The TWIML AI Podcast (formerly This Week in Machine Learning & Artificial Intelligence) Sam Charrington

Today we’re joined by Hima Lakkaraju, an Assistant Professor at Harvard University. At CVPR, Hima was a keynote speaker at the Fair, Data-Efficient and Trusted Computer Vision Workshop, where she spoke on Understanding the Perils of Black Box Explanations. Hima talks us through her presentation, which focuses on the unreliability of explainability techniques that center perturbations, such as LIME or SHAP, as well as how attacks on these models can be carried out, and what they look like.

We continue our CVPR coverage with today’s guest, Pavan Turaga, Associate Professor at Arizona State University. Pavan gave a keynote presentation at the Differential Geometry in CV and ML Workshop, speaking on Revisiting Invariants with Geometry and Deep Learning. We go in-depth on Pavan’s research on integrating physics-based principles into computer vision. We also discuss the context of the term “invariant,” and Pavan contextualizes this work in relation to Hinton’s similar Capsule Network res

Today we’re joined by Babak Ehteshami Bejnordi, a Research Scientist at Qualcomm.

Babak is currently focused on conditional computation, which is the main driver for today’s conversation. We dig into a few papers in great detail including one from this year’s CVPR conference, Conditional Channel Gated Networks for Task-Aware Continual Learning, covering how gates are used to drive efficiency and accuracy, while decreasing model size, how this research manifests into actual products, and more!

Today we’re joined by Marsal Gavalda, head of machine learning for the Commerce platform at Square, where he manages the development of machine learning for various tools and platforms, including marketing, appointments, and above all, risk management.

We explore how they manage their vast portfolio of projects, and how having an ML and technology focus at the outset of the company has contributed to their success, tips and best practices for internal democratization of ML, and much more.

Today we’re joined by Jianxu Chen, a scientist at the Allen Institute for Cell Science.

At the latest GTC conference, Jianxu presented his work on the Allen Cell Explorer Toolkit, an open-source project that allows users to do 3D segmentation of intracellular structures in fluorescence microscope images at high resolutions, making the images more accessible for data analysis. We discuss three of the major components of the toolkit: the cell image analyzer, the image generator, and the image visualizer

Today we’re joined by Andreas Madsen, an independent researcher based in Denmark. While we caught up with Andreas to discuss his ICLR spotlight paper, “Neural Arithmetic Units,” we also spend time exploring his experience as an independent researcher, discussing the difficulties of working with limited resources, the importance of finding peers to collaborate with, and tempering expectations of getting papers accepted to conferences -- something that might take a few tries to get right.