In this episode of the O’Reilly Data Show, I spoke with M.C. Srivas, co-founder of MapR and currently chief architect for data at Uber. We discussed his long career in data management and his experience building a variety of distributed systems. In the course of his career, Srivas has architected key components that now comprise many data platforms (distributed file system, database, query engine, messaging system, etc.).

Stream Processing and Messaging Systems for the IoT Age

In this episode of the O’Reilly Data Show, I spoke with one of Strata + Hadoop World’s most popular teachers—Duncan Ross, data and analytics director at TES Global. In his long career in data, Ross has seen several stages of the evolution of tools, techniques, and training programs, and along the way he has interacted with business managers in many countries and regions. In keeping with his wide-ranging interests, we discussed many topics, including business analytics, data science training programs, data philanthropy and data for good, and university rankings.

Democratizing Business Analytics

In this episode of the O’Reilly Data Show, I spoke with Ira Cohen, co-founder and chief data scientist at Anodot (full disclosure: I’m an advisor to Anodot). Since my days in quantitative finance, I’ve had a longstanding interest in time-series analysis. Back then, I used statistical (and data mining) techniques on relatively small volumes of financial time series. Today’s applications and use cases involve data volumes and speeds that require a new set of tools for data management, collection, and simple analysis.

On the analytics side, applications are also beginning to require online machine learning algorithms that are able to scale, are adaptive, and free of a rigid dependence on labeled data. I talked with Cohen about the challenges in building an advanced analytics system for intelligent applications at extremely large scale.

Semi-Supervised, Unsupervised, and Adaptive Algorithms for Large-Scale Time Series

In this episode of the Data Show, I spoke with Mike Tung, founder and CEO of Diffbot - a company dedicated to building large-scale knowledge databases. Diffbot is at the heart of many web applications, and it’s starting to power a wide array of intelligent applications. We talked about the challenges of building a web-scale platform for doing highly accurate, semi-supervised, structured data extraction. We also took a tour through the AI landscape, and the early days of self-driving cars.

Using AI to Build a Comprehensive Database of Knowledge

In this episode of the O’Reilly Data Show, I spoke with Rajat Monga, who serves as a director of engineering at Google and manages the TensorFlow engineering team. We talked about how he ended up working on deep learning, the current state of TensorFlow, and the applications of deep learning to products at Google and other companies.

Building Intelligent Applications with Deep Learning and TensorFlow

In this episode of the O’Reilly Data Show, I spoke withJana Eggers, CEO of Nara Logics. Eggers’ involvement with AI dates back to her days as a researcher at the Los Alamos National Laboratory. Most recently she has been helping companies across many industries adopt AI technologies as a way to enable a range of intelligent data applications.

Enabling Enterprise Adoption of AI Technologies

In this episode of the O’Reilly Data Show, I spoke with Adam Marcus, co-founder and CTO of B12, a startup focused on building human-in-the-loop intelligent applications. We talked about the open source platform Orchestra,for coordinating human-in-the-loop projects; the current wave of human-assisted AI applications; best practices for reviewing and scoring experts; and flash teams.

Building Human-Assisted AI Applications

While I was in Beijing for Strata + Hadoop World, several people reminded me of the chatbot Xiaoice—one of the most popular accounts on the Chinese social media site Weibo. Developed by Microsoft researchers, Xiaoice comes with a personality and is able to engage users in extended conversations on Weibo. These types of capabilities highlight that in an attention economy, systems that are able to forge an emotional connection will garner more loyalty and engagement from users.

In this episode of the O’Reilly Data Show, I sat down with Rana el Kaliouby, co-founder and CEO of Affectiva, one of the leading experts in emotion sensing systems. We talked about the impact of deep learning and computer vision, Affectiva’s large facial expression database, and privacy and ethics in an era of multimodal systems.

The Importance of Emotion in AI Systems

Ask a random person for an example of an AI system and chances are he or she will name self-driving vehicles. In this episode of the O’Reilly Data Show, I sat down with Shaoshan Liu, co-founder of PerceptIn and previously the senior architect (autonomous driving) at Baidu USA. We talked about the technology behind self-driving vehicles, their reliance on rule-based decision engines, and deploying large-scale deep learning systems.

The Technology Behind Self-Driving Vehicles

In this episode I spoke with Vikash Mansinghka, research scientist at MIT, where he leads the Probabilistic Computing Project, and co-founder of Empirical Systems. I’ve long wanted to introduce listeners to recent developments in probabilistic programming, and I found the perfect guide in Mansinghka.

Introducing Model-Based Thinking Into AI Systems

As data scientists add deep learning to their arsenals, they need tools that integrate with existing platforms and frameworks. This is particularly important for those who work in large enterprises. In this episode of the Data Show, I spoke with Adam Gibson, co-founder and CTO of Skymind, and co-creator of Deeplearning4J (DL4J). Gibson has spent the last few years developing the DL4J library and community, while simultaneously building deep learning solutions and products for large enterprises.

The Key to Building Deep Learning Solutions for Large Enterprises

In this episode of the Data Show, I spoke with Jason Dai, CTO of big data technologies at Intel, and co-chair of Strata + Hadoop World Beijing. Dai and his team are prolific and longstanding contributors to the Apache Spark project. Their early contributions to Spark tended to be on the systems side and included Netty-based shuffle, a fair-scheduler, and the “yarn-client” mode. Recently, they have been contributing tools for advanced analytics. In partnership with major cloud providers in China, they’ve written implementations of algorithmic building blocks and machine learning models that let Apache Spark users scale to extremely high-dimensional models and large data sets. They achieve scalability by taking advantage of things like data sparsity and Intel’s MKL software. Along the way, they’ve gained valuable experience and insight into how companies deploy machine learning models in real-world applications.

Deep Learning for Apache Spark

Thanks to freeways, cities became something to get through instead of something to get to. Now, as the next transportation revolution -- from rivers to trains to cars to autonomous cars -- promises to change the face of our cities, what happens to car culture, infrastructure, and more?

Who owns what, who pays? And what about the design -- and product management -- challenges, whether it's designing for user trust, city adoption, or an ever-moving target thanks to constantly evolving tech?

This episode of the podcast (in conversation with Sonal) covers all this and more, featuring: a16z's Frank Chen, who recently shared 16 questions about autonomous cars; Taggart Matthiesen, director of product at Lyft who covers the core platform as well as development/strategy for autonomous vehicles; and Carl Pope, former executive director and chairman of the Sierra Club -- and author (with former NYC mayor Mike Bloomberg) of the upcoming book Climate of Hope: How Cities Businesses and Citizens Can Save the Planet. Will curb space be the new shelf space? When we value the "iPhone-ness" over the "carness" of cars, what changes? And... will we all drive less, walk more?

a16z Podcast: Cars and Cities, the Autonomy Edition

In this episode of the Data Show, I spoke with Anima Anandkumar, a leading machine learning researcher, and currently a principal research scientist at Amazon. I took the opportunity to get an update on the latest developments on the use of tensors in machine learning. Most of our conversation centered around MXNet—an open source, efficient, scalable deep learning framework. I’ve been a fan of MXNet dating back to when it was a research project out of CMU and UW, and I wanted to hear Anandkumar’s perspective on its recent progress as a framework for enterprises and practicing data scientists.

Deep Learning That's Easy to Implement and Easy to Scale

In this episode of the Data Show, I spoke with Francisco Webber, founder of Cortical.io, a startup that is applying tools based on Hierarchical Temporal Memory (HTM) to natural language understanding. While HTM has been around for more than a decade, there aren’t many companies that have released products based on it (at least compared to other machine learning methods). Numenta, an organization developing open source machine intelligence based on the biology of the neocortex, maintains a community site featuring showcase applications. Webber’s company has been building tools based on HTM and applying them to big text data in a variety of industries; financial services has been a particularly strong vertical for Cortical.

Natural Language Analysis Using Hierarchical Temporal Memory

In this episode of the Data Show, I spoke with Aurélien Géron, a serial entrepreneur, data scientist, and author of a popular, new book entitled "Hands-on Machine Learning with Scikit-Learn and TensorFlow." Géron’s book is aimed at software engineers who want to learn machine learning and start deploying machine learning models in real-world products.

Becoming a Machine Learning Engineer

In this episode of the Data Show, I spoke with Karthik Ramasamy, adjunct faculty member at UC Berkeley, former engineering manager at Twitter, and co-founder of Streamlio. Ramasamy managed the team that built Heron, an open source, distributed stream processing engine, compatible with Apache Storm.  While Ramasamy has seen firsthand what it takes to build and deploy large-scale distributed systems (within Twitter, he worked closely with the team that built DistributedLog), he is first and foremost interested in designing and building end-to-end applications. As someone who organizes many conferences, I’m all too familiar with the vast array of popular big data frameworks available. But, I also know that engineers and architects are most interested in content and material that helps them cut through the options and decisions.

Architecting and Building End-to-End Streaming Applications

In this episode of the Data Show, I spoke with Reza Zadeh, adjunct professor at Stanford University, co-organizer of ScaledML, and co-founder of Matroid, a startup focused on commercial applications of deep learning and computer vision. Zadeh also is the co-author of the forthcoming book TensorFlow for Deep Learning (now in early release). Our conversation took place on the eve of the recent ScaledML conference, and much of our conversation was focused on practical and real-world strategies for scaling machine learning. In particular, we spoke about the rise of deep learning, hardware/software interfaces for machine learning, and the many commercial applications of computer vision.

Scaling Machine Learning

In this episode of the Data Show, I spoke with Lukas Biewald, co-founder and chief data scientist at CrowdFlower. In a previous episode we covered how the rise of deep learning is fueling the need for large labeled data sets and high-performance computing systems. CrowdFlower has a service that many leading companies have come to rely on to provide them with labeled data sets to train machine learning models. As deep learning models get larger and more complex, they require training data sets that are bigger than those required by other machine learning techniques.

Data Preparation in the Age of Deep Learning

In this episode of the Data Show, I spoke with David Ferrucci, founder of Elemental Cognition and senior technologist at Bridgewater Associates. Ferrucci served as principal investigator of IBM’s DeepQA project and led the Watson team that became champion of the Jeopardy! quiz show. Elemental Cognition (EC) is a research group focused on building an AI system that will be equipped with state-of-the-art natural language understanding technologies. Ferrucci envisions that EC will ship with foundational knowledge in many subject areas, but will be able to very quickly acquire knowledge in other (specialized) domains with the help of “human mentors.”

Having built and deployed several prominent AI systems through the years, I also wanted to get Ferrucci’s perspective on the evolution of AI technologies, and how enterprises can take advantage of all the exciting recent developments.

Ai

Joshua Newnham