Data Skeptic

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 pay

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 t

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 continuo

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 distribut

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.