Data Skeptic

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

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

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 Mach

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.