information. Nord VPN is quick and easy to use to protect the privacy and security of your data. Check them out at nordvpn.com/dataskeptic

Today on the show we have Adrian Martin, a Post-doctoral researcher from the University of Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona, Spain. He comes on the show today to discuss his research from the paper “Convolutional Neural Networks can be Deceived by Visual Illusions.”

Works Mentioned in Paper: “Convolutional Neural Networks can be Decieved by Visual Illusions.” by Alexander Gomez-Villa, Adrian Martin, Javier Vazquez-Corral, and Marcelo Bertalmio

Examples:

Snake Illusions https://www.illusionsindex.org/i/rotating-snakes

Twitter: Alex: @alviur

Adrian: @adriMartin13

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Have you ever wanted to hear what an earthquake sounds like? Today on the show we have Omkar Ranadive, Computer Science Masters student at NorthWestern University, who collaborates with Suzan van der Lee, an Earth and Planetary Sciences professor at Northwestern University, on the crowd-sourcing project Earthquake Detective. 

Email Links: Suzan: [email protected]  Omkar: [email protected]

Works Mentioned: 

Paper: Applying Machine Learning to Crowd-sourced Data from Earthquake Detective https://arxiv.org/abs/2011.04740 by Omkar Ranadive, Suzan van der Lee, Vivan Tang, and Kevin Chao Github: https://github.com/Omkar-Ranadive/Earthquake-Detective Earthquake Detective: https://www.zooniverse.org/projects/vivitang/earthquake-detective

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Byzantine fault tolerance (BFT) is a desirable property in a distributed computing environment. BFT means the system can survive the loss of nodes and nodes becoming unreliable. There are many different protocols for achieving BFT, though not all options can scale to large network sizes.

Ted Yin joins us to explain BFT, survey the wide variety of protocols, and share details about HotStuff.

Kyle shared some initial reactions to the announcement about Alpha Fold 2's celebrated performance in the CASP14 prediction.  By many accounts, this exciting result means protein folding is now a solved problem.

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Above all, everyone wants voting to be fair. What does fair mean and how can we measure it? Kenneth Arrow posited a simple set of conditions that one would certainly desire in a voting system. For example, unanimity - if everyone picks candidate A, then A should win!

Yet surprisingly, under a few basic assumptions, this theorem demonstrates that no voting system exists which can satisfy all the criteria.

This episode is a discussion about the structure of the proof and some of its implications.

Works Mentioned

As the COVID-19 pandemic continues, the public (or at least those with Twitter accounts) are sharing their personal opinions about mask-wearing via Twitter. What does this data tell us about public opinion? How does it vary by demographic? What, if anything, can make people change their minds?

Today we speak to, Neil Yeung and Jonathan Lai, Undergraduate students in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Rochester, and Professor of Computer Science, Jiebo-Luoto to discuss their recent paper. Face Off: Polarized Public Opinions on Personal Face Mask Usage during the COVID-19 Pandemic.

Works Mentioned https://arxiv.org/abs/2011.00336

Emails: Neil Yeung [email protected]

Jonathan Lia [email protected]

Jiebo Luo [email protected]

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Niclas Boehmer, second year PhD student at Berlin Institute of Technology, comes on today to discuss the computational complexity of bribery in elections through the paper “On the Robustness of Winners: Counting Briberies in Elections.”

Links Mentioned: https://www.akt.tu-berlin.de/menue/team/boehmer_niclas/

Works Mentioned: “On the Robustness of Winners: Counting Briberies in Elections.” by Niclas Boehmer, Robert Bredereck, Piotr Faliszewski. Rolf Niedermier

Thanks to our sponsors:

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Clement Fung, a Societal Computing PhD student at Carnegie Mellon University, discusses his research in security of machine learning systems and a defense against targeted sybil-based poisoning called FoolsGold.

Works Mentioned: The Limitations of Federated Learning in Sybil Settings

Twitter:

@clemfung

Website: https://clementfung.github.io/

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WORKS MENTIONED:

• “Calibrating Noise to Sensitivity in Private Data Analysis” by Cynthia Dwork, Frank McSherry, Kobbi Nissim, Adam Smith
• "Issues Encountered Deploying Differential Privacy" by Simson L Garfinkel, John M Abowd, and Sarah Powazek
• "Randomness Concerns When Deploying Differential Privacy" by Simson L. Garfinkel and Philip Leclerc 

Check out: https://simson.net/page/Differential_privacy

Thank you to our sponsor, BetterHelp. Professional and confidential in-app counseling for everyone. Save 10% on your first month of services with www.betterhelp.com/dataskeptic

Computer Science research fellow of Cambridge University, Heidi Howard discusses Paxos, Raft, and distributed consensus in distributed systems alongside with her work “Paxos vs. Raft: Have we reached consensus on distributed consensus?”

She goes into detail about the leaders in Paxos and Raft and how The Raft Consensus Algorithm actually inspired her to pursue her PhD. Paxos vs Raft paper: https://arxiv.org/abs/2004.05074 Leslie Lamport paper “part-time Parliament” https://lamport.azurewebsites.net/pubs/lamport-paxos.pdf Leslie Lamport paper "Paxos Made Simple" https://lamport.azurewebsites.net/pubs/paxos-simple.pdf Twitter : @heidiann360

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Patrick Rosenstiel joins us to discuss the The National Popular Vote.

Yudi Pawitan joins us to discuss his paper Defending the P-value.

Ivan Oransky joins us to discuss his work documenting the scientific peer-review process at retractionwatch.com.

Derek Lim joins us to discuss the paper Expertise and Dynamics within Crowdsourced Musical Knowledge Curation: A Case Study of the Genius Platform.

Neil Johnson joins us to discuss the paper The online competition between pro- and anti-vaccination views.

Mashbat Suzuki joins us to discuss the paper How Many Freemasons Are There? The Consensus Voting Mechanism in Metric Spaces.

Check out Mashbat’s and many other great talks at the 13th Symposium on Algorithmic Game Theory (SAGT 2020)

Steven Heilman joins us to discuss his paper Designing Stable Elections.

For a general interest article, see: https://theconversation.com/the-electoral-college-is-surprisingly-vulnerable-to-popular-vote-changes-141104

Steven Heilman receives funding from the National Science Foundation. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.

Sami Yousif joins us to discuss the paper The Illusion of Consensus: A Failure to Distinguish Between True and False Consensus. This work empirically explores how individuals evaluate consensus under different experimental conditions reviewing online news articles.

More from Sami at samiyousif.org

Link to survey mentioned by Daniel Kerrigan: https://forms.gle/TCdGem3WTUYEP31B8

In this solo episode, Kyle overviews the field of fraud detection with eCommerce as a use case.  He discusses some of the techniques and system architectures used by companies to fight fraud with a focus on why these things need to be approached from a real-time perspective.

In this episode, Kyle and Linhda review the results of our recent survey. Hear all about the demographic details and how we interpret these results.

Moses Namara from the HATLab joins us to discuss his research into the interaction between privacy and human-computer interaction.

Mark Glickman joins us to discuss the paper Data in the Life: Authorship Attribution in Lennon-McCartney Songs.

Erik Härkönen joins us to discuss the paper GANSpace: Discovering Interpretable GAN Controls. During the interview, Kyle makes reference to this amazing interpretable GAN controls video and it’s accompanying codebase found here. Erik mentions the GANspace collab notebook which is a rapid way to try these ideas out for yourself.

David Ifeoluwa Adelani joins us to discuss Generating Sentiment-Preserving Fake Online Reviews Using Neural Language Models and Their Human- and Machine-based Detection.

Sungsoo Ray Hong joins us to discuss the paper Human Factors in Model Interpretability: Industry Practices, Challenges, and Needs.

Deb Raji joins us to discuss her recent publication Saving Face: Investigating the Ethical Concerns of Facial Recognition Auditing.

Uri Hasson joins us this week to discuss the paper Robust-fit to Nature: An Evolutionary Perspective on Biological (and Artificial) Neural Networks.

Deep neural networks are undeniably effective. They rely on such a high number of parameters, that they are appropriately described as “black boxes”.

While black boxes lack desirably properties like interpretability and explainability, in some cases, their accuracy makes them incredibly useful.

But does achiving “usefulness” require a black box? Can we be sure an equally valid but simpler solution does not exist?

Cynthia Rudin helps us answer that question. We discuss her recent paper with co-author Joanna Radin titled (spoiler warning)…

Why Are We Using Black Box Models in AI When We Don’t Need To? A Lesson From An Explainable AI Competition

Daniel Kang joins us to discuss the paper Testing Robustness Against Unforeseen Adversaries.

Frank Mollica joins us to discuss the paper Humans store about 1.5 megabytes of information during language acquisition

Jayaraman Thiagarajan joins us to discuss the recent paper Calibrating Healthcare AI: Towards Reliable and Interpretable Deep Predictive Models.

What does it mean to understand a neural network? That’s the question posted on this arXiv paper. Kyle speaks with Tim Lillicrap about this and several other big questions.

Dan Elton joins us to discuss self-explaining AI. What could be better than an interpretable model? How about a model wich explains itself in a conversational way, engaging in a back and forth with the user.

We discuss the paper Self-explaining AI as an alternative to interpretable AI which presents a framework for self-explainging AI.

Becca Taylor joins us to discuss her work studying the impact of plastic bag bans as published in Bag Leakage: The Effect of Disposable Carryout Bag Regulations on Unregulated Bags from the Journal of Environmental Economics and Management. How does one measure the impact of these bans? Are they achieving their intended goals? Join us and find out!

We are joined by Arash Kalatian to discuss Decoding pedestrian and automated vehicle interactions using immersive virtual reality and interpretable deep learning.

Julia Evans joins us help answer the question why do neural networks think a panda is a vulture. Kyle talks to Julia about her hands-on work fooling neural networks.

Julia runs Wizard Zines which publishes works such as Your Linux Toolbox. You can find her on Twitter @b0rk

Jessica Hullman joins us to share her expertise on data visualization and communication of data in the media. We discuss Jessica’s work on visualizing uncertainty, interviewing visualization designers on why they don't visualize uncertainty, and modeling interactions with visualizations as Bayesian updates.

Homepage: http://users.eecs.northwestern.edu/~jhullman/

Lab: MU Collective

I am pleased to announce Data Skeptic is launching a new spin-off show called "Journal Club" with similar themes but a very different format to the Data Skeptic everyone is used to.

In Journal Club, we will have a regular panel and occasional guest panelists to discuss interesting news items and one featured journal article every week in a roundtable discussion. Each week, I'll be joined by Lan Guo and George Kemp for a discussion of interesting data science related news articles and a featured journal or pre-print article.

We hope that this podcast will give listeners an introduction to the works we cover and how people discuss these works. Our topics will often coincide with the original Data Skeptic podcast's current Interpretability theme, but we have few rules right now or what we pick. We enjoy discussing these items with each other and we hope you will do.

In the coming weeks, we will start opening up the guest chair more often to bring new voices to our discussion. After that we'll be looking for ways we can engage with our audience.

Keep reading and thanks for listening!

Kyle

Pramit Choudhary joins us to talk about the methodologies and tools used to assist with model interpretability.

Kyle and Linhda discuss how Shapley Values might be a good tool for determining what makes the cut for a home renovation.

We welcome back Marco Tulio Ribeiro to discuss research he has done since our original discussion on LIME.

In particular, we ask the question Are Red Roses Red? and discuss how Anchors provide high precision model-agnostic explanations.

Please take our listener survey.

Walt Woods joins us to discuss his paper Adversarial Explanations for Understanding Image Classification Decisions and Improved Neural Network Robustness with co-authors Jack Chen and Christof Teuscher.

Andrei Barbu joins us to discuss ObjectNet - a new kind of vision dataset.

In contrast to ImageNet, ObjectNet seeks to provide images that are more representative of the types of images an autonomous machine is likely to encounter in the real world. Collecting a dataset in this way required careful use of Mechanical Turk to get Turkers to provide a corpus of images that removes some of the bias found in ImageNet.

http://0xab.com/

Enrico Bertini joins us to discuss how data visualization can be used to help make machine learning more interpretable and explainable.

Find out more about Enrico at http://enrico.bertini.io/.

More from Enrico with co-host Moritz Stefaner on the Data Stories podcast!

We welcome Su Wang back to Data Skeptic to discuss the paper Distributional modeling on a diet: One-shot word learning from text only.

Wiebe van Ranst joins us to talk about a project in which specially designed printed images can fool a computer vision system, preventing it from identifying a person.  Their attack targets the popular YOLO2 pre-trained image recognition model, and thus, is likely to be widely applicable.

This episode includes an interview with Aaron Roth author of The Ethical Algorithm.

Machine learning has shown a rapid expansion into every sector and industry. With increasing reliance on models and increasing stakes for the decisions of models, questions of how models actually work are becoming increasingly important to ask.

Welcome to Data Skeptic Interpretability.

In this episode, Kyle interviews Christoph Molnar about his book Interpretable Machine Learning.

Thanks to our sponsor, the Gartner Data & Analytics Summit going on in Grapevine, TX on March 23 – 26, 2020. Use discount code: dataskeptic.

Our new theme song is #5 by Big D and the Kids Table.

Incidental music by Tanuki Suit Riot.

A year in recap.

We are joined by Colin Raffel to discuss the paper "Exploring the Limits of Transfer Learning with a Unified Text-to-Text Transformer".

Seth Juarez joins us to discuss the toolbox of options available to a data scientist to jumpstart or extend their machine learning efforts.

Alex Reeves joins us to discuss some of the challenges around building a serverless, scalable, generic machine learning pipeline.  The is a technical deep dive on architecting solutions and a discussion of some of the design choices made.

Buck Woody joins Kyle to share experiences from the field and the application of the Team Data Science Process - a popular six-phase workflow for doing data science.

Thea Sommerschield joins us this week to discuss the development of Pythia - a machine learning model trained to assist in the reconstruction of ancient language text.

Kyle met up with Damian Brady at MS Ignite 2019 to discuss machine learning operations.

The modern deep learning approaches to natural language processing are voracious in their demands for large corpora to train on.  Folk wisdom estimates used to be around 100k documents were required for effective training.  The availability of broadly trained, general-purpose models like BERT has made it possible to do transfer learning to achieve novel results on much smaller corpora.

Thanks to these advancements, an NLP researcher might get value out of fewer examples since they can use the transfer learning to get a head start and focus on learning the nuances of the language specifically relevant to the task at hand.  Thus, small specialized corpora are both useful and practical to create.

In this episode, Kyle speaks with Mor Geva, lead author on the recent paper Are We Modeling the Task or the Annotator? An Investigation of Annotator Bias in Natural Language Understanding Datasets, which explores some unintended consequences of the typical procedure followed for generating corpora.

Source code for the paper available here: https://github.com/mega002/annotator_bias

While at MS Build 2019, Kyle sat down with Lance Olson from the Applied AI team about how tools like cognitive services and cognitive search enable non-data scientists to access relatively advanced NLP tools out of box, and how more advanced data scientists can focus more time on the bigger picture problems.

Manuel Mager joins us to discuss natural language processing for low and under-resourced languages.  We discuss current work in this area and the Naki Project which aggregates research on NLP for native and indigenous languages of the American continent.

GPT-2 is yet another in a succession of models like ELMo and BERT which adopt a similar deep learning architecture and train an unsupervised model on a massive text corpus.

As we have been covering recently, these approaches are showing tremendous promise, but how close are they to an AGI?  Our guest today, Vazgen Davidyants wondered exactly that, and have conversations with a Chatbot running GPT-2.  We discuss his experiences as well as some novel thoughts on artificial intelligence.

Rajiv Shah attempted to reproduce an earthquake-predicting deep learning model.  His results exposed some issues with the model.  Kyle and Rajiv discuss the original paper and Rajiv's analysis.

Allyson Ettinger joins us to discuss her work in computational linguistics, specifically in exploring some of the ways in which the popular natural language processing approach BERT has limitations.

Omer Levy joins us to discuss "SpanBERT: Improving Pre-training by Representing and Predicting Spans".

https://arxiv.org/abs/1907.10529

Tim Niven joins us this week to discuss his work exploring the limits of what BERT can do on certain natural language tasks such as adversarial attacks, compositional learning, and systematic learning.

Kyle pontificates on how impressed he is with BERT.

Kyle sits down with Jen Stirrup to inquire about her experiences helping companies deploy data science solutions in a variety of different settings.

Video annotation is an expensive and time-consuming process. As a consequence, the available video datasets are useful but small. The availability of machine transcribed explainer videos offers a unique opportunity to rapidly develop a useful, if dirty, corpus of videos that are "self annotating", as hosts explain the actions they are taking on the screen.

This episode is a discussion of the HowTo100m dataset - a project which has assembled a video corpus of 136M video clips with captions covering 23k activities.

The paper will be presented at ICCV 2019

@antoine77340

Antoine on Github

Antoine's homepage

Kyle provides a non-technical overview of why Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT) is a powerful tool for natural language processing projects.

Kyle interviews Prasanth Pulavarthi about the Onnx format for deep neural networks.

Kyle and Linhda discuss some high level theory of mind and overview the concept machine learning concept of catastrophic forgetting.

Sebastian Ruder is a research scientist at DeepMind.  In this episode, he joins us to discuss the state of the art in transfer learning and his contributions to it.

In 2017, Facebook published a paper called Deal or No Deal? End-to-End Learning for Negotiation Dialogues. In this research, the reinforcement learning agents developed a mechanism of communication (which could be called a language) that made them able to optimize their scores in the negotiation game. Many media sources reported this as if it were a first step towards Skynet taking over. In this episode, Kyle discusses bargaining agents and the actual results of this research.

Priyanka Biswas joins us in this episode to discuss natural language processing for languages that do not have as many resources as those that are more commonly studied such as English.  Successful NLP projects benefit from the availability of like large corpora, well-annotated corpora, software libraries, and pre-trained models.  For languages that researchers have not paid as much attention to, these tools are not always available.

Kyle and Linh Da discuss the class of approaches called "Named Entity Recognition" or NER.  NER algorithms take any string as input and return a list of "entities" - specific facts and agents in the text along with a classification of the type (e.g. person, date, place).

USC students from the CAIS++ student organization have created a variety of novel projects under the mission statement of "artificial intelligence for social good". In this episode, Kyle interviews Zane and Leena about the Endangered Languages Project.

Kyle and Linh Da discuss the concepts behind the neural Turing machine.

Kyle chats with Rohan Kumar about hyperscale, data at the edge, and a variety of other trends in data engineering in the cloud.

In this episode, Kyle interviews Laura Edell at MS Build 2019.  The conversation covers a number of topics, notably her NCAA Final 4 prediction model.

Kyle and Linhda discuss attention and the transformer - an encoder/decoder architecture that extends the basic ideas of vector embeddings like word2vec into a more contextual use case.

When users on Twitter post with geographic tags, it creates the opportunity for a variety of interesting questions to be posed having to do with language, dialects, and location.  In this episode, Kyle interviews Bruno Gonçalves about his work studying language in this way.

This is an interview with Ellen Loeshelle, Director of Product Management at Clarabridge.  We primarily discuss sentiment analysis.

A gentle introduction to the very high-level idea of "attention" in machine learning, as it will play a major role in some upcoming episodes over the next few weeks.

Modern messaging technology has facilitated a trend towards highly compact, short messages send by users who can presume a great amount of context held between the communicating parties.  The rules of grammar may be discarded and often visible errors are a normal part of the conversation.

>>> Good mornink

>>> morning

Yet such short messages are also important for businesses whose users are unlikely to read a large block of text upon completing an order.  Similarly, a business might want to offer assistance and effective question and answering solutions in an automated and ideally multi-lingual way.  In this episode, we discuss techniques for designing solutions like that.

ELMo (Embeddings from Language Models) introduced the idea of deep contextualized word representations. It extends previous ideas like word2vec and GloVe. The ELMo model is a neural network able to map natural language into a vector space. This vector space, out of box, proved to be incredibly useful in a wide variety of seemingly unrelated NLP tasks like sentiment analysis and name entity recognition.

Bilingual evaluation understudy (or BLEU) is a metric for evaluating the quality of machine translation using human translation as examples of acceptable quality results. This metric has become a widely used standard in the research literature. But is it the perfect measure of quality of machine translation?

While at NeurIPS 2018, Kyle chatted with Liang Huang about his work with Baidu research on simultaneous translation, which was demoed at the conference.

Machine transcription (the process of translating audio recordings of language to text) has come a long way in recent years. But how do the errors made during machine transcription compare to the errors made by a human transcriber? Find out in this episode!

A sequence to sequence (or seq2seq) model is neural architecture used for translation (and other tasks) which consists of an encoder and a decoder.

The encoder/decoder architecture has obvious promise for machine translation, and has been successfully applied this way. Encoding an input to a small number of hidden nodes which can effectively be decoded to a matching string requires machine learning to learn an efficient representation of the essence of the strings.

In addition to translation, seq2seq models have been used in a number of other NLP tasks such as summarization and image captioning.

Related Links

• tf-seq2seq

• Describing Multimedia Content using Attention-based Encoder--Decoder Networks

• Show and Tell: A Neural Image Caption Generator

• Attend to You: Personalized Image Captioning with Context Sequence Memory Networks

Kyle interviews Julia Silge about her path into data science, her book Text Mining with R, and some of the ways in which she's used natural language processing in projects both personal and professional.

• https://stack-survey-2018.glitch.me/
• https://stackoverflow.blog/2017/03/28/realistic-developer-fiction/

One of the most challenging NLP tasks is natural language understanding and reasoning. How can we construct algorithms that are able to achieve human level understanding of text and be able to answer general questions about it?

This is truly an open problem, and one with the bAbI dataset has been constructed to facilitate. bAbI presents a variety of different language understanding and reasoning tasks and exists as benchmark for comparing approaches.

In this episode, Kyle talks to Rasmus Berg Palm about his recent paper Recurrent Relational Networks

In the first half of this episode, Kyle speaks with Marc-Alexandre Côté and Wendy Tay about Text World.  Text World is an engine that simulates text adventure games.  Developers are encouraged to try out their reinforcement learning skills building agents that can programmatically interact with the generated text adventure games.

In the second half of this episode, Kyle interviews Kevin Patel about his paper Towards Lower Bounds on Number of Dimensions for Word Embeddings.  In this research, the explore an important question of how many hidden nodes to use when creating a word embedding.

Word2vec is an unsupervised machine learning model which is able to capture semantic information from the text it is trained on. The model is based on neural networks. Several large organizations like Google and Facebook have trained word embeddings (the result of word2vec) on large corpora and shared them for others to use.

The key algorithmic ideas involved in word2vec is the continuous bag of words model (CBOW). In this episode, Kyle uses excerpts from the 1983 cinematic masterpiece War Games, and challenges Linhda to guess a word Kyle leaves out of the transcript. This is similar to how word2vec is trained. It trains a neural network to predict a hidden word based on the words that appear before and after the missing location.

In a recent paper, Leveraging Discourse Information Effectively for Authorship Attribution, authors Su Wang, Elisa Ferracane, and Raymond J. Mooney describe a deep learning methodology for predict which of a collection of authors was the author of a given document.

The earliest efforts to apply machine learning to natural language tended to convert every token (every word, more or less) into a unique feature. While techniques like stemming may have cut the number of unique tokens down, researchers always had to face a problem that was highly dimensional. Naive Bayes algorithm was celebrated in NLP applications because of its ability to efficiently process highly dimensional data.

Of course, other algorithms were applied to natural language tasks as well. While different algorithms had different strengths and weaknesses to different NLP problems, an early paper titled Scaling to Very Very Large Corpora for Natural Language Disambiguation popularized one somewhat surprising idea. For many NLP tasks, simply providing a large corpus of examples not only improved accuracy, but it also showed that asymptotically, some algorithms yielded more improvement from working on very, very large corpora.

Although not explicitly in about NLP, the noteworthy paper The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Data emphasizes this point further while paying homage to the classic treatise The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences.

In this episode, Kyle shares a few thoughts along these lines with Linh Da.

The discussion winds up with a brief introduction to Zipf's law. When applied to natural language, Zipf's law states that the frequency of any given word in a corpus (regardless of language) will be proportional to its rank in the frequency table.

Github is many things besides source control. It's a social network, even though not everyone realizes it. It's a vast repository of code. It's a ticketing and project management system. And of course, it has search as well.

In this episode, Kyle interviews Hamel Husain about his research into semantic code search.

This episode reboots our podcast with the theme of Natural Language Processing for the next few months.

We begin with introductions of Yoshi and Linh Da and then get into a broad discussion about natural language processing: what it is, what some of the classic problems are, and just a bit on approaches.

Finishing out the show is an interview with Lucy Park about her work on the KoNLPy library for Korean NLP in Python.

If you want to share your NLP project, please join our Slack channel.  We're eager to see what listeners are working on!

http://konlpy.org/en/latest/

Kyle shares a few thoughts on mistakes observed by job applicants and also shares a few procedural insights listeners at early stages in their careers might find value in.

Epicac by Kurt Vonnegut.

In today's episode, Kyle chats with Alexander Zhebrak, CTO of Insilico Medicine, Inc.

Insilico self describes as artificial intelligence for drug discovery, biomarker development, and aging research.

The conversation in this episode explores the ways in which machine learning, in particular, deep learning, is contributing to the advancement of drug discovery. This happens not just through research but also through software development. Insilico works on data pipelines and tools like MOSES, a benchmarking platform to support research on machine learning for drug discovery. The MOSES platform provides a standardized benchmarking dataset, a set of open-sourced models with unified implementation, and metrics to evaluate and assess their performance.

At the NeurIPS 2018 conference, Stradigi AI premiered a training game which helps players learn American Sign Language.

This episode brings the first of many interviews conducted at NeurIPS 2018.

In this episode, Kyle interviews Chief Data Scientist Carolina Bessega about the deep learning architecture used in this project.

The Stradigi AI team was exhibiting a project called the American Sign Language (ASL) Alphabet Game at the recent NeurIPS 2018 conference. They also published a detailed blog post about how they built the system found here.

 This week, Kyle interviews Scott Nestler on the topic of Data Ethics.

Today, no ubiquitous, formal ethical protocol exists for data science, although some have been proposed. One example is the INFORMS Ethics Guidelines.

Guidelines like this are rather informal compared to other professions, like the Hippocratic Oath. Yet not every profession requires such a formal commitment.

In this episode, Scott shares his perspective on a variety of ethical questions specific to data and analytics.

Kyle interviews Mick West, author of Escaping the Rabbit Hole: How to Debunk Conspiracy Theories Using Facts, Logic, and Respect about the nature of conspiracy theories, the people that believe them, and how to help people escape the belief in false information.

Mick is also the creator of metabunk.org.

The discussion explores conspiracies like chemtrails, 9/11 conspiracy theories, JFK assassination theories, and the flat Earth theory. We live in a complex world in which no person can have a sufficient understanding of all topics. It's only natural that some percentage of people will eventually adopt fringe beliefs. In this book, Mick provides a fantastic guide to helping individuals who have fallen into a rabbit hole of pseudo-science or fake news.

Fake news attempts to lead readers/listeners/viewers to conclusions that are not descriptions of reality.  They do this most often by presenting false premises, but sometimes by presenting flawed logic.

An argument is only sound and valid if the conclusions are drawn directly from all the state premises, and if there exists a path of logical reasoning leading from those premises to the conclusion.

While creating a theorem does feel to most mathematicians as a creative act of discovery, some theorems have been proven using nothing more than search.  All the "rules" of logic (like modus ponens) can be encoded into a computer program.  That program can start from the premises, applying various combinations of rules to inference new information, and check to see if the program has inference the desired conclusion or its negation.  This does seem like a mechanical process when painted in this light.  However, several challenges exist preventing any theorem prover from instantly solving all the open problems in mathematics.  In this episode, we discuss a bit about what those challenges are.

Fake news can be responded to with fact-checking. However, it's easier to create fake news than the fact check it.

Full Fact is the UK's independent fact-checking organization. In this episode, Kyle interviews Mevan Babakar, head of automated fact-checking at Full Fact.

Our discussion talks about the process and challenges in doing fact-checking. Full Fact has been exploring ways in which machine learning can assist in automating parts of the fact-checking process. Progress in areas like this allows journalists to be more effective and rapid in responding to new information.

In mathematics, truth is universal.  In data, truth lies in the where clause of the query.

As large organizations have grown to rely on their data more significantly for decision making, a common problem is not being able to agree on what the data is.

As the volume and velocity of data grow, challenges emerge in answering questions with precision.  A simple question like "what was the revenue yesterday" could become mired in details.  Did your query account for transactions that haven't been finalized?  If I query again later, should I exclude orders that have been returned since the last query?  What time zone should I use?  The list goes on and on.

In any large enough organization, you are also likely to find multiple copies if the same data.  Independent systems might record the same information with slight variance.  Sometimes systems will import data from other systems; a process which could become out of sync for several reasons.

For any sufficiently large system, answering analytical questions with precision can become a non-trivial challenge.  The business intelligence community aspires to provide a "single source of truth" - one canonical place where data consumers can go to get precise, reliable, and trusted answers to their analytical questions.

Probably not. Kyle asks Gerry Zhang who works at the Berkeley SETI Research Center about this possibility and more importantly, about his applications of deep learning to detect fast radio bursts.

Radio astronomy captures observations from space which can be converted to a waterfall chart or spectrogram. These data structures can be formatted in a visual way and also make great candidates for applying deep learning to the task of detecting the fast radio bursts.

This episode explores the root concept of what it is to be Bayesian: describing knowledge of a system probabilistically, having an appropriate prior probability, know how to weigh new evidence, and following Bayes's rule to compute the revised distribution.

We present this concept in a few different contexts but primarily focus on how our bird Yoshi sends signals about her food preferences.

Like many animals, Yoshi is a complex creature whose preferences cannot easily be summarized by a straightforward utility function the way they might in a textbook reinforcement learning problem. Her preferences are sequential, conditional, and evolving. We may not always know what our bird is thinking, but we have some good indicators that give us clues.

This is our interview with Dorje Brody about his recent paper with David Meier, How to model fake news. This paper uses the tools of communication theory and a sub-topic called filtering theory to describe the mathematical basis for an information channel which can contain fake news.

Thanks to our sponsor Gartner.