Data Skeptic

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

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

GPT-2 is yet another in a succession of models like ELMo and BERT which adopt a similar deep learning architecture and train an unsupervised model on a massive text corpus. As we have been covering recently, these approaches are showing tremendous promise, but how close are they to an AGI?  Our guest today, Vazgen Davidyants wondered exactly that, and have conversations with a Chatbot running GPT-2.  We discuss his experiences as well as some novel thoughts on artificial intelligence.

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

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

Omer Levy joins us to discuss "SpanBERT: Improving Pre-training by Representing and Predicting Spans". https://arxiv.org/abs/1907.10529

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

Kyle pontificates on how impressed he is with BERT.

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

Video annotation is an expensive and time-consuming process. As a consequence, the available video datasets are useful but small. The availability of machine transcribed explainer videos offers a unique opportunity to rapidly develop a useful, if dirty, corpus of videos that are "self annotating", as hosts explain the actions they are taking on the screen. This episode is a discussion of the HowTo100m dataset - a project which has assembled a video corpus of 136M video clips with captions covering 23k activities. Related Links The paper will be presented at ICCV 2019 @antoine77340 Antoine on Github Antoine's homepage

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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