The Data Skeptic Podcast features interviews and discussion of topics related to data science, statistics, machine learning, artificial intelligence and the like, all from the perspective of applying critical thinking and the scientific method to evaluate the veracity of claims and efficacy of approaches.
The podcast Data Skeptic is created by Kyle Polich. The podcast and the artwork on this page are embedded on this page using the public podcast feed (RSS).
Is it better to have your work team fully connected or sparsely connected?
In this episode we'll try to answer this question and more with our guest Hiroki Sayama, a SUNY Distinguished Professor and director of the Center for Complex Systems at Binghamton University.
Hiroki delves into the applications of network science in organizational structures and innovation dynamics by showing his recent work of extracting network structures from organizational charts to enable insights into decision-making and performance, He'll also cover how network connectivity impacts team creativity and innovation.
Key insights include how the structure of organizational networks—such as the depth of hierarchy or proximity to leadership—can influence corporate performance and how sparse network connectivity fosters more diverse and innovative ideas than fully connected networks.
A man goes into a bar… This is the beginning of a riddle that our guest, Yoed Kennet, an assistant professor at the Technion's Faculty of Data and Decision Sciences, uses to measure creativity in subjects.
In our talk, Yoed speaks about how to combine cognitive science and network science to explore the complexities and decode the mysteries of the human mind.
The listeners will learn how network science provides tools to map and analyze human memory, revealing how problem-solving and creativity emerge from changes in semantic memory structures.
Key insights include the role of memory restructuring during moments of insight, the connection between semantic networks and creative thinking, and how understanding these processes can improve problem-solving and analogical reasoning.
Real-life applications span enhancing creativity in the workplace, building tools to combat cognitive rigidity in aging, and improving learning strategies by fostering richer, more flexible mental networks.
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In this episode, Garima Agrawal, a senior researcher and AI consultant, brings her years of experience in data science and artificial intelligence. Listeners will learn about the evolving role of knowledge graphs in augmenting large language models (LLMs) for domain-specific tasks and how these tools can mitigate issues like hallucination in AI systems.
Key insights include how LLMs can leverage knowledge graphs to improve accuracy by integrating domain expertise, reducing hallucinations, and enabling better reasoning.
Real-life applications discussed range from enhancing customer support systems with efficient FAQ retrieval to creating smarter AI-driven decision-making pipelines.
Garima’s work highlights how blending static knowledge representation with dynamic AI models can lead to cost-effective, scalable, and human-centered AI solutions.
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In this episode, Bnaya Gross, a Fulbright postdoctoral fellow at the Center for Complex Network Research at Northwestern University, explores the transformative applications of network science in fields ranging from infrastructure to medicine, by studying the interactions between networks ("a network of networks").
Listeners will learn how interdependent networks provide a framework for understanding cascading failures, such as power outages, and how these insights transfer to physical systems like superconducting materials and biological networks.
Key takeaways include understanding how dependencies between networks can amplify vulnerabilities, applying these principles to create resilient infrastructure systems, and using network medicine to uncover relationships between diseases, potential drug repurposing and the process of aging.
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Our guests, Erwan Le Merrer and Gilles Tredan, are long-time collaborators in graph theory and distributed systems. They share their expertise on applying graph-based approaches to understanding both large language model (LLM) hallucinations and shadow banning on social media platforms.
In this episode, listeners will learn how graph structures and metrics can reveal patterns in algorithmic behavior and platform moderation practices.
Key insights include the use of graph theory to evaluate LLM outputs, uncovering patterns in hallucinated graphs that might hint at the underlying structure and training data of the models, and applying epidemic models to analyze the uneven spread of shadow banning on Twitter.
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In this episode, Šimon Mandlík, a PhD candidate at the Czech Technical University will talk with us about leveraging machine learning and graph-based techniques for cybersecurity applications.
We'll learn how graphs are used to detect malicious activity in networks, such as identifying harmful domains and executable files by analyzing their relationships within vast datasets.
This will include the use of hierarchical multi-instance learning (HML) to represent JSON-based network activity as graphs and the advantages of analyzing connections between entities (like clients, domains etc.).
Our guest shows that while other graph methods (such as GNN or Label Propagation) lack in scalability or having trouble with heterogeneous graphs, his method can tackle them because of the "locality assumption" – fraud will be a local phenomenon in the graph – and by relying on this assumption, we can get faster and more accurate results.
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Thibaut Vidal, a professor at Polytechnique Montreal, specializes in leveraging advanced algorithms and machine learning to optimize supply chain operations. In this episode, listeners will learn how graph-based approaches can transform supply chains by enabling more efficient routing, districting, and decision-making in complex logistical networks.
Key insights include the application of Graph Neural Networks to predict delivery costs, with potential to improve districting strategies for companies like UPS or Amazon and overcoming limitations of traditional heuristic methods.
Thibaut’s work underscores the potential for GNN to reduce costs, enhance operational efficiency, and provide better working conditions for teams through improved route familiarity and workload balance.
Our guest in this episode is David Tench, a Grace Hopper postdoctoral fellow at Lawrence Berkeley National Labs, who specializes in scalable graph algorithms and compression techniques to tackle massive datasets.
In this episode, we will learn how his techniques enable real-time analysis of large datasets, such as particle tracking in physics experiments or social network analysis, by reducing storage requirements while preserving critical structural properties.
David also challenges the common belief that giant graphs are sparse by pointing to a potential bias: Maybe because of the challenges that exist in analyzing large dense graphs, we only see datasets of sparse graphs? The truth is out there…
David encourages you to reach out to him if you have a large scale graph application that you don't currently have the capacity to deal with using your current methods and your current hardware. He promises to "look for the hammer that might help you with your nail".
In this episode, Dave Bechberger, principal Graph Architect at AWS and author of "Graph Databases in Action", brings deep insights into the field of graph databases and their applications.
Together we delve into specific scenarios in which Graph Databases provide unique solutions, such as in the fraud industry, and learn how to optimize our DB for questions around connections, such as "How are these entities related?" or "What patterns of interaction indicate anomalies?"
This discussion sheds light on when organizations should consider adopting graph databases, particularly for cases that require scalable analysis of highly interconnected data and provides practical insights into leveraging graph databases for performance improvements in tasks that traditional relational databases struggle with.
In this episode, Adam Machowczyk, a PhD student at the University of Leicester, specializes in graph rewriting and its intersection with machine learning, particularly Graph Neural Networks.
Adam explains how graph rewriting provides a formalized method to modify graphs using rule-based transformations, allowing for tasks like graph completion, attribute prediction, and structural evolution.
Bridging the worlds of graph rewriting and machine learning, Adam's work aspire to open new possibilities for creating adaptive, scalable models capable of solving challenges that traditional methods struggle with, such as handling heterogeneous graphs or incorporating incremental updates efficiently.
Real-life applications discussed include using graph transformations to improve recommender systems in social networks, molecular research in chemistry, and enhancing IoT network analysis.
In this episode, the data scientist Wentao Su shares his experience in AB testing on social media platforms like LinkedIn and TikTok.
We talk about how network science can enhance AB testing by accounting for complex social interactions, especially in environments where users are both viewers and content creators. These interactions might cause a "spillover effect" meaning a possible influence across experimental groups, which can distort results.
To mitigate this effect, our guest presents heuristics and algorithms they developed ("one-degree label propagation”) to allow for good results on big data with minimal running time and so optimize user experience and advertiser performance in social media platforms.
Alex Bisberg, a PhD candidate at the University of Southern California, specializes in network science and game analytics, with a focus on understanding social and competitive success in multiplayer online games.
In this episode, listeners can expect to learn from a network perspective about players interactions and patterns of behavior. Through his research on games, Alex sheds light on how network analysis and statistical tests might explain positive contagious behaviors, such as generosity, and explore the dynamics of collaboration and competition in gaming environments. These insights offer valuable lessons not only for game developers in enhancing player experience, engagement and retention, but also for anyone interested in understanding the ways that virtual interactions shape social networks and behavior.
In this episode we discuss the GitHub Collaboration Network with Behnaz Moradi-Jamei, assistant professor at James Madison University. As a network scientist, Behnaz created and analyzed a network of about 700,000 contributors to Github's repository. The network of collaborators on GitHub was created by identifying developers (nodes) and linking them with edges based on shared contributions to the same repositories. This means that if two developers contributed to the same project, an edge (connection) was formed between them, representing a collaborative relationship network consisting of 32 million such connections. By using algorithms for Community Detection, Behnaz's analysis reveals insights into how developer communities form, function, and evolve, that can be used as guidance for OSS community managers.
We are joined by Abhishek Paudel, a PhD Student at George Mason University with a research focus on robotics, machine learning, and planning under uncertainty, using graph-based methods to enhance robot behavior. He explains how graph-based approaches can model environments, capture spatial relationships, and provide a framework for integrating multiple levels of planning and decision-making.
We are joined by Maciej Besta, a senior researcher of sparse graph computations and large language models at the Scalable Parallel Computing Lab (SPCL). In this episode, we explore the intersection of graph theory and high-performance computing (HPC), Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) and LLMs.
In this episode, we sit down with Yuanyuan Tian, a principal scientist manager at Microsoft Gray Systems Lab, to discuss the evolving role of graph databases in various industries such as fraud detection in finance and insurance, security, healthcare, and supply chain optimization.
Our new season "Graphs and Networks" begins here! We are joined by new co-host Asaf Shapira, a network analysis consultant and the podcaster of NETfrix – the network science podcast. Kyle and Asaf discuss ideas to cover in the season and explore Asaf's work in the field.
Join us for our capstone episode on the Animal Intelligence season. We recap what we loved, what we learned, and things we wish we had gotten to spend more time on. This is a great episode to see how the podcast is produced. Now that the season is ending, our current co-host, Becky, is moving to emeritus status. In this last installment we got to spend a little more time getting to know Becky and where her work will take her after this. Did Data Skeptic inspire her to learn more about machine learning? Tune in and find out.
David Obembe, a recent University of Tartu graduate, discussed his Masters thesis on integrating LLMs with process mining tools. He explained how process mining uses event logs to create maps that identify inefficiencies in business processes. David shared his research on LLMs' potential to enhance process mining, including experiments evaluating their performance and future improvements using Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG).
Our guest today is Risa Shinoda, a PhD student at Kyoto University Agricultural Systems Engineering Lab, where she applies computer vision techniques.
She talked about the OpenAnimalTracks dataset and what it was used for. The dataset helps researchers predict animal footprint. She also discussed how she built a model for predicting tracks of animals. She shared the algorithms used and the accuracy they achieved. She also discussed further improvement opportunities for the model.
This episode features an interview with Mélisande Teng, a PhD candidate at Université de Montréal. Her research lies in the intersection of remote sensing and computer vision for biodiversity monitoring.
In this interview with author Deborah Gordon, Kyle asks questions about the mechanisms at work in an ant colony and what ants might teach us about how to build artificial intelligence. Ants are surprisingly adaptive creatures whose behavior emerges from their complex interactions. Aspects of network theory and the statistical nature of ant behavior are just some of the interesting details you'll get in this episode.
This season it’s become clear that computing skills are vital for working in the natural sciences. In this episode, we were fortunate to speak with Madlen Wilmes, co-author of the book "Computing Skills for Biologists: A Toolbox". We discussed the book and why it’s a great resource for students and teachers. In addition to the book, Madlen shared her experience and advice on transitioning from academia to an industry career and how data analytic skills transfer to jobs that your professionals might not always consider. Join us and learn more about the book and careers using transferable skills.
In this episode, we talked shop with Hager Radi about her biodiversity monitoring work. While biodiversity modeling may sound simple, count organisms and mark their location, there is a lot more to it than that! Incomplete and biased data can make estimations hard. There are also many species with very few observations in the wild. Using machine learning and remote sensing data, scientists can build models that predict species distributions with limited data. Listen in and hear about Hager’s work tackling these challenges and the tools she has built.
Today, Ashay Aswale and Tony Lopez shared their work on swarm robotics and what they have learned from ants. Robotic swarms must solve the same problems that eusocial insects do. What if your pheromone trail goes cold? What if you’re getting bad information from a bad-actor within the swarm? Answering these questions can help tackle serious robotic challenges. For example, a swarm of robots can lose a few members to accidents and malfunctions, but a large robot cannot. Additionally, a swarm could be host to many castes like an ant colony. Specialization with redundancy built in seems like a win-win! Tune in and hear more about this fascinating topic.
During this season we have talked with researchers working to utilize machine learning for behavioral observations. In previous episodes, you have heard about the software people like Richard use, but you haven’t heard much from scientists modifying and using these tools for specific research cases. PhD student, Richard Vogg, is working with multi-camera set-ups to track lemurs and macaques solving puzzle boxes in the wild. His work is part of a larger movement to automate behavioral analyses of video data. Listen in and learn why this tech is useful and why multi-camera setups are a good idea for more reliably identifying poses and individual animals.
Generative AI can struggle to create realistic animals and 2D representations often have mistakes like extra limbs and tails. If 2D wasn’t hard enough, there are researchers working on generative 3D models. 3D models present an extra challenge because there is paucity of training datasets.In this episode, PhD students Sandeep and Oindrila walked us through their work on creating 3D animals using 2D data. Join us to learn about their pipelines, quality control, tie in with iNaturalist, and how this tech could streamline FX pipelines.
Today, we sat down with Dr. Ignacio Escalante Meza to learn about opiliones and treehoppers. Opiliones, known as “daddy long legs” in the US, are understudied arachnids known for their tenacious locomotor behavior, sociality, and chemical communication. Treehoppers communicate through the stems of plants using vibrations. They can signal danger, attract mates, and communicate with their offspring. Join us to learn how researchers turn their vibrations into sound waves and study what they have to say.
Human shipping operations have increased significantly in the past few decades. While that means international trade and cheap goods for humans, it also means the ocean has experienced an increase in noise pollution. This has a measurable negative impact on marine mammals and other aquatic life. Could mathematics be the solution? This interview explores how optimization techniques can guide voyage optimization in a way that handles multiple optimization objectives including fuel cost and sound reduction.
Robbie Moon from the Georgia Tech Scheller College of Business joins us to discuss the analysis of unstructured data and the application of NLP methodologies towards financial data.
Have you ever participated in citizen science? Do you want to? One of the most popular platforms for crowdsourcing biodiversity data is iNaturalist. In addition to being a great science tool, the iNaturalist app can help you identify the organisms you encounter every day. We talked to Executive Director Scott Laurie about how scientists use iNaturalist. We also got to discuss what makes iNaturalist’s AI species recognition so good, and how citizen scientists are constantly providing high-quality training data. Listen in and learn how this fun-to-use tool works, where it's headed, and how you can get involved.
Do you code or are you interested in learning to code? Join us today and hear from three individuals that are at very different stages of their coding journeys. Becky Hansis-O’Neill (also our co-host this season) shares her experiences as a newbie who wants to learn more. Dr. Malia Gehan, a self-taught developer interested in studying plant phenotypes, explains why and how she and her colleagues learned to code and developed PlantCV. Finally, Dr. John Wilmes discusses his work as a professional mathematician and Machine Learning Research Engineer. Whether you are thinking about learning to code or an expert, we’re sure you will see a bit of yourself in this episode.
You’ve heard of Human Computer Interaction (HCI), now get ready for Animal Computer Interaction (ACI). Ilyena has made a career developing computer interfaces for non-human animals. She has worked with dogs, parrots, primates, and even giraffes. This is challenging because animals have a wide range of abilities and preferences. Parrots, for example, use their tongues to make selections on touchscreens. Listen in on our conversation and learn about interface development and testing with animals and how technology may improve animal welfare.
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
## Resources
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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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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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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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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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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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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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.
Check out our website for extended show notes! Thanks to our Sponsors:ClearML is an open-source MLOps solution users love to customize, helping you easily Track, Orchestrate, and Automate ML workflows at scale.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.
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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.
Check out our website for extended show notes and images! Thanks to our Sponsors: Visit Weights and Biases mention Data Skeptic when you request a demo! & Nomad Data In the image below, you can see the k-means clustering segmentation results for the same image with the values of 2, 4, 6, and 8 for k.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.
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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.
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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/
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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/
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
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
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.
Check out Sam's IBM statistics/ML blog at: http://www.research.ibm.com/haifa/dept/vst/ML-QA.shtmlJulien 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
Bird Statistics
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.
MentionsToday 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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When your business is ready to make that next hire, find the right person with LinkedIn Jobs. Just visit LinkedIn.com/DATASKEPTIC to post a job for free! Terms and conditions applyYuqi 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
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
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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
A Difficulty in the Concept of Social Welfare by Kenneth J. Arrow Three Brief Proofs of Arrows Impossibility Theorem by John Geanakoplos Thank you to our sponsors! Better Help is much more affordable than traditional offline counseling, and financial aid is available! Get started in less than 24 hours. Data Skeptic listeners get 10% off your first month when you visit: betterhelp.com/dataskeptic Let Springboard School of Data jumpstart your data career! With 100% online and remote schooling, supported by a vast network of professional mentors with a tuition-back guarantee, you can't go wrong. Up to twenty $500 scholarships will be awarded to Data Skeptic listeners. Check them out at springboard.com/dataskeptic and enroll using code: DATASKAs 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
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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:
Check out: https://simson.net/page/Differential_privacy
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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
Thank you to our sponsor Monday.com! Their apps challenge is still accepting submissions! find more information at monday.com/dataskeptic
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.
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)…
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!
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.
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.
MusicOur 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".
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.
Related LinksThe paper will be presented at ICCV 2019
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
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.
Related LinksOne 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!
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.
Without getting into definitions, we have an intuitive sense of what a "community" is. The Louvain Method for Community Detection is one of the best known mathematical techniques designed to detect communities.
This method requires typical graph data in which people are nodes and edges are their connections. It's easy to imagine this data in the context of Facebook or LinkedIn but the technique applies just as well to any other dataset like cellular phone calling records or pen-pals.
The Louvain Method provides a means of measuring the strength of any proposed community based on a concept known as Modularity. Modularity is a value in the range that measure the density of links internal to a community against links external to the community. The quite palatable assumption here is that a genuine community would have members that are strongly interconnected.
A community is not necessarily the same thing as a clique; it is not required that all community members know each other. Rather, we simply define a community as a graph structure where the nodes are more connected to each other than connected to people outside the community.
It's only natural that any person in a community has many connections to people outside that community. The more a community has internal connections over external connections, the stronger that community is considered to be. The Louvain Method elegantly captures this intuitively desirable quality.
In this episode, our guest is Dan Kahan about his research into how people consume and interpret science news.
In an era of fake news, motivated reasoning, and alternative facts, important questions need to be asked about how people understand new information.
Dan is a member of the Cultural Cognition Project at Yale University, a group of scholars interested in studying how cultural values shape public risk perceptions and related policy beliefs.
In a paper titled Cultural cognition of scientific consensus, Dan and co-authors Hank Jenkins‐Smith and Donald Braman discuss the "cultural cognition of risk" and establish experimentally that individuals tend to update their beliefs about scientific information through a context of their pre-existing cultural beliefs. In this way, topics such as climate change, nuclear power, and conceal-carry handgun permits often result in people.
The findings of this and other studies tell us that on topics such as these, even when people are given proper information about a scientific consensus, individuals still interpret those results through the lens of their pre-existing cultural beliefs.
The ‘cultural cognition of risk’ refers to the tendency of individuals to form risk perceptions that are congenial to their values. The study presents both correlational and experimental evidence confirming that cultural cognition shapes individuals’ beliefs about the existence of scientific consensus, and the process by which they form such beliefs, relating to climate change, the disposal of nuclear wastes, and the effect of permitting concealed possession of handguns. The implications of this dynamic for science communication and public policy‐making are discussed.
A false discovery rate (FDR) is a methodology that can be useful when struggling with the problem of multiple comparisons.
In any experiment, if the experimenter checks more than one dependent variable, then they are making multiple comparisons. Naturally, if you make enough comparisons, you will eventually find some correlation.
Classically, people applied the Bonferroni Correction. In essence, this procedure dictates that you should lower your p-value (raise your standard of evidence) by a specific amount depending on the number of variables you're considering. While effective, this methodology is strict about preventing false positives (type i errors). You aren't likely to find evidence for a hypothesis that is actually false using Bonferroni. However, your exuberance to avoid type i errors may have introduced some type ii errors. There could be some hypotheses that are actually true, which you did not notice.
This episode covers an alternative known as false discovery rates. The essence of this method is to make more specific adjustments to your expectation of what p-value is sufficient evidence.
Digital videos can be described as sequences of still images and associated audio. Audio is easy to fake. What about video?
A video can easily be broken down into a sequence of still images replayed rapidly in sequence. In this context, videos are simply very high dimensional sequences of observations, ripe for input into a machine learning algorithm.
The availability of commodity hardware, clever algorithms, and well-designed software to implement those algorithms at scale make it possible to do machine learning on video, but to what end? There are many answers, one interesting approach being the technology called "DeepFakes".
The Deep of Deepfakes refers to Deep Learning, and the fake refers to the function of the software - to take a real video of a human being and digitally alter their face to match someone else's face. Here are two examples:
This software produces curiously convincing fake videos. Yet, there's something slightly off about them. Surely machine learning can be used to determine real from fake... right? Siwei Lyu and his collaborators certainly thought so and demonstrated this idea by identifying a novel, detectable feature which was commonly missing from videos produced by the Deep Fakes software.
In this episode, we discuss this use case for deep learning, detecting fake videos, and the threat of fake videos in the future.
In this episode, Kyle reviews what we've learned so far in our series on Fake News and talks briefly about where we're going next.
Two weeks ago we discussed click through rates or CTRs and their usefulness and limits as a metric. Today, we discuss a related metric known as quality score.
While that phrase has probably been used to mean dozens of different things in different contexts, our discussion focuses around the idea of quality score encountered in Search Engine Marketing (SEM). SEM is the practice of purchasing keyword targeted ads shown to customers using a search engine.
Most SEM is managed via an auction mechanism - the advertiser states the price they are willing to pay, and in real time, the search engine will serve users advertisements and charge the advertiser.
But how to search engines decide who to show and what price to charge? This is a complicated question requiring a multi-part answer to address completely. In this episode, we focus on one part of that equation, which is the quality score the search engine assigns to the ad in context. This quality score is calculated via several factors including crawling the destination page (also called the landing page) and predicting how applicable the content found there is to the ad itself.
Kyle interviews Steven Sloman, Professor in the school of Cognitive, Linguistic, and Psychological Sciences at Brown University. Steven is co-author of The Knowledge Illusion: Why We Never Think Alone and Causal Models: How People Think about the World and Its Alternatives. Steven shares his perspective and research into how people process information and what this teaches us about the existence of and belief in fake news.
A Click Through Rate (CTR) is the proportion of clicks to impressions of some item of content shared online. This terminology is most commonly used in digital advertising but applies just as well to content websites might choose to feature on their homepage or in search results.
A CTR is intuitively appealing as a metric for optimization. After all, if users are disinterested in some content, under normal circumstances, it's reasonable to assume they would ignore the content, rather than clicking on it. On the other hand, the best content is likely to elicit a high CTR as users signal their interest by following the hyperlink.
In the advertising world, a website could charge per impression, per click, or per action. Both impression and action based pricing have asymmetrical results for the publisher and advertiser. However, paying per click (CPC based advertising) seems to strike a nice balance. For this and other numeric reasons, many digital advertising mechanisms (such as Google Adwords) use CPC as the payment mechanism.
When charging per click, an advertising platform will value a high CTR when selecting which ad to show. As we learned in our episode on Goodhart's Law, once a measure is turned into a target, it ceases to be a good measure. While CTR alone does not entirely drive most online advertising algorithms, it does play an important role. Thus, advertisers are incentivized to adopt strategies that maximize CTR.
On the surface, this sounds like a great idea: provide internet users what they are looking for, and be awarded with their attention and lower advertising costs. However, one possible unintended consequence of this type of optimization is the creation of ads which are designed solely to generate clicks, regardless of if the users are happy with the page they visit after clicking a link.
So, at least in part, websites that optimize for higher CTRs are going to favor content that does a good job getting viewers to click it. Getting a user to view a page is not totally synonymous with getting a user to appreciate the content of a page. The gap between the algorithmic goal and the user experience could be one of the factors that has promoted the creation of fake news.
The scale and frequency with which information can be distributed on social media makes the problem of fake news a rapidly metastasizing issue. To do any content filtering or labeling demands an algorithmic solution.
In today's episode, Kyle interviews Kai Shu and Mike Tamir about their independent work exploring the use of machine learning to detect fake news.
Kai Shu and his co-authors published Fake News Detection on Social Media: A Data Mining Perspective, a research paper which both surveys the existing literature and organizes the structure of the problem in a robust way.
Mike Tamir led the development of fakerfact.org, a website and Chrome/Firefox plugin which leverages machine learning to try and predict the category of a previously unseen web page, with categories like opinion, wiki, and fake news.
If you prepared a list of creatures regarded as highly intelligent, it's unlikely ants would make the cut. This is expected, as on an individual level, ants do not generally display behavior that most humans would regard as intelligence. In fact, it might even be true that most species of ants are unable to learn. Despite this, ant colonies have evolved excellent survival mechanisms through the careful orchestration of ants.
With publications such as "Prior exposure increases perceived accuracy of fake news", "Lazy, not biased: Susceptibility to partisan fake news is better explained by lack of reasoning than by motivated reasoning", and "The science of fake news", Gordon Pennycook is asking and answering analytical questions about the nature of human intuition and fake news.
Gordon appeared on Data Skeptic in 2016 to discuss people's ability to recognize pseudo-profound bullshit. This episode explores his work in fake news.
Today's spam filters are advanced data driven tools. They rely on a variety of techniques to effectively and often seamlessly filter out junk email from good email.
Whitelists, blacklists, traffic analysis, network analysis, and a variety of other tools are probably employed by most major players in this area. Naturally content analysis can be an especially powerful tool for detecting spam.
Given the binary nature of the problem ( or ) its clear that this is a great problem to use machine learning to solve. In order to apply machine learning, you first need a labelled training set. Thankfully, many standard corpora of labelled spam data are readily available. Further, if you're working for a company with a spam filtering problem, often asking users to self-moderate or flag things as spam can be an effective way to generate a large amount of labels for "free".
With a labeled dataset in hand, a data scientist working on spam filtering must next do feature engineering. This should be done with consideration of the algorithm that will be used. The Naive Bayesian Classifer has been a popular choice for detecting spam because it tends to perform pretty well on high dimensional data, unlike a lot of other ML algorithms. It also is very efficient to compute, making it possible to train a per-user Classifier if one wished to. While we might do some basic NLP tricks, for the most part, we can turn each word in a document (or perhaps each bigram or n-gram in a document) into a feature.
The Naive part of the Naive Bayesian Classifier stems from the naive assumption that all features in one's analysis are considered to be independent. If and are known to be independent, then . In other words, you just multiply the probabilities together. Shh, don't tell anyone, but this assumption is actually wrong! Certainly, if a document contains the word algorithm, it's more likely to contain the word probability than some randomly selected document. Thus, , violating the assumption. Despite this "flaw", the Naive Bayesian Classifier works remarkably will on many problems. If one employs the common approach of converting a document into bigrams (pairs of words instead of single words), then you can capture a good deal of this correlation indirectly.
In the final leg of the discussion, we explore the question of whether or not a Naive Bayesian Classifier would be a good choice for detecting fake news.
How does fake news get spread online? Its not just a matter of manipulating search algorithms. The social platforms for sharing play a major role in the distribution of fake news. But how significant of an impact can there be? How significantly can bots influence the spread of fake news?
In this episode, Kyle interviews Filippo Menczer, Professor of Computer Science and Informatics.
Fil is part of the Observatory on Social Media ([OSoMe][https://osome.iuni.iu.edu/tools/]). OSoMe are the creators of Hoaxy, Botometer, Fakey, and other tools for studying the spread of information on social media.
The interview explores these tools and the contributions Bots make to the spread of fake news.
This episode kicks off our new theme of "Fake News" with guests Robert Sheaffer and Brad Schwartz.
Fake news is a new label for an old idea. For our purposes, we will define fake news information created to deliberately mislead while masquerading as a legitimate, journalistic source of truth. It's become a modern topic of discussion as our cultures evolve to the fledgling mechanisms of communication introduced by online platforms.
What was the earliest incident of fake news? That's a question for which we may never find a satisfying answer. While not the earliest, we present a dramatization of an early example of fake news, which leads us into a discussion with UFO Skeptic Robert Sheaffer. Following that we get into our main interview with Brad Schwartz, author of Broadcast Hysteria: Orson Welles's War of the Worlds and the Art of Fake News.
We revisit the 2018 Microsoft Build in this episode, focusing on the latest ideas in DevOps. Kyle interviews Cloud Developer Advocates Damien Brady, Paige Bailey, and Donovan Brown to talk about DevOps and data science and databases.
For a data scientist, what does it even mean to “build”? Packaging and deployment are things that a data scientist doesn't normally have to consider in their day-to-day work. The process of making an AI app is usually divided into two streams of work: data scientists building machine learning models and app developers building the application for end users to consume.
DevOps includes all the parties involved in getting the application deployed and maintained and thinking about all the phases that follow and precede their part of the end solution. So what does DevOps mean for data science? Why should you adopt DevOps best practices?
In the first half, Paige and Damian share their views on what DevOps for data science would look like and how it can be introduced to provide continuous integration, delivery, and deployment of data science models. In the second half, Donovan and Damian talk about the DevOps life cycle of putting a database under version control and carrying out deployments through a release pipeline.
Logic is a fundamental of mathematical systems. It's roots are the values true and false and it's power is in what it's rules allow you to prove. Prepositional logic provides it's user variables. This episode gets into First Order Logic, an extension to prepositional logic.
An intelligent agent trained in a simulated environment may be prone to making mistakes in the real world due to discrepancies between the training and real-world conditions. The areas where an agent makes mistakes are hard to find, known as "blind spots," and can stem from various reasons. In this week’s episode, Kyle is joined by Ramya Ramakrishnan, a PhD candidate at MIT, to discuss the idea “blind spots” in reinforcement learning and approaches to discover them.
In this week’s episode, our host Kyle interviews Gokula Krishnan from ETH Zurich, about his recent contributions to defenses against adversarial attacks. The discussion centers around his latest paper, titled “Defending Against Adversarial Attacks by Leveraging an Entire GAN,” and his proposed algorithm, aptly named ‘Cowboy.’
On a long car ride, Linhda and Kyle record a short episode. This discussion is about transfer learning, a technique using in machine learning to leverage training from one domain to have a head start learning in another domain.
Transfer learning has some obvious appealing features. Take the example of an image recognition problem. There are now many widely available models that do general image recognition. Detecting that an image contains a "sofa" is an impressive feat. However, for a furniture company interested in more specific details, this classifier is absurdly general. Should the furniture company build a massive corpus of tagged photos, effectively starting from scratch? Or is there a way they can transfer the learnings from the general task to the specific one.
A general definition of transfer learning in machine learning is the use of taking some or all aspects of a pre-trained model as the basis to begin training a new model which a specific and potentially limited dataset.
Medical imaging is a highly effective tool used by clinicians to diagnose a wide array of diseases and injuries. However, it often requires exceptionally trained specialists such as radiologists to interpret accurately. In this episode of Data Skeptic, our host Kyle Polich is joined by Gabriel Maicas, a PhD candidate at the University of Adelaide, to discuss machine learning systems that can be used by radiologists to improve their accuracy and speed of diagnosis.
Thanks to our sponsor Galvanize
A Kalman Filter is a technique for taking a sequence of observations about an object or variable and determining the most likely current state of that object. In this episode, we discuss it in the context of tracking our lilac crowned amazon parrot Yoshi.
Kalman filters have many applications but the one of particular interest under our current theme of artificial intelligence is to efficiently update one's beliefs in light of new information.
The Kalman filter is based upon the Gaussian distribution. This distribution is described by two parameters: (the mean) and standard deviation. The procedure for updating these values in light of new information has a closed form. This means that it can be described with straightforward formulae and computed very efficiently.
You may gain a greater appreciation for Kalman filters by considering what would happen if you could not rely on the Gaussian distribution to describe your posterior beliefs. If determining the probability distribution over the variables describing some object cannot be efficiently computed, then by definition, maintaining the most up to date posterior beliefs can be a significant challenge.
Kyle will be giving a talk at Skeptical 2018 in Berkeley, CA on June 10.
There's so much to discuss on the AI side, it's hard to know where to begin. Luckily, Steve Guggenheimer, Microsoft’s corporate vice president of AI Business, and Carlos Pessoa, a software engineering manager for the company’s Cloud AI Platform, talked to Kyle about announcements related to AI in industry.
Today's interview is with the authors of the textbook Artificial Intelligence and Games.
Thanks to our sponsor The Great Courses.
This week's episode is a short primer on game theory.
For tickets to the free Data Skeptic meetup in Chicago on Tuesday, May 15 at the Mendoza College of Business (224 South Michigan Avenue, Suite 350), click here,
In this episode of Data Skeptic, Kyle chats with Jerry Schwarz from the Independent Investigations Group (IIG)'s SF Bay Area chapter about testing claims of the paranormal. The IIG is a volunteer-based organization dedicated to investigating paranormal or extraordinary claim from a scientific viewpoint. The group, headquartered at the Center for Inquiry-Los Angeles in Hollywood, offers a $100,000 prize to anyone who can show, under proper observing conditions, evidence of any paranormal, supernatural, or occult power or event.
CHICAGO Tues, May 15, 6pm. Come to our Data Skeptic meetup.
CHICAGO Saturday, May 19, 10am. Kyle will be giving a talk at the Chicago AI, Data Science, and Blockchain Conference 2018.
Our guest this week, Hector Levesque, joins us to discuss an alternative way to measure a machine’s intelligence, called Winograd Schemas Challenge. The challenge was proposed as a possible alternative to the Turing test during the 2011 AAAI Spring Symposium. The challenge involves a small reading comprehension test about common sense knowledge.
This week on Data Skeptic, we begin with a skit to introduce the topic of this show: The Imitation Game. We open with a scene in the distant future. The year is 2027, and a company called Shamony is announcing their new product, Ada, the most advanced artificial intelligence agent. To prove its superiority, the lead scientist announces that it will use the Turing Test that Alan Turing proposed in 1950. During this we introduce Turing’s “objections” outlined in his famous paper, “Computing Machinery and Intelligence.”
Following that, we talk with improv coach Holly Laurent on the art of improvisation and Peter Clark from the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence about question and answering algorithms.
In this episode, Kyle shares his perspective on the chatbot Eugene Goostman which (some claim) "passed" the Turing Test. As a second topic Kyle also does an intro of the Winograd Schema Challenge.
In this episode, Kyle and Linhda discuss the theory of formal languages. Any language can (theoretically) be a formal language. The requirement is that the language can be rigorously described as a set of strings which are considered part of the language. Those strings are any combination of alphabet characters in the given language.
The Loebner Prize is a competition in the spirit of the Turing Test. Participants are welcome to submit conversational agent software to be judged by a panel of humans. This episode includes interviews with Charlie Maloney, a judge in the Loebner Prize, and Bruce Wilcox, a winner of the Loebner Prize.
In this episode, Kyle chats with Vince from iv.ai and Heather Shapiro who works on the Microsoft Bot Framework. We solicit their advice on building a good chatbot both creatively and technically.
Our sponsor today is Warby Parker.
In this week’s episode, Kyle Polich interviews Pedro Domingos about his book, The Master Algorithm: How the quest for the ultimate learning machine will remake our world. In the book, Domingos describes what machine learning is doing for humanity, how it works and what it could do in the future. He also hints at the possibility of an ultimate learning algorithm, in which the machine uses it will be able to derive all knowledge — past, present, and future.
What's the best machine learning algorithm to use? I hear that XGBoost wins most of the Kaggle competitions that aren't won with deep learning. Should I just use XGBoost all the time? That might work out most of the time in practice, but a proof exists which tells us that there cannot be one true algorithm to rule them.
For a long time, physicians have recognized that the tools they have aren't powerful enough to treat complex diseases, like cancer. In addition to data science and models, clinicians also needed actual products — tools that physicians and researchers can draw upon to answer questions they regularly confront, such as “what clinical trials are available for this patient that I'm seeing right now?” In this episode, our host Kyle interviews guests Alex Grigorenko and Iker Huerga from Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center to talk about how data and technology can be used to prevent, control and ultimately cure cancer.
In a previous episode, we discussed Markov Decision Processes or MDPs, a framework for decision making and planning. This episode explores the generalization Partially Observable MDPs (POMDPs) which are an incredibly general framework that describes most every agent based system.
Making a decision is a complex task. Today's guest Dongho Kim discusses how he and his team at Prowler has been building a platform that will be accessible by way of APIs and a set of pre-made scripts for autonomous decision making based on probabilistic modeling, reinforcement learning, and game theory. The aim is so that an AI system could make decisions just as good as humans can.
In many real world situations, a person/agent doesn't necessarily know their own objectives or the mechanics of the world they're interacting with. However, if the agent receives rewards which are correlated with the both their actions and the state of the world, then reinforcement learning can be used to discover behaviors that maximize the reward earned.
In this week’s episode, Kyle is joined by Risto Miikkulainen, a professor of computer science and neuroscience at the University of Texas at Austin. They talk about evolutionary computation, its applications in deep learning, and how it’s inspired by biology. They also discuss some of the things Sentient Technologies is working on in stock and finances, retail, e-commerce and web design, as well as the technology behind it-- evolutionary algorithms.
Formally, an MDP is defined as the tuple containing states, actions, the transition function, and the reward function. This podcast examines each of these and presents them in the context of simple examples. Despite MDPs suffering from the curse of dimensionality, they're a useful formalism and a basic concept we will expand on in future episodes.
Last week on Data Skeptic, we visited the Laboratory of Neuroimaging, or LONI, at USC and learned about their data-driven platform that enables scientists from all over the world to share, transform, store, manage and analyze their data to understand neurological diseases better. We talked about how neuroscientists measure the brain using data from MRI scans, and how that data is processed and analyzed to understand the brain. This week, we'll continue the second half of our two-part episode on LONI.
Last year, Kyle had a chance to visit the Laboratory of Neuroimaging, or LONI, at USC, and learn about how some researchers are using data science to study the function of the brain. We’re going to be covering some of their work in two episodes on Data Skeptic. In this first part of our two-part episode, we'll talk about the data collection and brain imaging and the LONI pipeline. We'll then continue our coverage in the second episode, where we'll talk more about how researchers can gain insights about the human brain and their current challenges. Next week, we’ll also talk more about what all that has to do with data science machine learning and artificial intelligence. Joining us in this week’s episode are members of the LONI lab, which include principal investigators, Dr. Arthur Toga and Dr. Meng Law, and researchers, Farshid Sepherband, PhD and Ryan Cabeen, PhD.
In artificial intelligence, the term 'agent' is used to mean an autonomous, thinking agent with the ability to interact with their environment. An agent could be a person or a piece of software. In either case, we can describe aspects of the agent in a standard framework.
This episode kicks off the next theme on Data Skeptic: artificial intelligence. Kyle discusses what's to come for the show in 2018, why this topic is relevant, and how we intend to cover it.
We break format from our regular programming today and bring you an excerpt from Max Tegmark's book "Life 3.0". The first chapter is a short story titled "The Tale of the Omega Team". Audio excerpted courtesy of Penguin Random House Audio from LIFE 3.0 by Max Tegmark, narrated by Rob Shapiro. You can find "Life 3.0" at your favorite bookstore and the audio edition via penguinrandomhouseaudio.com.
Kyle will be giving a talk at the Monterey County SkeptiCamp 2018.
This week, our host Kyle Polich is joined by guest Tim Henderson from Google to talk about the computational complexity foundations of modern cryptography and the complexity issues that underlie the field. A key question that arises during the discussion is whether we should trust the security of modern cryptography.
This episode features an interview with Rigel Smiroldo recorded at NIPS 2017 in Long Beach California. We discuss data privacy, machine learning use cases, model deployment, and end-to-end machine learning.
When computers became commodity hardware and storage became incredibly cheap, we entered the era of so-call "big" data. Most definitions of big data will include something about not being able to process all the data on a single machine. Distributed computing is required for such large datasets.
Getting an algorithm to run on data spread out over a variety of different machines introduced new challenges for designing large-scale systems. First, there are concerns about the best strategy for spreading that data over many machines in an orderly fashion. Resolving ambiguity or disagreements across sources is sometimes required.
This episode discusses how such algorithms related to the complexity class NC.
In this week's episode, Scott Aaronson, a professor at the University of Texas at Austin, explains what a quantum computer is, various possible applications, the types of problems they are good at solving and much more. Kyle and Scott have a lively discussion about the capabilities and limits of quantum computers and computational complexity.
I sat down with Ali Ghodsi, CEO and found of Databricks, and John Chirapurath, GM for Data Platform Marketing at Microsoft related to the recent announcement of Azure Databricks.
When I heard about the announcement, my first thoughts were two-fold. First, the possibility of optimized integrations with existing Azure services. This would be a big benefit to heavy Azure users who also want to use Spark. Second, the benefits of active directory to control Databricks access for large enterprise.
Hear Ali and JG's thoughts and comments on what makes Azure Databricks a novel offering.
In this episode we discuss the complexity class of EXP-Time which contains algorithms which require $O(2^{p(n)})$ time to run. In other words, the worst case runtime is exponential in some polynomial of the input size. Problems in this class are even more difficult than problems in NP since you can't even verify a solution in polynomial time.
We mostly discuss Generalized Chess as an intuitive example of a problem in EXP-Time. Another well-known problem is determining if a given algorithm will halt in k steps. That extra condition of restricting it to k steps makes this problem distinct from Turing's original definition of the halting problem which is known to be intractable.
In this week's episode, host Kyle Polich interviews author Lance Fortnow about whether P will ever be equal to NP and solve all of life’s problems. Fortnow begins the discussion with the example question: Are there 100 people on Facebook who are all friends with each other? Even if you were an employee of Facebook and had access to all its data, answering this question naively would require checking more possibilities than any computer, now or in the future, could possibly do. The P/NP question asks whether there exists a more clever and faster algorithm that can answer this problem and others like it.
Algorithms with similar runtimes are said to be in the same complexity class. That runtime is measured in the how many steps an algorithm takes relative to the input size.
The class P contains all algorithms which run in polynomial time (basically, a nested for loop iterating over the input). NP are algorithms which seem to require brute force. Brute force search cannot be done in polynomial time, so it seems that problems in NP are more difficult than problems in P. I say it "seems" this way because, while most people believe it to be true, it has not been proven. This is the famous P vs. NP conjecture. It will be discussed in more detail in a future episode.
Given a solution to a particular problem, if it can be verified/checked in polynomial time, that problem might be in NP. If someone hands you a completed Sudoku puzzle, it's not difficult to see if they made any mistakes. The effort of developing the solution to the Sudoku game seems to be intrinsically more difficult. In fact, as far as anyone knows, in the general case of all possible examples of the game, it seems no strategy can do better on average than just random guessing.
This notion of random guessing the solution is where the N in NP comes from: Non-deterministic. Imagine a machine with a random input already written in its memory. Given enough such machines, one of them will have the right answer. If they all ran in parallel, one of them could verify it's input in polynomial time. This guess / provided input is often called a witness string.
NP is an important concept for many reasons. To me, the most reason to know about NP is a practical one. Depending on your goals or the goals of your employer, there are many challenging problems you may attempt to solve. If a problem you are trying to solve happens to be in NP, then you should consider the implications very carefully. Perhaps you'll be lucky and discover that your particular instance of the problem is easy. Sudoku is pretty easy if only 2 remaining squares need to be filled in. The traveling salesman problem is easy to solve if you live in a country where all roads for a ring with exactly one road in and out.
If the problem you wish to solve is not trivial, or if you will face many instances of the problem and expect some will not be trivial, then it's unlikely you'll be able to find the exact solution. Sure, maybe you can grab a bunch of commodity servers and try to scale the heck out of your attempt. Depending on the problem you're solving, that might just work. If you can out-purchase your problem in computing power, then problems in NP will surrender to you. But if your input size ever grows, it's unlikely you'll be able to keep up.
If your problem is intractable in this way, all is not lost. You might be able to find an approximate solution to your problem. Good enough is better than no solution at all, right? Most of the time, probably. However, some tremendous work has also been done studying topics like this. Are there problems which are not even approximable in polynomial time? What approximation techniques work best? Alas, those answers lie elsewhere.
This episode avoids a discussion of a few key points in order to keep the material accessible. If you find this interesting, you should next familiarize yourself with the notions of NP-Complete, NP-Hard, and co-NP. These are topics we won't necessarily get to in future episodes. Michael Sipser's Introduction to the Theory of Computation is a good resource.
In this episode, Professor Michael Kearns from the University of Pennsylvania joins host Kyle Polich to talk about the computational complexity of machine learning, complexity in game theory, and algorithmic fairness. Michael's doctoral thesis gave an early broad overview of computational learning theory, in which he emphasizes the mathematical study of efficient learning algorithms by machines or computational systems.
When we look at machine learning algorithms they are almost like meta-algorithms in some sense. For example, given a machine learning algorithm, it will look at some data and build some model, and it’s going to behave presumably very differently under different inputs. But does that mean we need new analytical tools? Or is a machine learning algorithm just the same thing as any deterministic algorithm, but just a little bit more tricky to figure out anything complexity-wise? In other words, is there some overlap between the good old-fashioned analysis of algorithms with the analysis of machine learning algorithms from a complexity viewpoint? And what is the difference between strategies for determining the complexity bounds on samples versus algorithms?
A big area of machine learning (and in the analysis of learning algorithms in general) Michael and Kyle discuss is the topic known as complexity regularization. Complexity regularization asks: How should one measure the goodness of fit and the complexity of a given model? And how should one balance those two, and how can one execute that in a scalable, efficient way algorithmically? From this, Michael and Kyle discuss the broader picture of why one should care whether a learning algorithm is efficiently learnable if it's learnable in polynomial time.
Another interesting topic of discussion is the difference between sample complexity and computational complexity. An active area of research is how one should regularize their models so that they're balancing the complexity with the goodness of fit to fit their large training sample size.
As mentioned, a good resource for getting started with correlated equilibria is: https://www.cs.cornell.edu/courses/cs684/2004sp/feb20.pdf
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TMs are a model of computation at the heart of algorithmic analysis. A Turing Machine has two components. An infinitely long piece of tape (memory) with re-writable squares and a read/write head which is programmed to change it's state as it processes the input. This exceptionally simple mechanical computer can compute anything that is intuitively computable, thus says the Church-Turing Thesis.
Attempts to make a "better" Turing Machine by adding things like additional tapes can make the programs easier to describe, but it can't make the "better" machine more capable. It won't be able to solve any problems the basic Turing Machine can, even if it perhaps solves them faster.
An important concept we didn't get to in this episode is that of a Universal Turing Machine. Without the prefix, a TM is a particular algorithm. A Universal TM is a machine that takes, as input, a description of a TM and an input to that machine, and subsequently, simulates the inputted machine running on the given input.
Turing Machines are a central idea in computer science. They are central to algorithmic analysis and the theory of computation.
Over the past several years, we have seen many success stories in machine learning brought about by deep learning techniques. While the practical success of deep learning has been phenomenal, the formal guarantees have been lacking. Our current theoretical understanding of the many techniques that are central to the current ongoing big-data revolution is far from being sufficient for rigorous analysis, at best. In this episode of Data Skeptic, our host Kyle Polich welcomes guest John Wilmes, a mathematics post-doctoral researcher at Georgia Tech, to discuss the efficiency of neural network learning through complexity theory.
How long an algorithm takes to run depends on many factors including implementation details and hardware. However, the formal analysis of algorithms focuses on how they will perform in the worst case as the input size grows. We refer to an algorithm's runtime as it's "O" which is a function of its input size "n". For example, O(n) represents a linear algorithm - one that takes roughly twice as long to run if you double the input size. In this episode, we discuss a few everyday examples of algorithmic analysis including sorting, search a shuffled deck of cards, and verifying if a grocery list was successfully completed.
Thanks to our sponsor Brilliant.org, who right now is featuring a related problem as their Brilliant Problem of the Week.
In this episode, Microsoft's Corporate Vice President for Cloud Artificial Intelligence, Joseph Sirosh, joins host Kyle Polich to share some of the Microsoft's latest and most exciting innovations in AI development platforms. Last month, Microsoft launched a set of three powerful new capabilities in Azure Machine Learning for advanced developers to exploit big data, GPUs, data wrangling and container-based model deployment.
Extended show notes found here.
Thanks to our sponsor Springboard. Check out Springboard's Data Science Career Track Bootcamp.
Last year, the film development and production company End Cue produced a short film, called Sunspring, that was entirely written by an artificial intelligence using neural networks. More specifically, it was authored by a recurrent neural network (RNN) called long short-term memory (LSTM). According to End Cue’s Chief Technical Officer, Deb Ray, the company has come a long way in improving the generative AI aspect of the bot. In this episode, Deb Ray joins host Kyle Polich to discuss how generative AI models are being applied in creative processes, such as screenwriting. Their discussion also explores how data science for analyzing development projects, such as financing and selecting scripts, as well as optimizing the content production process.
One Shot Learning is the class of machine learning procedures that focuses learning something from a small number of examples. This is in contrast to "traditional" machine learning which typically requires a very large training set to build a reasonable model.
In this episode, Kyle presents a coded message to Linhda who is able to recognize that many of these new symbols created are likely to be the same symbol, despite having extremely few examples of each. Why can the human brain recognize a new symbol with relative ease while most machine learning algorithms require large training data? We discuss some of the reasons why and approaches to One Shot Learning.
Recommender systems play an important role in providing personalized content to online users. Yet, typical data mining techniques are not well suited for the unique challenges that recommender systems face. In this episode, host Kyle Polich joins Dr. Joseph Konstan from the University of Minnesota at a live recording at FARCON 2017 in Minneapolis to discuss recommender systems and how machine learning can create better user experiences.
Thanks to our sponsor brilliant.org/dataskeptics
A Long Short Term Memory (LSTM) is a neural unit, often used in Recurrent Neural Network (RNN) which attempts to provide the network the capacity to store information for longer periods of time. An LSTM unit remembers values for either long or short time periods. The key to this ability is that it uses no activation function within its recurrent components. Thus, the stored value is not iteratively modified and the gradient does not tend to vanish when trained with backpropagation through time.
Zillow is a leading real estate information and home-related marketplace. We interviewed Andrew Martin, a data science Research Manager at Zillow, to learn more about how Zillow uses data science and big data to make real estate predictions.
Our guest Pranav Rajpurkar and his coauthored recently published Cardiologist-Level Arrhythmia Detection with Convolutional Neural Networks, a paper in which they demonstrate the use of Convolutional Neural Networks which outperform board certified cardiologists in detecting a wide range of heart arrhythmias from ECG data.
RNNs are a class of deep learning models designed to capture sequential behavior. An RNN trains a set of weights which depend not just on new input but also on the previous state of the neural network. This directed cycle allows the training phase to find solutions which rely on the state at a previous time, thus giving the network a form of memory. RNNs have been used effectively in language analysis, translation, speech recognition, and many other tasks.
Thanks to our sponsor Springboard.
In this week's episode, guest Andre Natal from Mozilla joins our host, Kyle Polich, to discuss a couple exciting new developments in open source speech recognition systems, which include Project Common Voice.
In June 2017, Mozilla launched a new open source project, Common Voice, a novel complementary project to the TensorFlow-based DeepSpeech implementation. DeepSpeech is a deep learning-based voice recognition system that was designed by Baidu, which they describe in greater detail in their research paper. DeepSpeech is a speech-to-text engine, and Mozilla hopes that, in the future, they can use Common Voice data to train their DeepSpeech engine.
A Bayesian Belief Network is an acyclic directed graph composed of nodes that represent random variables and edges that imply a conditional dependence between them. It's an intuitive way of encoding your statistical knowledge about a system and is efficient to propagate belief updates throughout the network when new information is added.
In this episode, Tony Beltramelli of UIzard Technologies joins our host, Kyle Polich, to talk about the ideas behind his latest app that can transform graphic design into functioning code, as well as his previous work on spying with wearables.
In statistics, two random variables might depend on one another (for example, interest rates and new home purchases). We call this conditional dependence. An important related concept exists called conditional independence. This phrase describes situations in which two variables are independent of one another given some other variable.
For example, the probability that a vendor will pay their bill on time could depend on many factors such as the company's market cap. Thus, a statistical analysis would reveal many relationships between observable details about the company and their propensity for paying on time. However, if you know that the company has filed for bankruptcy, then we might assume their chances of paying on time have dropped to near 0, and the result is now independent of all other factors in light of this new information.
We discuss a few real world analogies to this idea in the context of some chance meetings on our recent trip to New York City.
Animals can't tell us when they're experiencing pain, so we have to rely on other cues to help treat their discomfort. But it is often difficult to tell how much an animal is suffering. The sheep, for instance, is the most inscrutable of animals. However, scientists have figured out a way to understand sheep facial expressions using artificial intelligence.
On this week's episode, Dr. Marwa Mahmoud from the University of Cambridge joins us to discuss her recent study, "Estimating Sheep Pain Level Using Facial Action Unit Detection." Marwa and her colleague's at Cambridge's Computer Laboratory developed an automated system using machine learning algorithms to detect and assess when a sheep is in pain. We discuss some details of her work, how she became interested in studying sheep facial expression to measure pain, and her future goals for this project.
If you're able to be in Minneapolis, MN on August 23rd or 24th, consider attending Farcon. Get your tickets today via https://farcon2017.eventbrite.com.
This episode collects interviews from my recent trip to Microsoft Build where I had the opportunity to speak with Dharma Shukla and Syam Nair about the recently announced CosmosDB. CosmosDB is a globally consistent, distributed datastore that supports all the popular persistent storage formats (relational, key/value pair, document database, and graph) under a single streamlined API. The system provides tunable consistency, allowing the user to make choices about how consistency trade-offs are managed under the hood, if a consumer wants to go beyond the selected defaults.
This episode discusses the vanishing gradient - a problem that arises when training deep neural networks in which nearly all the gradients are very close to zero by the time back-propagation has reached the first hidden layer. This makes learning virtually impossible without some clever trick or improved methodology to help earlier layers begin to learn.
hen faced with medical issues, would you want to be seen by a human or a machine? In this episode, guest Edward Choi, co-author of the study titled Doctor AI: Predicting Clinical Events via Recurrent Neural Network shares his thoughts. Edward presents his team’s efforts in developing a temporal model that can learn from human doctors based on their collective knowledge, i.e. the large amount of Electronic Health Record (EHR) data.
In a neural network, the output value of a neuron is almost always transformed in some way using a function. A trivial choice would be a linear transformation which can only scale the data. However, other transformations, like a step function allow for non-linear properties to be introduced.
Activation functions can also help to standardize your data between layers. Some functions such as the sigmoid have the effect of "focusing" the area of interest on data. Extreme values are placed close together, while values near it's point of inflection change more quickly with respect to small changes in the input. Similarly, these functions can take any real number and map all of them to a finite range such as [0, 1] which can have many advantages for downstream calculation.
In this episode, we overview the concept and discuss a few reasons why you might select one function verse another.
This episode recaps the Microsoft Build Conference. Kyle recently attended and shares some thoughts on cloud, databases, cognitive services, and artificial intelligence. The episode includes interviews with Rohan Kumar and David Carmona.
Max-pooling is a procedure in a neural network which has several benefits. It performs dimensionality reduction by taking a collection of neurons and reducing them to a single value for future layers to receive as input. It can also prevent overfitting, since it takes a large set of inputs and admits only one value, making it harder to memorize the input. In this episode, we discuss the intuitive interpretation of max-pooling and why it's more common than mean-pooling or (theoretically) quartile-pooling.
This episode is an interview with Tinghui Zhou. In the recent paper "Unsupervised Learning of Depth and Ego-motion from Video", Tinghui and collaborators propose a deep learning architecture which is able to learn depth and pose information from unlabeled videos. We discuss details of this project and its applications.
CNNs are characterized by their use of a group of neurons typically referred to as a filter or kernel. In image recognition, this kernel is repeated over the entire image. In this way, CNNs may achieve the property of translational invariance - once trained to recognize certain things, changing the position of that thing in an image should not disrupt the CNN's ability to recognize it. In this episode, we discuss a few high-level details of this important architecture.
Despite the success of GANs in imaging, one of its major drawbacks is the problem of 'mode collapse,' where the generator learns to produce samples with extremely low variety.
To address this issue, today's guests Arnab Ghosh and Viveka Kulharia proposed two different extensions. The first involves tweaking the generator's objective function with a diversity enforcing term that would assess similarities between the different samples generated by different generators. The second comprises modifying the discriminator objective function, pushing generations corresponding to different generators towards different identifiable modes.
GANs are an unsupervised learning method involving two neural networks iteratively competing. The discriminator is a typical learning system. It attempts to develop the ability to recognize members of a certain class, such as all photos which have birds in them. The generator attempts to create false examples which the discriminator incorrectly classifies. In successive training rounds, the networks examine each and play a mini-max game of trying to harm the performance of the other.
In addition to being a useful way of training networks in the absence of a large body of labeled data, there are additional benefits. The discriminator may end up learning more about edge cases than it otherwise would be given typical examples. Also, the generator's false images can be novel and interesting on their own.
The concept was first introduced in the paper Generative Adversarial Networks.
Recently, we've seen opinion polls come under some skepticism. But is that skepticism truly justified? The recent Brexit referendum and US 2016 Presidential Election are examples where some claims the polls "got it wrong". This episode explores this idea.
No reliable, complete database cataloging home sales data at a transaction level is available for the average person to access. To a data scientist interesting in studying this data, our hands are complete tied. Opportunities like testing sociological theories, exploring economic impacts, study market forces, or simply research the value of an investment when buying a home are all blocked by the lack of easy access to this dataset. OpenHouse seeks to correct that by centralizing and standardizing all publicly available home sales transactional data. In this episode, we discuss the achievements of OpenHouse to date, and what plans exist for the future.
Check out the OpenHouse gallery.I also encourage everyone to check out the project Zareen mentioned which was her Harry Potter word2vec webapp and Joy's project doing data visualization on Jawbone data.
GuestsThanks again to @iamzareenf, @blueplastic, and @joytafty for coming on the show. Thanks to the numerous other volunteers who have helped with the project as well!
Announcements and detailsIf you're interested in getting involved in OpenHouse, check out the OpenHouse contributor's quickstart page.
Kyle is giving a machine learning talk in Los Angeles on May 25th, 2017 at Zehr.
Thanks to our sponsor for this episode Periscope Data. The blog post demoing their maps option is on our blog titled Periscope Data Maps.
To start a free trial of their dashboarding too, visit http://periscopedata.com/skeptics
Kyle recently did a youtube video exploring the Data Skeptic podcast download numbers using Periscope Data. Check it out at https://youtu.be/aglpJrMp0M4.
Supplemental music is Lee Rosevere's Let's Start at the Beginning.
There's more than one type of computer processor. The central processing unit (CPU) is typically what one means when they say "processor". GPUs were introduced to be highly optimized for doing floating point computations in parallel. These types of operations were very useful for high end video games, but as it turns out, those same processors are extremely useful for machine learning. In this mini-episode we discuss why.
Backpropagation is a common algorithm for training a neural network. It works by computing the gradient of each weight with respect to the overall error, and using stochastic gradient descent to iteratively fine tune the weights of the network. In this episode, we compare this concept to finding a location on a map, marble maze games, and golf.
In this week's episode of Data Skeptic, host Kyle Polich talks with guest Maura Church, Patreon's data science manager. Patreon is a fast-growing crowdfunding platform that allows artists and creators of all kinds build their own subscription content service. The platform allows fans to become patrons of their favorite artists- an idea similar the Renaissance times, when musicians would rely on benefactors to become their patrons so they could make more art. At Patreon, Maura's data science team strives to provide creators with insight, information, and tools, so that creators can focus on what they do best-- making art.
On the show, Maura talks about some of her projects with the data science team at Patreon. Among the several topics discussed during the episode include: optical music recognition (OMR) to translate musical scores to electronic format, network analysis to understand the connection between creators and patrons, growth forecasting and modeling in a new market, and churn modeling to determine predictors of long time support.
A more detailed explanation of Patreon's A/B testing framework can be found here
Other useful links to topics mentioned during the show:
In a feed forward neural network, neurons cannot form a cycle. In this episode, we explore how such a network would be able to represent three common logical operators: OR, AND, and XOR. The XOR operation is the interesting case.
Below are the truth tables that describe each of these functions.
AND Truth Table Input 1 Input 2 Output 0 0 0 0 1 0 1 0 0 1 1 1 OR Truth Table Input 1 Input 2 Output 0 0 0 0 1 1 1 0 1 1 1 1 XOR Truth Table Input 1 Input 2 Output 0 0 0 0 1 1 1 0 1 1 1 0The AND and OR functions should seem very intuitive. Exclusive or (XOR) if true if and only if exactly single input is 1. Could a neural network learn these mathematical functions?
Let's consider the perceptron described below. First we see the visual representation, then the Activation function , followed by the formula for calculating the output.
Can this perceptron learn the AND function?
Sure. Let and
What about OR?
Yup. Let and
An infinite number of possible solutions exist, I just picked values that hopefully seem intuitive. This is also a good example of why the bias term is important. Without it, the AND function could not be represented.
How about XOR?
No. It is not possible to represent XOR with a single layer. It requires two layers. The image below shows how it could be done with two laters.
In the above example, the weights computed for the middle hidden node capture the essence of why this works. This node activates when recieving two positive inputs, thus contributing a heavy penalty to be summed by the output node. If a single input is 1, this node will not activate.
Universal approximation theorem tells us that any continuous function can be tightly approximated using a neural network with only a single hidden layer and a finite number of neurons. With this in mind, a feed forward neural network should be adaquet for any applications. However, in practice, other network architectures and the allowance of more hidden layers are empirically motivated.
Other types neural networks have less strict structal definitions. The various ways one might relax this constraint generate other classes of neural networks that often have interesting properties. We'll get into some of these in future mini-episodes.
Check out our recent blog post on how we're using Periscope Data cohort charts.
Thanks to Periscope Data for sponsoring this episode. More about them at periscopedata.com/skeptics
In this Data Skeptic episode, Kyle is joined by guest Ruggiero Cavallo to discuss his latest efforts to mitigate the problems presented in this new world of online advertising. Working with his collaborators, Ruggiero reconsiders the search ad allocation and pricing problems from the ground up and redesigns a search ad selling system. He discusses a mechanism that optimizes an entire page of ads globally based on efficiency-maximizing search allocation and a novel technical approach to computing prices.
Today's episode overviews the perceptron algorithm. This rather simple approach is characterized by a few particular features. It updates its weights after seeing every example, rather than as a batch. It uses a step function as an activation function. It's only appropriate for linearly separable data, and it will converge to a solution if the data meets these criteria. Being a fairly simple algorithm, it can run very efficiently. Although we don't discuss it in this episode, multi-layer perceptron networks are what makes this technique most attractive.
DataRefuge is a public collaborative, grassroots effort around the United States in which scientists, researchers, computer scientists, librarians and other volunteers are working to download, save, and re-upload government data. The DataRefuge Project, which is led by the UPenn Program in Environmental Humanities and the Penn Libraries group at University of Pennsylvania, aims to foster resilience in an era of anthropogenic global climate change and raise awareness of how social and political events affect transparency.
If a CEO wants to know the state of their business, they ask their highest ranking executives. These executives, in turn, should know the state of the business through reports from their subordinates. This structure is roughly analogous to a process observed in deep learning, where each layer of the business reports up different types of observations, KPIs, and reports to be interpreted by the next layer of the business. In deep learning, this process can be thought of as automated feature engineering. DNNs built to recognize objects in images may learn structures that behave like edge detectors in the first hidden layer. Proceeding layers learn to compose more abstract features from lower level outputs. This episode explore that analogy in the context of automated feature engineering.
Linh Da and Kyle discuss a particular image in this episode. The image included below in the show notes is drawn from the work of Lee, Grosse, Ranganath, and Ng in their paper Convolutional Deep Belief Networks for Scalable Unsupervised Learning of Hierarchical Representations.
In this episode, I speak with Raghu Ramakrishnan, CTO for Data at Microsoft. We discuss services, tools, and developments in the big data sphere as well as the underlying needs that drove these innovations.
In this episode, we talk about a high-level description of deep learning. Kyle presents a simple game (pictured below), which is more of a puzzle really, to try and give Linh Da the basic concept.
Thanks to our sponsor for this week, the Data Science Association. Please check out their upcoming Dallas conference at dallasdatascience.eventbrite.com
Versioning isn't just for source code. Being able to track changes to data is critical for answering questions about data provenance, quality, and reproducibility. Daniel Whitenack joins me this week to talk about these concepts and share his work on Pachyderm. Pachyderm is an open source containerized data lake.
During the show, Daniel mentioned the Gopher Data Science github repo as a great resource for any data scientists interested in the Go language. Although we didn't mention it, Daniel also did an interesting analysis on the 2016 world chess championship that complements our recent episode on chess well. You can find that post here
Supplemental music is Lee Rosevere's Let's Start at the Beginning.
Thanks to Periscope Data for sponsoring this episode. More about them at periscopedata.com/skeptics
Logistic Regression is a popular classification algorithm. In this episode, we discuss how it can be used to determine if an audio clip represents one of two given speakers. It assumes an output variable (isLinhda) is a linear combination of available features, which are spectral bands in the discussion on this episode.
Keep an eye on the dataskeptic.com blog this week as we post more details about this project.
Thanks to our sponsor this week, the Data Science Association. Please check out their upcoming conference in Dallas on Saturday, February 18th, 2017 via the link below.
dallasdatascience.eventbrite.com
Prior work has shown that people's response to competition is in part predicted by their gender. Understanding why and when this occurs is important in areas such as labor market outcomes. A well structured study is challenging due to numerous confounding factors. Peter Backus and his colleagues have identified competitive chess as an ideal arena to study the topic. Find out why and what conclusions they reached.
Our discussion centers around Gender, Competition and Performance: Evidence from Real Tournaments from Backus, Cubel, Guid, Sanchez-Pages, and Mañas. A summary of their paper can also be found here.
Deep learning can be prone to overfit a given problem. This is especially frustrating given how much time and computational resources are often required to converge. One technique for fighting overfitting is to use dropout. Dropout is the method of randomly selecting some neurons in one's network to set to zero during iterations of learning. The core idea is that each particular input in a given layer is not always available and therefore not a signal that can be relied on too heavily.
In this episode I speak with Clarence Wardell and Kelly Jin about their mutual service as part of the White House's Police Data Initiative and Data Driven Justice Initiative respectively.
The Police Data Initiative was organized to use open data to increase transparency and community trust as well as to help police agencies use data for internal accountability. The PDI emerged from recommendations made by the Task Force on 21st Century Policing.
The Data Driven Justice Initiative was organized to help city, county, and state governments use data-driven strategies to help low-level offenders with mental illness get directed to the right services rather than into the criminal justice system.
We close out 2016 with a discussion of a basic interview question which might get asked when applying for a data science job. Specifically, how a library might build a model to predict if a book will be returned late or not.
Today's episode is a reading of Isaac Asimov's Franchise. As mentioned on the show, this is just a work of fiction to be enjoyed and not in any way some obfuscated political statement. Enjoy, and happy holidays!
Classically, entropy is a measure of disorder in a system. From a statistical perspective, it is more useful to say it's a measure of the unpredictability of the system. In this episode we discuss how information reduces the entropy in deciding whether or not Yoshi the parrot will like a new chew toy. A few other everyday examples help us examine why entropy is a nice metric for constructing a decision tree.
Cloud services are now ubiquitous in data science and more broadly in technology as well. This week, I speak to Mark Souza, Tobias Ternström, and Corey Sanders about various aspects of data at scale. We discuss the embedding of R into SQLServer, SQLServer on linux, open source, and a few other cloud topics.
Today's episode is all about Causal Impact, a technique for estimating the impact of a particular event on a time series. We talk to William Martin about his research into the impact releases have on app and we also chat with Karen Blakemore about a project she helped us build to explore the impact of a Saturday Night Live appearance on a musician's career.
Martin's work culminated in a paper Causal Impact for App Store Analysis. A shorter summary version can be found here. His company helping app developers do this sort of analysis can be found at crestweb.cs.ucl.ac.uk/appredict/.
The Bootstrap is a method of resampling a dataset to possibly refine it's accuracy and produce useful metrics on the result. The bootstrap is a useful statistical technique and is leveraged in Bagging (bootstrap aggregation) algorithms such as Random Forest. We discuss this technique related to polling and surveys.
The Gini Coefficient (as it relates to decision trees) is one approach to determining the optimal decision to introduce which splits your dataset as part of a decision tree. To pick the right feature to split on, it considers the frequency of the values of that feature and how well the values correlate with specific outcomes that you are trying to predict.
Financial analysis techniques for studying numeric, well structured data are very mature. While using unstructured data in finance is not necessarily a new idea, the area is still very greenfield. On this episode,Delia Rusu shares her thoughts on the potential of unstructured data and discusses her work analyzing Wikipedia to help inform financial decisions.
Delia's talk at PyData Berlin can be watched on Youtube (Estimating stock price correlations using Wikipedia). The slides can be found here and all related code is available on github.
AdaBoost is a canonical example of the class of AnyBoost algorithms that create ensembles of weak learners. We discuss how a complex problem like predicting restaurant failure (which is surely caused by different problems in different situations) might benefit from this technique.
Platform as a service is a growing trend in data science where services like fraud analysis and face detection can be provided via APIs. Such services turn the actual model into a black box to the consumer. But can the model be reverse engineered?
Florian Tramèr shares his work in this episode showing that it can. The paper Stealing Machine Learning Models via Prediction APIs is definitely worth your time to read if you enjoy this episode. Related source code can be found in https://github.com/ftramer/Steal-ML.
For machine learning models created with the random forest algorithm, there is no obvious diagnostic to inform you which features are more important in the output of the model. Some straightforward but useful techniques exist revolving around removing a feature and measuring the decrease in accuracy or Gini values in the leaves. We broadly discuss these techniques in this episode.
As cities provide bike sharing services, they must also plan for how to redistribute bicycles as they inevitably build up at more popular destination stations. In this episode, Hui Xiong talks about the solution he and his colleagues developed to rebalance bike sharing systems.
Random forest is a popular ensemble learning algorithm which leverages bagging both for sampling and feature selection. In this episode we make an analogy to the process of running a bookstore.
Jo Hardin joins us this week to discuss the ASA's Election Prediction Contest. This is a competition aimed at forecasting the results of the upcoming US presidential election competition. More details are available in Jo's blog post found here.
You can find some useful R code for getting started automatically gathering data from 538 via Jo's github and official contest details are available here. During the interview we also mention Daily Kos and 538.
The F1 score is a model diagnostic that combines precision and recall to provide a singular evaluation for model comparison. In this episode we discuss how it applies to selecting an interior designer.
Urban congestion effects every person living in a city of any reasonable size. Lewis Lehe joins us in this episode to share his work on downtown congestion pricing. We explore topics of how different pricing mechanisms effect congestion as well as how data visualization can inform choices.
You can find examples of Lewis's work at setosa.io. His paper which we discussed during the interview isDistance-dependent congestion pricing for downtown zones.
On this episode, we discuss State of California data which can be found at pems.dot.ca.gov.
Heteroskedasticity is a term used to describe a relationship between two variables which has unequal variance over the range. For example, the variance in the length of a cat's tail almost certainly changes (grows) with age. On the other hand, the average amount of chewing gum a person consume probably has a consistent variance over a wide range of human heights.
We also discuss some issues with the visualization shown in the tweet embedded below.
Our guest today is Michael Cuthbert, an associate professor of music at MIT and principal investigator of the Music21 project, which we focus our discussion on today.
Music21 is a python library making analysis of music accessible and fun. It supports integration with popular formats such as MIDI, MusicXML, Lilypond, and others. It's also well integrated with The Elvis Project, enabling users to import large volumes of music for easy analysis. Music21 is a great platform for musicologists and machine learning researchers alike to explore patterns and structure in music.
Paxos is a protocol for arriving a consensus in a distributed computing system which accounts for unreliability of the nodes. We discuss how this might be used in the real world in the event of a massive disaster.
Machine learning models are often criticized for being black boxes. If a human cannot determine why the model arrives at the decision it made, there's good cause for skepticism. Classic inspection approaches to model interpretability are only useful for simple models, which are likely to only cover simple problems.
The LIME project seeks to help us trust machine learning models. At a high level, it takes advantage of local fidelity. For a given example, a separate model trained on neighbors of the example are likely to reveal the relevant features in the local input space to reveal details about why the model arrives at it's conclusion.
In this episode, Marco Tulio Ribeiro joins us to discuss how LIME (Locally Interpretable Model-Agnostic Explanations) can help users trust machine learning models. The accompanying paper is titled "Why Should I Trust You?": Explaining the Predictions of Any Classifier.
Analysis of variance is a method used to evaluate differences between the two or more groups. It works by breaking down the total variance of the system into the between group variance and within group variance. We discuss this method in the context of wait times getting coffee at Starbucks.
When humans describe images, they have a reporting bias, in that the report only what they consider important. Thus, in addition to considering whether something is present in an image, one should consider whether it is also relevant to the image before labeling it.
Ishan Misra joins us this week to discuss his recent paper Seeing through the Human Reporting Bias: Visual Classifiers from Noisy Human-Centric Labels which explores a novel architecture for learning to distinguish presence and relevance. This work enables web-scale datasets to be useful for training, not just well groomed hand labeled corpora.
Survival analysis techniques are useful for studying the longevity of groups of elements or individuals, taking into account time considerations and right censorship. This episode explores how survival analysis can describe marriages, in particular, using the non-parametric Cox proportional hazard model.
This episode discusses some good summaries of survey data on marriage and divorce which can be found here.
The python lifelines library is a good place to get started for people that want to do some hands on work.
This week is an insightful discussion with Claudia Perlich about some situations in machine learning where models can be built, perhaps by well-intentioned practitioners, to appear to be highly predictive despite being trained on random data. Our discussion covers some novel observations about ROC and AUC, as well as an informative discussion of leakage.
Much of our discussion is inspired by two excellent papers Claudia authored: Leakage in Data Mining: Formulation, Detection, and Avoidance and On Cross Validation and Stacking: Building Seemingly Predictive Models on Random Data. Both are highly recommended reading!
An ROC curve is a plot that compares the trade off of true positives and false positives of a binary classifier under different thresholds. The area under the curve (AUC) is useful in determining how discriminating a model is. Together, ROC and AUC are very useful diagnostics for understanding the power of one's model and how to tune it.
I'm joined by Chris Stucchio this week to discuss how deliberate or uninformed statistical practitioners can derive spurious and arbitrary results via multiple comparisons. We discuss p-hacking and a variety of other important lessons and tips for proper analysis.
You can enjoy Chris's writing on his blog at chrisstucchio.com and you may also like his recent talk Multiple Comparisons: Make Your Boss Happy with False Positives, Guarenteed.
If you'd like to make a good prediction, your best bet is to invent a time machine, visit the future, observe the value, and return to the past. For those without access to time travel technology, we need to avoid including information about the future in our training data when building machine learning models. Similarly, if any other feature whose value would not actually be available in practice at the time you'd want to use the model to make a prediction, is a feature that can introduce leakage to your model.
Kristian Lum (@KLdivergence) joins me this week to discuss her work at @hrdag on predictive policing. We also discuss Multiple Systems Estimation, a technique for inferring statistical information about a population from separate sources of observation.
If you enjoy this discussion, check out the panel Tyranny of the Algorithm? Predictive Analytics & Human Rights which was mentioned in the episode.
Distributed computing cannot guarantee consistency, accuracy, and partition tolerance. Most system architects need to think carefully about how they should appropriately balance the needs of their application across these competing objectives. Linh Da and Kyle discuss the CAP Theorem using the analogy of a phone tree for alerting people about a school snow day.
A startup is claiming that they can detect terrorists purely through facial recognition. In this solo episode, Kyle explores the plausibility of these claims.
Goodhart's law states that "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure". In this mini-episode we discuss how this affects SEO, call centers, and Scrum.
I'm joined this week by Jon Morra, director of data science at eHarmony to discuss a variety of ways in which machine learning and data science are being applied to help connect people for successful long term relationships.
Interesting open source projects mentioned in the interview include Face-parts, a web service for detecting faces and extracting a robust set of fiducial markers (features) from the image, and Aloha, a Scala based machine learning library. You can learn more about these and other interesting projects at the eHarmony github page.
In the wrap up, Jon mentioned the LA Machine Learning meetup which he runs. This is a great resource for LA residents separate and complementary to datascience.la groups, so consider signing up for all of the above and I hope to see you there in the future.
Mystery shoppers and fruit cultivation help us discuss stationarity - a property of some time serieses that are invariant to time in several ways. Differencing is one approach that can often convert a non-stationary process into a stationary one. If you have a stationary process, you get the benefits of many known statistical properties that can enable you to do a significant amount of inferencing and prediction.
I'm joined by Wes McKinney (@wesmckinn) and Hadley Wickham (@hadleywickham) on this episode to discuss their joint project Feather. Feather is a file format for storing data frames along with some metadata, to help with interoperability between languages. At the time of recording, libraries are available for R and Python, making it easy for data scientists working in these languages to quickly and effectively share datasets and collaborate.
Bargaining is the process of two (or more) parties attempting to agree on the price for a transaction. Game theoretic approaches attempt to find two strategies from which neither party is motivated to deviate. These strategies are said to be in equilibrium with one another. The equilibriums available in bargaining depend on the the transaction mechanism and the information of the parties. Discounting (how long parties are willing to wait) has a significant effect in this process. This episode discusses some of the choices Kyle and Linh Da made in deciding what offer to make on a house.
Deepjazz is a project from Ji-Sung Kim, a computer science student at Princeton University. It is built using Theano, Keras, music21, and Evan Chow's project jazzml. Deepjazz is a computational music project that creates original jazz compositions using recurrent neural networks trained on Pat Metheny's "And Then I Knew". You can hear some of deepjazz's original compositions on soundcloud.
This week I spoke with Elham Shaabani and Paulo Shakarian (@PauloShakASU) about their recent paper Early Identification of Violent Criminal Gang Members (also available onarXiv). In this paper, they use social network analysis techniques and machine learning to provide early detection of known criminal offenders who are in a high risk group for committing violent crimes in the future. Their techniques outperform existing techniques used by the police. Elham and Paulo are part of the Cyber-Socio Intelligent Systems (CySIS) Lab.
A dinner party at Data Skeptic HQ helps teach the uses of fractional factorial design for studying 2-way interactions.
Cheng-tao Chu (@chengtao_chu) joins us this week to discuss his perspective on common mistakes and pitfalls that are made when doing machine learning. This episode is filled with sage advice for beginners and intermediate users of machine learning, and possibly some good reminders for experts as well. Our discussion parallels his recent blog postMachine Learning Done Wrong.
Cheng-tao Chu is an entrepreneur who has worked at many well known silicon valley companies. His paper Map-Reduce for Machine Learning on Multicore is the basis for Apache Mahout. His most recent endeavor has just emerged from steath, so please check out OneInterview.io.
Co-host Linh Da was in a biking accident after hitting a pothole. She sustained an injury that required stitches. This is the story of our quest to file a 311 complaint and track it through the City of Los Angeles's open data portal.
My guests this episode are Chelsea Ursaner (LA City Open Data Team), Ben Berkowitz (CEO and founder of SeeClickFix), and Russ Klettke (Editor of pothole.info)
Certain data mining algorithms (including k-means clustering and k-nearest neighbors) require a user defined parameter k. A user of these algorithms is required to select this value, which raises the questions: what is the "best" value of k that one should select to solve their problem?
This mini-episode explores the appropriate value of k to use when trying to estimate the cost of a house in Los Angeles based on the closests sales in it's area.
Today on Data Skeptic, Lachlan Gunn joins us to discuss his recent paper Too Good to be True. This paper highlights a somewhat paradoxical / counterintuitive fact about how unanimity is unexpected in cases where perfect measurements cannot be taken. With large enough data, some amount of error is expected.
The "Too Good to be True" paper highlights three interesting examples which we discuss in the podcast. You can also watch a lecture from Lachlan on this topic via youtube here.
How well does your model explain your data? R-squared is a useful statistic for answering this question. In this episode we explore how it applies to the problem of valuing a house. Aspects like the number of bedrooms go a long way in explaining why different houses have different prices. There's some amount of variance that can be explained by a model, and some amount that cannot be directly measured. R-squared is the ratio of the explained variance to the total variance. It's not a measure of accuracy, it's a measure of the power of one's model.
Jessica Hamrick joins us this week to discuss her work studying mental simulation. Her research combines machine learning approaches iwth behavioral method from cognitive science to help explain how people reason and predict outcomes. Her recent paper Think again? The amount of mental simulation tracks uncertainty in the outcome is the focus of our conversation in this episode.
Lastly, Kyle invited Samuel Hansen from the Relative Prime podcast to mention the Relatively Prime Season 3 kickstarter, which needs your support now through Friday, March 11th, 2016.
This episode is a discussion of multiple regression: the use of observations that are a vector of values to predict a response variable. For this episode, we consider how features of a home such as the number of bedrooms, number of bathrooms, and square footage can predict the sale price.
Unlike a typical episode of Data Skeptic, these show notes are not just supporting material, but are actually featured in the episode.
The site Redfin gratiously allows users to download a CSV of results they are viewing. Unfortunately, they limit this extract to 500 listings, but you can still use it to try the same approach on your own using the download link shown in the figure below.
Samuel Mehr joins us this week to share his perspective on why people are musical, where music comes from, and why it works the way it does. We discuss a number of empirical studies related to music and musical cognition, and dispense a few myths about music along the way.
Some of Sam's work discussed in this episode include Music in the Home: New Evidence for an Intergenerational Link,Two randomized trials provide no consistent evidence for nonmusical cognitive benefits of brief preschool music enrichment, and Miscommunication of science: music cognition research in the popular press. Additional topics we discussed are also covered in a Harvard Gazette article featuring Sam titled Muting the Mozart effect.
You can follow Sam on twitter via @samuelmehr.
This episode reviews the concept of k-d trees: an efficient data structure for holding multidimensional objects. Kyle gives Linhda a dictionary and asks her to look up words as a way of introducing the concept of binary search. We actually spend most of the episode talking about binary search before getting into k-d trees, but this is a necessary prerequisite.
Algorithms are pervasive in our society and make thousands of automated decisions on our behalf every day. The possibility of digital discrimination is a very real threat, and it is very plausible for discrimination to occur accidentally (i.e. outside the intent of the system designers and programmers). Christian Sandvig joins us in this episode to talk about his work and the concept of auditing algorithms.
Christian Sandvig (@niftyc) has a PhD in communications from Stanford and is currently an Associate Professor of Communication Studies and Information at the University of Michigan. His research studies the predictable and unpredictable effects that algorithms have on culture. His work exploring the topic of auditing algorithms has framed the conversation of how and why we might want to have oversight on the way algorithms effect our lives. His writing appears in numerous publications including The Social Media Collective, The Huffington Post, and Wired.
One of his papers we discussed in depth on this episode was Auditing Algorithms: Research Methods for Detecting Discrimination on Internet Platforms, which is well worth a read.
Today's episode begins by asking how many left handed employees we should expect to be at a company before anyone should claim left handedness discrimination. If not lefties, let's consider eye color, hair color, favorite ska band, most recent grocery store used, and any number of characteristics could be studied to look for deviations from the norm in a company.
When multiple comparisons are to be made simultaneous, one must account for this, and a common method for doing so is with the Bonferroni Correction. It is not, however, a sure fire procedure, and this episode wraps up with a bit of skepticism about it.
A recent paper in the journal of Judgment and Decision Making titled On the reception and detection of pseudo-profound bullshit explores empirical questions around a reader's ability to detect statements which may sound profound but are actually a collection of buzzwords that fail to contain adequate meaning or truth. These statements are definitively different from lies and nonesense, as we discuss in the episode.
This paper proposes the Bullshit Receptivity scale (BSR) and empirically demonstrates that it correlates with existing metrics like the Cognitive Reflection Test, building confidence that this can be a useful, repeatable, empirical measure of a person's ability to detect pseudo-profound statements as being different from genuinely profound statements. Additionally, the correlative results provide some insight into possible root causes for why individuals might find great profundity in these statements based on other beliefs or cognitive measures.
The paper's lead author Gordon Pennycook joins me to discuss this study's results.
If you'd like some examples of pseudo-profound bullshit, you can randomly generate some based on Deepak Chopra's twitter feed.
To read other work from Gordon, check out his Google Scholar page and find him on twitter via @GordonPennycook.
And just for fun, if you think you've dreamed up a Data Skeptic related pseudo-profound bullshit statement, tweet it with hashtag #pseudoprofound. If I see an especially clever or humorous one, I might want to send you a free Data Skeptic sticker.
Today's mini episode discusses the widely known optimization algorithm gradient descent in the context of hiking in a foggy hillside.
This episode is a discussion of data visualization and a proposed New Year's resolution for Data Skeptic listeners. Let's kill the word cloud.
Today's episode is a reading of Isaac Asimov's The Machine that Won the War. I can't think of a story that's more appropriate for Data Skeptic.
In this interview with Aaron Halfaker of the Wikimedia Foundation, we discuss his research and career related to the study of Wikipedia. In his paper The Rise and Decline of an open Collaboration Community, he highlights a trend in the declining rate of active editors on Wikipedia which began in 2007. I asked Aaron about a variety of possible hypotheses for the phenomenon, in particular, how automated quality control tools that revert edits automatically could play a role. This lead Aaron and his collaborators to develop Snuggle, an optimized interface to help Wikipedians better welcome new comers to the community.
We discuss the details of these topics as well as ORES, which provides revision scoring as a service to any software developer that wants to consume the output of their machine learning based scoring.
You can find Aaron on Twitter as @halfak.
Today's topic is term frequency inverse document frequency, which is a statistic for estimating the importance of words and phrases in a set of documents.
Early astronomers could see several of the planets with the naked eye. The invention of the telescope allowed for further understanding of our solar system. The work of Isaac Newton allowed later scientists to accurately predict Neptune, which was later observationally confirmed exactly where predicted. It seemed only natural that a similar unknown body might explain anomalies in the orbit of Mercury, and thus began the search for the hypothesized planet Vulcan.
Thomas Levenson's book "The Hunt for Vulcan" is a narrative of the key scientific minds involved in the search and eventual refutation of an unobserved planet between Mercury and the sun. Thomas joins me in this episode to discuss his book and the fascinating story of the quest to find this planet.
During the discussion, we mention one of the contributions made by Urbain-Jean-Joseph Le Verrier which involved some complex calculations which enabled him to predict where to find the planet that would eventually be called Neptune. The calculus behind this work is difficult, and some of that work is demonstrated in a Jupyter notebook I recently discovered from Paulo Marques titled The-Body Problem.
Thomas Levenson is a professor at MIT and head of its science writing program. He is the author of several books, including Einstein in Berlin and Newton and the Counterfeiter: The Unknown Detective Career of the World’s Greatest Scientist. He has also made ten feature-length documentaries (including a two-hour Nova program on Einstein) for which he has won numerous awards. In his most recent book "The Hunt for Vulcan", explores the century spanning quest to explain the movement of the cosmos via theory and the role the hypothesized planet Vulcan played in the story.
Follow Thomas on twitter @tomlevenson and check out his blog athttps://inversesquare.wordpress.com/.
Pick up your copy of The Hunt for Vulcan at your local bookstore, preferred book buying place, or at the Penguin Random House site.
Today's episode discusses the accuracy paradox. There are cases when one might prefer a less accurate model because it yields more predictive power or better captures the underlying causal factors describing the outcome variable you are interested in. This is especially relevant in machine learning when trying to predict rare events. We discuss how the accuracy paradox might apply if you were trying to predict the likelihood a person was a bird owner.
... or should this have been called data science from a neuroscientist's perspective? Either way, I'm sure you'll enjoy this discussion with Laurie Skelly. Laurie earned a PhD in Integrative Neuroscience from the Department of Psychology at the University of Chicago. In her life as a social neuroscientist, using fMRI to study the neural processes behind empathy and psychopathy, she learned the ropes of zooming in and out between the macroscopic and the microscopic -- how millions of data points come together to tell us something meaningful about human nature. She's currently at Metis Data Science, an organization that helps people learn the skills of data science to transition in industry.
In this episode, we discuss fMRI technology, Laurie's research studying empathy and psychopathy, as well as the skills and tools used in common between neuroscientists and data scientists. For listeners interested in more on this subject, Laurie recommended the blogs Neuroskeptic, Neurocritic, and Neuroecology.
We conclude the episode with a mention of the upcoming Metis Data Science San Francisco cohort which Laurie will be teaching. If anyone is interested in applying to participate, they can do so here.
A discussion of the expected number of cars at a stoplight frames today's discussion of the bias variance tradeoff. The central ideal of this concept relates to model complexity. A very simple model will likely generalize well from training to testing data, but will have a very high variance since it's simplicity can prevent it from capturing the relationship between the covariates and the output. As a model grows more and more complex, it may capture more of the underlying data but the risk that it overfits the training data and therefore does not generalize (is biased) increases. The tradeoff between minimizing variance and minimizing bias is an ongoing challenge for data scientists, and an important discussion for skeptics around how much we should trust models.
The recent opinion piece Big Data Doesn't Exist on Tech Crunch by Slater Victoroff is an interesting discussion about the usefulness of data both big and small. Slater joins me this episode to discuss and expand on this discussion.
Slater Victoroff is CEO of indico Data Solutions, a company whose services turn raw text and image data into human insight. He, and his co-founders, studied at Olin College of Engineering where indico was born. indico was then accepted into the "Techstars Accelarator Program" in the Fall of 2014 and went on to raise $3M in seed funding. His recent essay "Big Data Doesn't Exist" received a lot of traction on TechCrunch, and I have invited Slater to join me today to discuss his perspective and touch on a few topics in the machine learning space as well.
The degree to which two variables change together can be calculated in the form of their covariance. This value can be normalized to the correlation coefficient, which has the advantage of transforming it to a unitless measure strictly bounded between -1 and 1. This episode discusses how we arrive at these values and why they are important.
Today's guest is Cameron Davidson-Pilon. Cameron has a masters degree in quantitative finance from the University of Waterloo. Think of it as statistics on stock markets. For the last two years he's been the team lead of data science at Shopify. He's the founder of dataoragami.net which produces screencasts teaching methods and techniques of applied data science. He's also the author of the just released in print book Bayesian Methods for Hackers: Probabilistic Programming and Bayesian Inference, which you can also get in a digital form.
This episode focuses on the topic of Bayesian A/B Testing which spans just one chapter of the book. Related to today's discussion is the Data Origami post The class imbalance problem in A/B testing.
Lastly, Data Skeptic will be giving away a copy of the print version of the book to one lucky listener who has a US based delivery address. To participate, you'll need to write a review of any site, book, course, or podcast of your choice on datasciguide.com. After it goes live, tweet a link to it with the hashtag #WinDSBook to be given an entry in the contest. This contest will end November 20th, 2015, at which time I'll draw a single randomized winner and contact them for delivery details via direct message on Twitter.
The central limit theorem is an important statistical result which states that typically, the mean of a large enough set of independent trials is approximately normally distributed. This episode explores how this might be used to determine if an amazon parrot like Yoshi produces or or less waste than an African Grey, under the assumption that the individual distributions are not normal.
Today's guest is Chris Hofstader (@gonz_blinko), an accessibility researcher and advocate, as well as an activist for causes such as improving access to information for blind and vision impaired people. His background in computer programming enabled him to be the leader of JAWS, a Windows program that allowed people with a visual impairment to read their screen either through text-to-speech or a refreshable braille display. He's the Managing Member of 3 Mouse Technology. He's also a frequent blogger primarily at chrishofstader.com.
For web developers and site owners, Chris recommends two tools to help test for accessibility issues: tenon.io and dqtech.co.
A guest post from Chris appeared on the Skepchick blogged titled Skepticism and Disability which lead to the formation of the sister site Skeptibility.
In a discussion of skepticism and favorite podcasts, Chris mentioned a number of great shows, most notably The Pod Delusion to which he was a contributor. Additionally, Chris has also appeared on The Atheist Nomads.
Lastly, a shout out from Chris to musician Shelley Segal whom he hosted just before the date of recording of this episode. Her music can be found on her site or via bandcamp.
The multi-armed bandit problem is named with reference to slot machines (one armed bandits). Given the chance to play from a pool of slot machines, all with unknown payout frequencies, how can you maximize your reward? If you knew in advance which machine was best, you would play exclusively that machine. Any strategy less than this will, on average, earn less payout, and the difference can be called the "regret".
You can try each slot machine to learn about it, which we refer to as exploration. When you've spent enough time to be convinced you've identified the best machine, you can then double down and exploit that knowledge. But how do you best balance exploration and exploitation to minimize the regret of your play?
This mini-episode explores a few examples including restaurant selection and A/B testing to discuss the nature of this problem. In the end we touch briefly on Thompson sampling as a solution.
Our episode this week begins with a correction. Back in episode 28 (Monkeys on Typewriters), Kyle made some bold claims about the probability that monkeys banging on typewriters might produce the entire works of Shakespeare by chance. The proof shown in the show notes turned out to be a bit dubious and Dave Spiegel joins us in this episode to set the record straight.
In addition to that, our discussion explores a number of interesting topics in astronomy and astrophysics. This includes a paper Dave wrote with Ed Turner titled "Bayesian analysis of the astrobiological implications of life's early emergence on Earth" as well as exoplanet discovery.
There are several factors that are important to selecting an appropriate sample size and dealing with small samples. The most important questions are around representativeness - how well does your sample represent the total population and capture all it's variance?
Linhda and Kyle talk through a few examples including elections, picking an Airbnb, produce selection, and home shopping as examples of cases in which the amount of observations one has are more or less important depending on how complex the underlying system one is observing is.
There's an old adage which says you cannot fit a model which has more parameters than you have data. While this is often the case, it's not a universal truth. Today's guest Jake VanderPlas explains this topic in detail and provides some excellent examples of when it holds and doesn't. Some excellent visuals articulating the points can be found on Jake's blog Pythonic Perambulations, specifically on his post The Model Complexity Myth.
We also touch on Jake's work as an astronomer, his noteworthy open source contributions, and forthcoming book (currently available in an Early Edition) Python Data Science Handbook.
There are many occasions in which one might want to know the distance or similarity between two things, for which the means of calculating that distance is not necessarily clear. The distance between two points in Euclidean space is generally straightforward, but what about the distance between the top of Mount Everest to the bottom of the ocean? What about the distance between two sentences?
This mini-episode summarizes some of the considerations and a few of the means of calculating distance. We touch on Jaccard Similarity, Manhattan Distance, and a few others.
ContentMine is a project which provides the tools and workflow to convert scientific literature into machine readable and machine interpretable data in order to facilitate better and more effective access to the accumulated knowledge of human kind. The program's founder Peter Murray-Rust joins us this week to discuss ContentMine. Our discussion covers the project, the scientific publication process, copywrite, and several other interesting topics.
Today's mini-episode explains the distinction between structured and unstructured data, and debates which of these categories best describe recipes.
Yusan Lin shares her research on using data science to explore the fashion industry in this episode. She has applied techniques from data mining, natural language processing, and social network analysis to explore who are the innovators in the fashion world and how their influence effects other designers.
If you found this episode interesting and would like to read more, Yusan's papers Text-Generated Fashion Influence Model: An Empirical Study on Style.com and The Hidden Influence Network in the Fashion Industry are worth reading.
PageRank is the algorithm most famous for being one of the original innovations that made Google stand out as a search engine. It was defined in the classic paper The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine by Sergey Brin and Larry Page. While this algorithm clearly impacted web searching, it has also been useful in a variety of other applications. This episode presents a high level description of this algorithm and how it might apply when trying to establish who writes the most influencial academic papers.
In this episode, Benjamin Uminsky enlightens us about some of the ways the Los Angeles County Registrar-Recorder/County Clerk leverages data science and analysis to help be more effective and efficient with the services and expectations they provide citizens. Our topics range from forecasting to predicting the likelihood that people will volunteer to be poll workers.
Benjamin recently spoke at Big Data Day LA. Videos have not yet been posted, but you can see the slides from his talk Data Mining Forecasting and BI at the RRCC if this episode has left you hungry to learn more.
During the show, Benjamin encouraged any Los Angeles residents who have some time to serve their community consider becoming a pollworker.
This episode explores the k-nearest neighbors algorithm which is an unsupervised, non-parametric method that can be used for both classification and regression. The basica concept is that it leverages some distance function on your dataset to find the $k$ closests other observations of the dataset and averaging them to impute an unknown value or unlabelled datapoint.
How do people think rationally about small probability events?
What is the optimal statistical process by which one can update their beliefs in light of new evidence?
This episode of Data Skeptic explores questions like this as Kyle consults a cast of previous guests and experts to try and answer the question "What is the probability, however small, that Bigfoot is real?"
This mini-episode is a high level explanation of the basic idea behind MapReduce, which is a fundamental concept in big data. The origin of the idea comes from a Google paper titled MapReduce: Simplified Data Processing on Large Clusters. This episode makes an analogy to tabulating paper voting ballets as a means of helping to explain how and why MapReduce is an important concept.
The Credible Hulk joins me in this episode to discuss a recent blog post he wrote about glyphosate and the data about how it's introduction changed the historical usage trends of other herbicides. Links to all the sources and references can be found in the blog post.
In this discussion, we also mention the food babe and Last Thursdayism which may be worth some further reading. Kyle also mentioned the list of ingredients or chemical composition of a banana.
Credible Hulk mentioned the Mommy PhD facebook page. An interesting article about Mommy PhD can be found here. Lastly, if you enjoyed the show, please "Like" the Credible Hulk facebook group.
More features are not always better! With an increasing number of features to consider, machine learning algorithms suffer from the curse of dimensionality, as they have a wider set and often sparser coverage of examples to consider. This episode explores a real life example of this as Kyle and Linhda discuss their thoughts on purchasing a home.
The curse of dimensionality was defined by Richard Bellman, and applies in several slightly nuanced cases. This mini-episode discusses how it applies on machine learning.
This episode does not, however, discuss a slightly different version of the curse of dimensionality which appears in decision theoretic situations. Consider the game of chess. One must think ahead several moves in order to execute a successful strategy. However, thinking ahead another move requires a consideration of every possible move of every piece controlled, and every possible response one's opponent may take. The space of possible future states of the board grows exponentially with the horizon one wants to look ahead to. This is present in the notably useful Bellman equation.
This episode discusses video game analytics with guest Anders Drachen. The way in which people get access to games and the opportunity for game designers to ask interesting questions with data has changed quite a bit in the last two decades. Anders shares his insights about the past, present, and future of game analytics. We explore not only some of the innovations and interesting ways of examining user experience in the gaming industry, but also touch on some of the exciting opportunities for innovation that are right on the horizon.
You can find more from Anders online at andersdrachen.com, and follow him on twitter @andersdrachen
This mini-episode discusses Anscombe's Quartet, a series of four datasets which are clearly very different but share some similar statistical properties with one another. For example, each of the four plots has the same mean and variance on both axis, as well as the same correlation coefficient, and same linear regression.
The episode tries to add some context by imagining each of these datasets as data about a sports team, and why it can be important to look beyond basic summary statistics when exploring your dataset.
A recent episode of the Skeptics Guide to the Universe included a slight rant by Dr. Novella and the rouges about a shortcoming in operating systems. This episode explores why such a (seemingly obvious) flaw might make sense from an engineering perspective, and how data science might be the solution.
In this solo episode, Kyle proposes the concept of "annoyance mining" - the idea that with proper logging and enough feedback, data scientists could be provided the right dataset from which they can detect flaws and annoyances in software and other systems and automatically detect potential bugs, flaws, and improvements which could make those systems better.
As system complexity grows, it seems that an abstraction like this might be required in order to keep maintaining an effective development cycle. This episode is a bit of a soap box for Kyle as he explores why and how we might track an appropriate amount of data to be able to make better software and systems more suited for the users.
Elizabeth Lee from CyArk joins us in this episode to share stories of the work done capturing important historical sites digitally. CyArk is a non-profit focused on using technology to preserve the world's important historic and cultural locations digitally. CyArk's founder Ben Kacyra, a pioneer in 3D capture technology, and his wife, founded CyArk after seeing the need to preserve important artifacts and locations digitally before they are lost to natural disasters, human destruction, or the passage of time. We discuss their technology, data, and site selection including the upcoming themes of locations and the CyArk 500.
Elizabeth puts out the call to all listeners to share their opinions on what important sites should be included in The Cyark 500 Challenge - an effort to digitally preserve 500 of the most culturally important heritage sites within the next five years. You can Nominate a site by submitting a short form at CyArk.org
Visit http://www.cyark.org/projects/ to view an immersive, interactive experience of many of the sites preserved.
Linhda and Kyle review a New York Times article titled How Your Hometown Affects Your Chances of Marriage. This article explores research about what correlates with the likelihood of being married by age 26 by county. Kyle and LinhDa discuss some of the fine points of this research and the process of identifying factors for consideration.
With the advent of algorithms capable of beating highly ranked chess players, the temptation to cheat has emmerged as a potential threat to the integrity of this ancient and complex game. Yet, there are aspects of computer play that are measurably different than human play. Dr. Kenneth Regan has developed a methodology for looking at a long series of modes and measuring the likelihood that the moves may have been selected by an algorithm.
The full transcript of this episode is well annotated and has a wealth of excellent links to the things discussed.
If you're interested in learning more about Dr. Regan, his homepage (Kenneth Regan), his page on wikispaces, and the amazon page of books by Kenneth W. Regan are all great resources.
This week's episode dicusses z-scores, also known as standard score. This score describes the distance (in standard deviations) that an observation is away from the mean of the population. A closely related top is the 68-95-99.7 rule which tells us that (approximately) 68% of a normally distributed population lies within one standard deviation of the mean, 95 within 2, and 99.7 within 3.
Kyle and Linh Da discuss z-scores in the context of human height. If you'd like to calculate your own z-score for height, you can do so below. They further discuss how a z-score can also describe the likelihood that some statistical result is due to chance. Thus, if the significance of a finding can be said to be 3σ, that means that it's 99.7% likely not due to chance, or only 0.3% likely to be due to chance.
This week Noelle Sio Saldana discusses her volunteer work at Crisis Text Line - a 24/7 service that connects anyone with crisis counselors. In the episode we discuss Noelle's career and how, as a participant in the Pivotal for Good program (a partnership with DataKind), she spent three months helping find insights in the messaging data collected by Crisis Text Line. These insights helped give visibility into a number of different aspects of Crisis Text Line's services. Listen to this episode to find out how!
If you or someone you know is in a moment of crisis, there's someone ready to talk to you by texting the shortcode 741741.
Have you ever wondered what is lost when you compress a song into an MP3? This week's guest Ryan Maguire did more than that. He worked on software to issolate the sounds that are lost when you convert a lossless digital audio recording into a compressed MP3 file.
To complete his project, Ryan worked primarily in python using the pyo library as well as the Bregman Toolkit
Ryan mentioned humans having a dynamic range of hearing from 20 hz to 20,000 hz, if you'd like to hear those tones, check the previous link.
If you'd like to know more about our guest Ryan Maguire you can find his website at the previous link. To follow The Ghost in the MP3 project, please checkout their Facebook page, or on the sitetheghostinthemp3.com.
A PDF of Ryan's publication quality write up can be found at this link: The Ghost in the MP3 and it is definitely worth the read if you'd like to know more of the technical details.
This episode contains converage of the 2015 Data Fest hosted at UCLA. Data Fest is an analysis competition that gives teams of students 48 hours to explore a new dataset and present novel findings. This year, data from Edmunds.com was provided, and students competed in three categories: best recommendation, best use of external data, and best visualization.
For our 50th episode we enduldge a bit by cooking Linhda's previously mentioned "healthy" cornbread. This leads to a discussion of the statistical topic of overdispersion in which the variance of some distribution is larger than what one's underlying model will account for.
This episode overviews some of the fundamental concepts of natural language processing including stemming, n-grams, part of speech tagging, and th bag of words approach.
Guest Youyou Wu discuses the work she and her collaborators did to measure the accuracy of computer based personality judgments. Using Facebook "like" data, they found that machine learning approaches could be used to estimate user's self assessment of the "big five" personality traits: openness, agreeableness, extraversion, conscientiousness, and neuroticism. Interestingly, the computer-based assessments outperformed some of the assessments of certain groups of human beings. Listen to the episode to learn more.
The original paper Computer-based personality judgements are more accurate than those made by humansappeared in the January 2015 volume of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).
For her benevolent Youyou recommends Private traits and attributes are predictable from digital records of human behavior by Michal Kosinski, David Stillwell, and Thore Graepel. It's a similar paper by her co-authors which looks at demographic traits rather than personality traits.
And for her self-serving recommendation, Youyou has a link that I'm very excited about. You can visitApplyMagicSauce.com to see how this model evaluates your personality based on your Facebook like information. I'd love it if listeners participated in this research and shared your perspective on the results via The Data Skeptic Podcast Facebook page. I'm going to be posting mine there for everyone to see.
This episode explores how going wine testing could teach us about using markov chain monte carlo (mcmc).
This episode introduces the idea of a Markov Chain. A Markov Chain has a set of states describing a particular system, and a probability of moving from one state to another along every valid connected state. Markov Chains are memoryless, meaning they don't rely on a long history of previous observations. The current state of a system depends only on the previous state and the results of a random outcome.
Markov Chains are a useful way method for describing non-deterministic systems. They are useful for destribing the state and transition model of a stochastic system.
As examples of Markov Chains, we discuss stop light signals, bowling, and text prediction systems in light of whether or not they can be described with Markov Chains.
Nicole Goebel joins us this week to share her experiences in oceanography studying phytoplankton and other aspects of the ocean and how data plays a role in that science.
We also discuss Thinkful where Nicole and I are both mentors for the Introduction to Data Science course.
Last but not least, check out Nicole's blog Data Science Girl and the videos Kyle mentioned on her Youtube channel featuring one on the diversity of phytoplankton and how that changes in time and space.
This episode explores Ordinary Least Squares or OLS - a method for finding a good fit which describes a given dataset.
New York State approved the use of automated speed cameras within a specific range of schools. Tim Schmeier did an analysis of publically available data related to these cameras as part of a project at the NYC Data Science Academy. Tim's work leverages several open data sets to ask the questions: are the speed cameras succeeding in their intended purpose of increasing public safety near schools? What he found using open data may surprise you.
You can read Tim's write up titled Speed Cameras: Revenue or Public Safety? on the NYC Data Science Academy blog. His original write up, reproducible analysis, and figures are a great compliment to this episode.
For his benevolent recommendation, Tim suggests listeners visit Maddie's Fund - a data driven charity devoted to helping achieve and sustain a no-kill pet nation. And for his self-serving recommendation, Tim Schmeier will very shortly be on the job market. If you, your employeer, or someone you know is looking for data science talent, you can reach time at his gmail account which is timothy.schmeier at gmail dot com.
The k-means clustering algorithm is an algorithm that computes a deterministic label for a given "k" number of clusters from an n-dimensional datset. This mini-episode explores how Yoshi, our lilac crowned amazon's biological processes might be a useful way of measuring where she sits when there are no humans around. Listen to find out how!
Emre Sarigol joins me this week to discuss his paper Online Privacy as a Collective Phenomenon. This paper studies data collected from social networks and how the sharing behaviors of individuals can unintentionally reveal private information about other people, including those that have not even joined the social network! For the specific test discussed, the researchers were able to accurately predict the sexual orientation of individuals, even when this information was withheld during the training of their algorithm.
The research produces a surprisingly accurate predictor of this private piece of information, and was constructed only with publically available data from myspace.com found on archive.org. As Emre points out, this is a small shadow of the potential information available to modern social networks. For example, users that install the Facebook app on their mobile phones are (perhaps unknowningly) sharing all their phone contacts. Should a social network like Facebook choose to do so, this information could be aggregated to assemble "shadow profiles" containing rich data on users who may not even have an account.
The Chi-Squared test is a methodology for hypothesis testing. When one has categorical data, in the form of frequency counts or observations (e.g. Vegetarian, Pescetarian, and Omnivore), split into two or more categories (e.g. Male, Female), a question may arise such as "Are women more likely than men to be vegetarian?" or put more accurately, "Is any observed difference in the frequency with which women report being vegetarian differ in a statistically significant way from the frequency men report that?"
My quest this week is noteworthy a.i. researcher Randy Olson who joins me to share his work creating the Reddit World Map - a visualization that illuminates clusters in the reddit community based on user behavior.
Randy's blog post on created the reddit world map is well complimented by a more detailed write up titled Navigating the massive world of reddit: using backbone networks to map user interests in social media. Last but not least, an interactive version of the results (which leverages Gephi) can be found here.
For a benevolent recommendation, Randy suggetss people check out Seaborn - a python library for statistical data visualization. For a self serving recommendation, Randy recommends listeners visit the Data is beautiful subreddit where he's a moderator.
When dealing with dynamic systems that are potentially undergoing constant change, its helpful to describe what "state" they are in. In many applications the manner in which the state changes from one to another is not completely predictable, thus, there is uncertainty over how it transitions from state to state. Further, in many applications, one cannot directly observe the true state, and thus we describe such situations as partially observable state spaces. This episode explores what this means and why it is important in the context of chess, poker, and the mood of Yoshi the lilac crowned amazon parrot.
My guest this week is Anh Nguyen, a PhD student at the University of Wyoming working in the Evolving AI lab. The episode discusses the paper Deep Neural Networks are Easily Fooled [pdf] by Anh Nguyen, Jason Yosinski, and Jeff Clune. It describes a process for creating images that a trained deep neural network will mis-classify. If you have a deep neural network that has been trained to recognize certain types of objects in images, these "fooling" images can be constructed in a way which the network will mis-classify them. To a human observer, these fooling images often have no resemblance whatsoever to the assigned label. Previous work had shown that some images which appear to be unrecognizable white noise images to us can fool a deep neural network. This paper extends the result showing abstract images of shapes and colors, many of which have form (just not the one the network thinks) can also trick the network.
This episode introduces a high level discussion on the topic of Data Provenance, with more MINI episodes to follow to get into specific topics. Thanks to listener Sara L who wrote in to point out the Data Skeptic Podcast has focused alot about using data to be skeptical, but not necessarily being skeptical of data.
Data Provenance is the concept of knowing the full origin of your dataset. Where did it come from? Who collected it? How as it collected? Does it combine independent sources or one singular source? What are the error bounds on the way it was measured? These are just some of the questions one should ask to understand their data. After all, if the antecedent of an argument is built on dubious grounds, the consequent of the argument is equally dubious.
For a more technical discussion than what we get into in this mini epiosode, I recommend A Survey of Data Provenance Techniques by authors Simmhan, Plale, and Gannon.
I had the change to speak with well known Sharon Hill (@idoubtit) for the first episode of 2015. We discuss a number of interesting topics including the contributions Doubtful News makes to getting scientific and skeptical information ranked highly in search results, sink holes, why earthquakes are hard to predict, and data collection about paranormal groups via the internet.
In this quick holiday episode, we touch on how one would approach modeling the statistical distribution over the probability of belief in Santa Claus given age.
Economist Peter Backus joins me in this episode to discuss a few interesting topics. You may recall Linhda and I previously discussed his paper "The Girlfriend Equation" on a recent mini-episode. We start by touching base on this fun paper and get a follow up on where Peter stands years after writing w.r.t. a successful romantic union. Additionally, we delve in to some fascinating economics topics.
We touch on questions of the role models, for better or for worse, played a role in the ~2008 economic crash, statistics in economics and the difficulty of measurement, and some insightful discussion about the economics charities. Peter encourages listeners to be open to giving money to charities that are good at fundraising, and his arguement is a (for me) suprisingly insightful logic. Lastly, we have a teaser of some of Peter's upcoming work using unconventional data sources.
For his benevolent recommendation, Peter recommended the book The Conquest of Happiness by Bertrand Russell, and for his self-serving recommendation, follow Peter on twitter at @Awesomnomics.
Love and Data is the continued theme in this mini-episode as we discuss the game theory example of The Battle of the Sexes. In this textbook example, a couple must strategize about how to spend their Friday night. One partner prefers football games while the other partner prefers to attend the opera. Yet, each person would rather be at their non-preferred location so long as they are still with their spouse. So where should they decide to go?
Can algorithms help you find love? Many happy couples successfully brought together via online dating websites show us that data science can help you find love. I'm joined this week by Thomas Levi, Senior Data Scientist at Plenty of Fish, to discuss some of his work which helps people find one another as efficiently as possible.
Matchmaking is a truly non-trivial problem, and one that's dynamically changing all the time as new users join and leave the "pool of fish". This episode explores the aspects of what makes this a tough problem and some of the ways POF has been successfully using data science to solve it, and continues to try to innovate with new techniques like interest matching.
For his benevolent references, Thomas suggests readers check out All of Statistics as well as the caret library for R. And for a self serving recommendation, follow him on twitter (@tslevi) or connect with Thomas Levi on Linkedin.
Economist Peter Backus put forward "The Girlfriend Equation" while working on his PhD - a probabilistic model attempting to estimate the likelihood of him finding a girlfriend. In this mini episode we explore the soundness of his model and also share some stories about how Linhda and Kyle met.
I'm joined this week by Alex Boklin to explore the topic of magical thinking especially in the context of Rhonda Byrne's "The Secret", and the similarities it bears to The Global Consciousness Project (GCP). The GCP puts forward the hypothesis that random number generators elicit statistically significant changes as a result of major world events.
What is randomness? How can we determine if some results are randomly generated or not? Why are random numbers important to us in our everyday life? These topics and more are discussed in this mini-episode on random numbers.
Many readers will be vaguely familar with the idea of "X number of monkeys banging on Y number of typewriters for Z number of years" - the idea being that such a setup would produce random sequences of letters. The origin of this idea was the mathemetician Borel who was interested in whether or not 1,000,000 monkeys working for 10 hours per day might eventually reproduce the works of shakespeare.
We explore this topic and provide some further details in the show notes which you can find over at dataskeptic.com
This week's episode explores the possibilities of extracting novel insights from the many great social web APIs available. Matthew Russell's Mining the Social Web is a fantastic exploration of the tools and methods, and we explore a few related topics.
One helpful feature of the book is it's use of a Vagrant virtual machine. Using it, readers can easily reproduce the examples from the book, and there's a short video available that will walk you through setting up the Mining the Social Web virtual machine.
The book also has an accompanying github repository which can be found here.
A quote from Matthew that particularly reasonates for me was "The first commandment of Data Science is to 'Know thy data'." Take a listen for a little more context around this sage advice.
In addition to the book, we also discuss some of the work done by Digital Reasoning where Matthew serves as CTO. One of their products we spend some time discussing is Synthesys, a service that processes unstructured data and delivers knowledge and insight extracted from the data.
Some listeners might already be familiar with Digital Reasoning from recent coverage in Fortune Magazine on their cognitive computing efforts.
For his benevolent recommendation, Matthew recommends the Hardcore History Podcast, and for his self-serving recommendation, Matthew mentioned that they are currently hiring for Data Science job opportunities at Digital Reasoning if any listeners are looking for new opportunities.
This episode explores the basis of why we can trust encryption. Suprisingly, a discussion of looking up a word in the dictionary (binary search) and efficiently going wine tasting (the travelling salesman problem) help introduce computational complexity as well as the P ?= NP question, which is paramount to the trustworthiness RSA encryption.
With a high level foundation of computational theory, we talk about NP problems, and why prime factorization is a difficult problem, thus making it a great basis for the RSA encryption algorithm, which most of the internet uses to encrypt data. Unlike the encryption scheme Ray Romano used in "Everybody Loves Raymond", RSA has nice theoretical foundations.
It should be noted that although this episode gives good reason to trust that properly encrypted data, based on well choosen public/private keys where the private key is not compromised, is safe. However, having safe encryption doesn't necessarily mean that the Internet is secure. Topics like Man in the Middle attacks as well as the Snowden revelations are a topic for another day, not for this record length "mini" episode.
Jeff Stanton joins me in this episode to discuss his book An Introduction to Data Science, and some of the unique challenges and issues faced by someone doing applied data science. A challenge to any data scientist is making sure they have a good input data set and apply any necessary data munging steps before their analysis. We cover some good advise for how to approach such problems.
The t-test is this week's mini-episode topic. The t-test is a statistical testing procedure used to determine if the mean of two datasets differs by a statistically significant amount. We discuss how a wine manufacturer might apply a t-test to determine if the sweetness, acidity, or some other property of two separate grape vines might differ in a statistically meaningful way.
Check out more details and examiles found in the show notes linked below.
This week I'm joined by Karl Mamer to discuss the data behind three well known urban legends. Did a large blackout in New York and surrounding areas result in a baby boom nine months later? Do subliminal messages affect our behavior? Is placing beer alongside diapers a recipe for generating more revenue than these products in separate locations? Listen as Karl and I explore these claims.
The Data Skeptic Podcast is launching a contest- not one of chance, but one of skill. Listeners are encouraged to put their data science skills to good use, or if all else fails, guess!
The contest works as follows. Below is some data about the cumulative number of downloads the podcast has achieved on a few given dates. Your job is to predict the date and time at which the podcast will recieve download number 27,182. Why this arbitrary number? It's as good as any other arbitrary number!
Use whatever means you want to formulate a prediction. Once you have it, wait until that time and then post a review of the Data Skeptic Podcast on iTunes. You don't even have to leave a good review! The review which is posted closest to the actual time at which this download occurs will win a free copy of Matthew Russell's "Mining the Social Web" courtesy of the Data Skeptic Podcast. "Price is Right" rules are in play - the winner is the person that posts their review closest to the actual time without going over.
More information at dataskeptic.com
A discussion about conducting US presidential election polls helps frame a converation about selection bias.
Commute times and BBQ invites help frame a discussion about the statistical concept of confidence intervals.
A discussion about getting ready in the morning, negotiating a used car purchase, and selecting the best AirBnB place to stay at help frame a conversation about the decision theoretic principal known as the Value of Information equation.
In this bonus episode, guest Louis Zocchi discusses his background in the gaming industry, specifically, how he became a manufacturer of dice designed to produce statistically uniform outcomes. During the show Louis mentioned a two part video listeners might enjoy: part 1 and part 2 can both be found on youtube. Kyle mentioned a robot capable of unnoticably cheating at Rock Paper Scissors / Ro Sham Bo. More details can be found here. Louis mentioned dice collector Kevin Cook whose website is DiceCollector.com While we're on the subject of table top role playing games, Kyle recommends these two related podcasts listeners might enjoy: The Conspiracy Skeptic podcast (on which host Kyle was recently a guest) had a great episode "Dungeons and Dragons - The Devil's Game?" which explores claims of D&Ds alleged ties to skepticism. Also, Kyle swears there's a great Monster Talk episode discussing claims of a satanic connection to Dungeons and Dragons, but despite mild efforts to locate it, he came up empty. Regardless, listeners of the Data Skeptic Podcast are encouraged to explore the back catalog to try and find the aforementioned episode of this great podcast. Last but not least, as mentioned in the outro, awesomedice.com did some great independent empirical testing that confirms Game Science dice are much closer to the desired uniform distribution over possible outcomes when compared to one leading manufacturer.
Marick Sinay from ZestFianance is our guest this weel. This episode explores how data science techniques are applied in the financial world, specifically in assessing credit worthiness.
Linhda and Kyle talk about Decision Tree Learning in this miniepisode. Decision Tree Learning is the algorithmic process of trying to generate an optimal decision tree to properly classify or forecast some future unlabeled element based by following each step in the tree.
Our guest this week is Hamilton physics professor Kate Jones-Smith who joins us to discuss the evidence for the claim that drip paintings of Jackson Pollock contain fractal patterns. This hypothesis originates in a paper by Taylor, Micolich, and Jonas titled Fractal analysis of Pollock's drip paintings which appeared in Nature. Kate and co-author Harsh Mathur wrote a paper titled Revisiting Pollock's Drip Paintings which also appeared in Nature. A full text PDF can be found here, but lacks the helpful figures which can be found here, although two images are blurred behind a paywall. Their paper was covered in the New York Times as well as in USA Today (albeit with with a much more delightful headline: Never mind the Pollock's [sic]). While discussing the intersection of science and art, the conversation also touched briefly on a few other intersting topics. For example, Penrose Tiles appearing in islamic art (pre-dating Roger Penrose's investigation of the interesting properties of these tiling processes), Quasicrystal designs in art, Automated brushstroke analysis of the works of Vincent van Gogh, and attempts to authenticate a possible work of Leonardo Da Vinci of uncertain provenance. Last but not least, the conversation touches on the particularly compellingHockney-Falco Thesis which is also covered in David Hockney's book Secret Knowledge. For those interested in reading some of Kate's other publications, many Katherine Jones-Smith articles can be found at the given link, all of which have downloadable PDFs.
Our topic for this week is "noise" as in signal vs. noise. This is not a signal processing discussions, but rather a brief introduction to how the work noise is used to describe how much information in a dataset is useless (as opposed to useful).
Also, Kyle announces having recently had the pleasure of appearing as a guest on The Conspiracy Skeptic Podcast to discussion The Bible Code. Please check out this other fine program for this and it's many other great episodes.
Our guest this week is Susan Gerbic. Susan is a skeptical activist involved in many activities, the one we focus on most in this episode is Guerrilla Skepticism on Wikipedia, an organization working to improve the content and citations of Wikipedia. During the episode, Kyle recommended Susan's talk a The Amazing Meeting 9 which can be found here. Some noteworthy topics mentioned during the podcast were Neil deGrasse Tyson's endorsement of the Penny for NASA project. As well as the Web of Trust and Rebutr browser plug ins, as well as how following the Skeptic Action project on Twitter provides recommendations of sites to visit and rate as you see fit via these tools. For her benevolent reference, Susan suggested The Odds Must Be Crazy, a fun website that explores the statistical likelihoods of seemingly unlikely situations. For all else, Susan and her various activities can be found via SusanGerbic.com.
In this week's mini episode, Linhda and Kyle discuss Ant Colony Optimization - a numerical / stochastic optimization technique which models its search after the process ants employ in using random walks to find a goal (food) and then leaving a pheremone trail in their walk back to the nest. We even find some way of relating the city of San Francisco and running a restaurant into the discussion.
Our guest this week is Shahid Shah. Shahid is CEO at Netspective, and writes three blogs: Health Care Guy, Shahid Shah, and HitSphere - the Healthcare IT Supersite. During the program, Kyle recommended a talk from the 2014 MIT Sloan CIO Symposium entitled Transforming "Digital Silos" to "Digital Care Enterprise" which was hosted by our guest Shahid Shah. In addition to his work in Healthcare IT, he also the chairperson for Open Source Electronic Health Record Alliance, an non-profit organization that, amongst other activities, is hosting an upcoming conference. The 3rd annual OSEHRA Open Source Summit: Global Collaboration in Healthcare IT , which will be taking place September 3-5, 2014 in Washington DC. For our benevolent recommendation, Shahid suggested listeners may benefit from taking the time to read books on leadership for the insights they provide. For our self-serving recommendation, Shahid recommended listeners check out his company Netspective , if you are working with a company looking for help getting started building software utilizing next generation technologies.
This miniepisode discusses the technique called Cross Validation - a process by which one randomly divides up a dataset into numerous small partitions. Next, (typically) one is held out, and the rest are used to train some model. The hold out set can then be used to validate how good the model does at describing/predicting new data.
This episode features a discussion with statistics PhD student Zach Seeskin about a project he was involved in as part of the Eric and Wendy Schmidt Data Science for Social Good Summer Fellowship. The project involved exploring the relationship (if any) between streetlight outages and crime in the City of Chicago. We discuss how the data was accessed via the City of Chicago data portal, how the analysis was done, and what correlations were discovered in the data. Won't you listen and hear what was found?
This episode loosely explores the topic of Experimental Design including hypothesis testing, the importance of statistical tests, and an everyday and business example.
In this week's episode, we discuss applied solutions to big data problem with big data engineer Jay Shankar. The episode explores approaches and design philosophy to solving real world big data business problems, and the exploration of the wide array of tools available.
In this minisode, we discuss Bayesian Updating - the process by which one can calculate the most likely hypothesis might be true given one's older / prior belief and all new evidence.
In the second full length episode of the podcast, we discuss the current state of personalized medicine and the advancements in genetics that have made it possible.
In this mini, we discuss p-values and their use in hypothesis testing, in the context of an hypothetical experiment on plant flowering, and end with a reference to the Particle Fever documentary and how statistical significance played a role.
A conversation with Convertro's Nathan Janos about methodologies used to help advertisers understand the affect each of their marketing efforts (print, SEM, display, skywriting, etc.) contributes to their overall return.
In this first mini-episode of the Data Skeptic Podcast, we define and discuss type i and type ii errors (a.k.a. false positives and false negatives).
The Data Skeptic Podcast features conversations with topics related to data science, statistics, machine learning, artificial intelligence and the like, all from the perspective of applying critical thinking and the scientific method to evaluate the veracity of claims and efficacy of approaches.
This first episode is a short discussion about what this podcast is all about.
En liten tjänst av I'm With Friends. Finns även på engelska.