bots

Machine Learning

The O'Reilly Data Show explores the opportunities and techniques driving big data and data science. Through interviews and analysis, we highlight the people putting data to work.

The O'Reilly Data Show Podcast

In this episode of the O’Reilly Bots Podcast, I speak with Dennis Mortensen, founder and CEO of X.ai, a personal assistant bot that handles meeting scheduling through email.

Dennis Mortensen on Email Bots

In this episode of the O’Reilly Bots Podcast, I speak with Tim Hwang, an affiliated researcher at the Oxford Internet Institute, about AI-driven psyops bots and their capacity for social destabilization.

Tim Hwang on Bots That Cause Chaos

In this episode of the O’Reilly Bots Podcast, I speak with Tom Coates, co-founder of Thington, a service layer for the Internet of Things. Thington provides a conversational, messaging-like interface for controlling devices like lights and thermostats, but it’s also conversational at a deeper level: its very architecture treats the interactions between different devices like a conversation, allowing devices to make announcements to any other device that cares to listen.

Tom Coates on Conversational Devices

Dan Gailey (@dpg) and Nathan Ross (@nathantross) talk about Enterprise Chatbots, Bot-to-Bot Communication, Bots as first class citizens, and Bot UX.

BotWorld Podcast #1 - Dan Gailey and Nathan Ross

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 Bots Podcast, we peer into the giant companies that are beginning to adopt messaging and bots. My guest is Tom Hadfield, founder of Message.io, a service that syndicates bots across many different messaging platforms.

Tom Hadfield on Bots in the Enterprise

In recent years hedge funds have taken the lead in algorithmic investing - or robo-trading as it’s sometimes called. But there’s no reason the hedge fund world should have all the good stuff. In this episode of the AI Podcast, we speak with Gaurav Chakravorty, co-founder of qplum, a startup that’s working to bring that same machine learning investing approach to the rest of us.

Ep. 26: Deep Learning Promises to Bring Algorithmic Investing Smarts to the Rest of Us

In this episode of the Data Show, I spoke with Ken Stanley, founding member of Uber AI Labs and associate professor at the University of Central Florida. Stanley is an AI researcher and a leading pioneer in the field of neuroevolution—a method for evolving and learning neural networks through evolutionary algorithms. In a recent survey article, Stanley went through the history of neuroevolution and listed recent developments, including its applications to reinforcement learning problems.

Effective Mechanisms for Searching the Space of Machine Learning Algorithms

In this episode of the Data Show, we look back to a recent conversation I had at the Spark Summit in San Francisco with Ion Stoica (UC Berkeley professor and executive chairman of Databricks) and Matei Zaharia (assistant professor at Stanford and chief technologist of Databricks). Stoica and Zaharia were core members of UC Berkeley’s AMPLab, which originated Apache Spark, Apache Mesos, and Alluxio.

The State Of Machine Learning In Apache Spark

In this episode of the O’Reilly Programming Podcast, I talk with Katharine Jarmul, a Python developer and data analyst whose company, Kjamistan, provides consulting and training on topics surrounding machine learning, natural language processing, and data testing. Jarmul is the co-author (along with Jacqueline Kazil) of the O’Reilly book "Data Wrangling with Python," and she has presented the live online training course "Practical Data Cleaning with Python."

Katharine Jarmul on Using Python for Data Analysis

In this episode of the Data Show, I spoke with Ofer Ronen, GM of Chatbase, a startup housed within Google’s Area 120. With tools for building chatbots becoming accessible, conversational interfaces are becoming more prevalent. As Ronen highlights in our conversation, chatbots are already enabling companies to automate many routine tasks (mainly in customer interaction). We are still in the early days of chatbots, but if current trends persist, we’ll see bots deployed more widely and take on more complex tasks and interactions. Gartner recently predicted that by 2021, companies will spend more on bots and chatbots than mobile app development.

Like any other software application, as bots get deployed in real-world applications, companies will need tools to monitor their performance. For a single, simple chatbot, one can imagine developers manually monitoring log files for errors and problems. Things get harder as you scale to more bots and as the bots get increasingly more complex. As in the case of other machine learning applications, when companies start deploying many more chatbots, automated tools for monitoring and diagnostics become essential.

The good news is relevant tools are beginning to emerge. In this episode, Ronen describes a tool he helped build: Chatbase is a chatbot analytics and optimization service that leverages machine learning research and technologies developed at Google. In essence, Chatbase lets companies focus on building and deploying the best possible chatbots.

Using Machine Learning to Monitor and Optimize Chatbots

In this episode of the Data Show, I spoke with Roger Chen, co-founder and CEO of Computable Labs, a startup focused on building tools for the creation of data networks and data exchanges. Chen has also served as co-chair of O'Reilly's Artificial Intelligence Conference since its inception in 2016. This conversation took place the day after Chen and his collaborators released an interesting new white paper, "Fair value and decentralized governance of data." Current-generation AI and machine learning technologies rely on large amounts of data, and to the extent they can use their large user bases to create “data silos,” large companies in large countries (like the U.S. and China) enjoy a competitive advantage. With that said, we are awash in articles about the dangers posed by these data silos. Privacy and security, disinformation, bias, and a lack of transparency and control are just some of the issues that have plagued the perceived owners of “data monopolies.”

Acquiring and Sharing High-Quality Data

In this episode of the Data Show, I speak with Cassie Kozyrkov, technical director and chief decision scientist at Google Cloud. She describes "decision intelligence" as an interdisciplinary field concerned with all aspects of decision-making, and which combines data science with the behavioral sciences. Most recently she has been focused on developing best practices that can help practitioners make safe, effective use of AI and data. Kozyrkov uses her platform to help data scientists develop skills that will enable them to connect data and AI with their organizations' core businesses.

We had a great conversation spanning many topics, including:

How data science can be more useful

The importance of the human side of data

The leadership talent shortage in data science

Is data science a bubble?

Make Data Science More Useful

In this episode of the Data Show, I speak with Alex Ratner, project lead for Stanford’s Snorkel open source project; Ratner also recently garnered a faculty position at the University of Washington and is currently working on a company supporting and extending the Snorkel project. Snorkel is a framework for building and managing training data. Based on our survey from earlier this year, labeled data remains a key bottleneck for organizations building machine learning applications and services.

Ratner was a guest on the podcast a little over two years ago when Snorkel was a relatively new project. Since then, Snorkel has added more features, expanded into computer vision use cases, and now boasts many users, including Google, Intel, IBM, and other organizations. Along with his thesis advisor professor Chris Ré of Stanford, Ratner and his collaborators have long championed the importance of building tools aimed squarely at helping teams build and manage training data. With today’s release of Snorkel version 0.9, we are a step closer to having a framework that enables the programmatic creation of training data sets.

Labeling, Transforming, and Structuring Training Data Sets for Machine Learning

In this episode of the Data Show, I speak with Kesha Williams, technical instructor at A Cloud Guru, a training company focused on cloud computing. As a full stack web developer, Williams became intrigued by machine learning and started teaching herself the ML tools on Amazon Web Services. Fast forward to today, Williams has built some well-regarded Alexa skills, mastered ML services on AWS, and has now firmly added machine learning to her developer toolkit.

Becoming a Machine Learning Practitioner

In this episode of the Data Show, I speak with Michael Mahoney, a member of RISELab, the International Computer Science Institute, and the Department of Statistics at UC Berkeley. A physicist by training, Mahoney has been at the forefront of many important problems in large-scale data analysis. On the theoretical side, his works spans algorithmic and statistical methods for matrices, graphs, regression, optimization, and related problems. On the applications side, he has contributed to systems used for internet and social media analysis, social network analysis, as well as for a host of applications in the physical and life sciences. Most recently, he has been working on deep neural networks, specifically developing theoretical methods and practical diagnostic tools that should be helpful to practitioners who use deep learning.

Understanding Deep Neural Networks

O'Reilly Media spreads the knowledge of innovators. At O’Reilly, a big part of our business is paying attention to what’s new and interesting in the world of technology. We have a pretty good record at having anticipated some of the big technology developments in recent history. For instance, we launched the first commercial Web site, GNN, in 1993; we organized the meeting at which the term “open source” was first adopted; we were early investors in Blogger, which helped launch the blogging revolution; and more recently, our Web 2.0 conference launched a world-wide meme. We call this predictive sense the “O’Reilly Radar.” And while we’re certainly not always right, we are, at least, good at making interesting guesses.

Our methodology is simple: we draw from the wisdom of the alpha geeks in our midst, paying attention to what’s interesting to them, amplifying these weak signals, and seeing where they fit into the innovation ecology. Add to that the original research conducted by our Research team, and you start to get a good picture of what the technology world is thinking about.

Using Machine Learning to Monitor and Optimize Chatbots

O'Reilly Radar