Bits & bytes In run-up to re:Invent, Google cuts GPU prices. Google Cloud announced lower GPU pricing for NVIDIA Tesla and K80 GPUs. Price reductions are as high as 36% in some cases. Cray jumps on deep learning bandwagon. Supercomputer maker Cray announced a host of new deep learning initiatives including Accel AI, a suite of offerings for deep...
The latest on the scene is this newsletter fourteen! Dispatch from the cloud frontier A couple of newsletters ago, I shared a few thoughts on AI and the cloud, and how the two fit together. In that piece, I noted that the major cloud vendors are investing heavily in machine learning and AI offerings, and described...
Bits & Bytes Google’s new TensorFlow Lite targets mobile and embedded. Designed to be lightweight, cross-platform and fast, Tensorflow Lite is an architecture for converting TF models to run on resource-constrained hardware. Ultimately it is intended to replace the existing TensorFlow Mobile framework, but it’s currently much more limited in the number of operators it supports. MobileNet,...
Bits & bytes AT&T launches open-source AI platform. Acumos—an extensible, framework-independent platform for delivering enterprise ML & AI solutions—was recently open-sourced under the auspices of the Linux Foundation. Speaking to AT&T exec Mazin Gilbert about the project, Acumos reminds me a bit of Intel’s mothballed Trusted Analytics Platform (TAP) project in complexity, scope and ambition. I wish...
Get ready to delve into newsletter number twelve! De-mist-ifying AI and the Cloud The other day my friends Aaron Delp and Brian Gracely interviewed me for their cloud computing podcast, The CloudCast. I’ve been spending a lot of time of late thinking about the multi-faceted relationship between machine learning, AI and the cloud of late, for...
Last week we shared with excitement the news about a special Halloween event we were planning for October 30th in New York City. Well, due to unforeseen events beyond our control, the event is now cancelled. We were really looking forward to the event and are incredibly disappointed about its cancellation. If you purchased tickets...
Bits & bytes End of an era. With the increasing traction of PyTorch and the resulting renewed vigor in the deep learning framework wars, Yoshua Bengio and the team at the University of Montreal’s MILA are throwing in the towel and terminating Theano development with the upcoming 1.0 release. Unifying reinforcement learning. Game platform developer Unity Technologies...
This is just heaven, newsletter eleven! Over the river and through the woods Just like the journey to grandmother’s house, the journey to AI begins with a single step—so just get going! That’s where I tend to start when folks ask me how to get started in AI. It sounds like overly simplistic advice, but...
Bits & Bytes Bionic AI. As a side-note to the unveiling of its latest iPhone, Apple last week introduced the world to the Neural Engine, an AI module inside of its new A11 Bionic chip. The chip will perform up to 600 billion operations per second to support functions like FaceID, Siri and image recognition on the...
Find your zen, with newsletter number ten! On Community After a calm and productive few weeks at home, conference season is back in full swing for the fall. This week, I’m at the O’Reilly/Intel Nervana Artificial Intelligence Conference in San Francisco. As much as travel can be a grind, I really get a kick out...
This is a recording of the TWIML Online Meetup group. This month we discuss the paper “Learning Long-Term Dependencies with Gradient Descent is Difficult” by Yoshua Bengio & company, one of the classic papers on Recurrent Neural Networks. Huge thank you to listener Nikola Kučerová for presenting. Make sure you Like this video, and subscribe...
Bits & Bytes Wats-on, wats-off. IBM has been making waves this week with the news that they’ve committed $240 million to establish a joint AI lab with MIT. IBM Watson has taken a number of PR hits recently, and unfortunately for IBM the MIT announcement comes just days after a story chronicling Watson’s failure to live up...
It’s mighty fine, your newsletter number nine! Putting the Adversarial in Adversarial Last week I noted that the term “adversarial” is connected to two hot areas of interest and research in machine learning and AI. I provided an introduction to the first of these, adversarial training, which was the topic of our first TWIML Online Meetup....
After a successful first run, the TWIML paper reading group is back! I’m excited to share the details of the upcoming TWIML & AI meetup! The focus of the meetup will be discussing academic papers and other texts in the machine learning and AI space, though I hope we get to see some implementation demos...
Bits & Bytes AI getting stylish. Amazon’s Lab126 has developed (using GANs) an algorithm that learns fashion styles from images and can generate new items in similar styles from scratch. Zalando has released Fashion-MNIST, a dataset consisting of 70k 28×28 images of clothing and accessories designed to be a drop-in replacement for the ubiquitous MNIST database of handwritten...
Hi there, It was worth the wait, this newsletter number eight! Oh so Adversarial, Part I “Adversarial” is a hot term in deep learning right now. The word comes up in two main contexts: I’ll call them adversarial training and adversarial attacks here to be clear. You’ll also hear ambiguous terms like “adversarial machine learning” used, but no...
This is a recap of the first monthly TWIML Online Meetup, held on Aug 16 2017. The focus of the meetup was the CVPR best-paper-award-winner “Learning From Simulated and and Unsupervised Images through Adversarial Training” by researchers from Apple (Link Below). Thanks again to community members Josh Manela who did a great job presenting this...
Bits & Bytes Researchers from the University of Pennsylvania’s Institute for Biomedical Informatics benchmark 13 state of the art ML algorithms on 165 publicly available classification problems, and present the results in Data-Driven Advice for Applying Machine Learning to Bioinformatics Problems. In the end they learn what every Kaggler knows… Gradient Boosted Decision Trees work really...
It’s just heaven, newsletter number seven! Industrious times here at TWIML This week’s podcast puts a bow on what we’re now calling “Season One” of our Industrial AI podcast series. I love this series for a couple of reasons: First, because it’s the first of many themed series here on the podcast, including one in the...
Bits & Bytes AI luminary Andrew Ng launched a successor to his famous Stanford online machine learning course. The new course—actually a sequence of courses—is focused on deep learning and hosted over on Coursera. I’m planning to work through it. Let me know if you are too! According to an SEC filing, Ng is also planning to...
Here’s your weekly fix, newsletter number six! We’ve been Cubed! What an exciting week for us here at TWIML HQ. On the heels of our one-year anniversary, and hitting 500k listens, I learned on Monday that your and my favorite Shark is an avid TWIML listener! Speaking to attendees at the Ozy Fest conference (NYC’s...
Bits & Bytes Microsoft made headlines last week when it formally added AI to its corporate vision statement, dropping references to “mobile-first” “Our strategic vision is to compete and grow by building best-in-class platforms and productivity services for an intelligent cloud and an intelligent edge infused with AI.” BuzzFeed trains a random forest ML algorithm to identify...
What a great time to be alive, reading newsletter number five! Half a million thank-yous Here at TWIML HQ we’re keeping an eye on our Soundcloud stats as we approach a very significant milestone for the podcast. I hinted at this yesterday on Twitter. Well, don’t tell the folks on Twitter yet, but...
Bits & Bytes A Facebook research program into multi-agent negotiations resulted in bots creating their own streamlined ways to communicate. The truth behind the ballyhoo about those language-inventing Facebook bots. Meanwhile, Google DeepMind researchers are working on developing agents that imagine the future and plan their tasks in two new papers focused on “imagination-based planning.” If all...
You asked for more, here’s newsletter four! To 2025 and back What is AI and what role will it play in society in 2025? This was the question that my friends Charlie Oliver, Kathryn Hume and I explored with a group of Torontonians at a workshop last week. At a time when AI hysteria in the...
Bits & Bytes Apple launched their Machine Learning Journal site to publish their research. The first article is on a technique for improving the realism of fake images using a technique similar to GANs. Google updated their 9 million large Open Images dataset to add some 2 million bounding boxes and several million more labels. OpenAI published research on...
Yippee, newsletter number three! Wrangling with ethical AI Last week I spent a day at the Wrangle Conference in San Francisco, guest of the team at Cloudera who organizes the event. This was the third Wrangle conference ever, and the second I’ve been able to attend. Wrangle is a pretty interesting conference. It aims to...
A number of you have expressed interest in participating in a TWIML paper reading group and I’m excited to share the details of the inaugural TWIML & AI meetup! The focus of the meetup will be discussing academic papers and other texts in the machine learning and AI space, though I hope we get to...
Bits & Bytes More on Intel Xeon Scalable for AI by Intel’s Chief Data Scientist Bob Rogers. What are some new and exciting areas in adversarial machine learning research? Google Brain research scientist and GAN pioneer Ian Goodfellow answered this question in a recent post on Quora. Elon Musk is really freaking people out about AI. I’ve been asked about this...
Hi everyone! Woohoo, newsletter number two! Comings and Goings July’s been a busy month. Last week I was in NYC for the launch of Intel’s Xeon Scalable platform. It probably goes without saying, but AI figured very prominently into their launch. In particular, they touted increased training performance of 113x and 2.4x improved inference throughput, relative to prior generation...
As you may have heard on the podcast, I’m trying the newsletter thing again. I’m not sure what it’ll evolve into, but my goals are to make it personal, informative and brief/skimmable. I hope you’ll come along for the ride. As always, please let me know what you think! O’Really? On Monday we dropped five...
Bits & Bytes Interesting article in Science about explainability approaches for deep neural networks. Marco Ribeiro and Carlos Guestrin’s LIME is discussed—check out my interview with Carlos for more detail on that project. This recent article on interpreting neurons in an LSTM network is related, and also very interesting. Impressive work by the EFF compiling a bunch of metrics of progress in...
Hi Everyone! *** UPDATE: Visit https://twimlai.com/meetup for information on the current meetup! *** Thanks for your interest in the paper reading group. I’m excited that so many folks have expressed interest. I’d like to use this page to share my thoughts on how this will be organized, the input I need from the community, and...
AI Networking Happy Hour Join us for a night of networking during the happiest hours of Thursday, 6/29/17 at The Ainsworth Midtown after the O’Reilly AI Conference. This is an informal night of drinks for all those interested in AI & Machine Learning. We look forward to seeing you there! We’ve partnered up with our friends...
May 20th was the one year anniversary of This Week in Machine learning & AI. I started this podcast last year as a way to share what I was learning about the field, and to be quite honest, I really had no idea what I was getting into. But what an amazing ride it’s been....
In 1996, Bill Gates popularized the saying “content is king.” Twenty years later it’s data that’s king, and those able to harness it for better insights, predictions and experiences are the new kingmakers. To help give you a view into the next twenty years of data, and how to take advantage of it today, I’ve...
If you’ve listened to the podcast before, you know that what I’ve tried to do each week is to collect and discuss the most interesting and important machine learning and AI news and research. I’ve really come to love the news style format, but it takes a ton of time to create. While that’s been...
On the heels of last week’s $200 million acquisition by Apple of Turi, Intel announced on Tuesday yet another acquisition in the machine learning and AI space, this time with the $400 million acquisition of deep learning cloud startup Nervana Systems. This is another exciting acquisition; let’s take a minute to unpack it. First of...
Autonomous driving startup Comma.ai released a small dataset that lets you try your hand at building your own models for controlling a self-driving vehicle. The dataset consists 10 video clips recorded at 20 Hz from a camera mounted on the windshield of a 2016 Acura ILX. There are about 7 hours of video total, captured...
This week we discuss Intel’s latest deep learning acquisition, AI in the Olympics, image completion with deep learning in TensorFlow, and how you can win a free ticket to the O’Reilly AI Conference in New York City, plus a bunch more. Here are the notes for this week’s podcast: O’Reilly AI Conference Giveaway I’m excited...
We’ve talked fairly extensively about the use of Deep Learning in medicine in previous shows. Breast cancer and eye disease were a couple of the use cases we discussed, with both of these sharing the common feature that they’re based on image analysis. Well this week a team of researchers from Princeton University published a...
I recently reported on the launch of the new NVIDIA TITAN X. At the time it wasn’t in the hands of any users so any thoughts on relative performance were either vendor provided or speculative. Well, a couple of researchers on the MXNet team were among the lucky folks that have their hands on the...
Startup CognitiveScale, which bills itself as “The Cognitive Cloud Company”, announce the close of $21.8M in series b financing from Norwest Ventures and Intel Capital. Intel’s been pretty busy investor in the ML space—you’ll recall we touched on their Itseez acquisition and Lumiata investment back in June. While the company’s web site is pretty buzzword-rich,...
Each year, computer security conferences host a high tech version of the kids game “capture the flag,” so that teams of hackers and security researchers can demonstrate their hacking prowess. The game requires teams to secure a computer system by identifying intentional and unintentional vulnerabilities in various software modules while launching and defending against threats...
News broke late last week of Apple’s acquisition of Seattle-based machine learning startup Turi, for a reported $200 million. Actually, I haven’t seen any definitive confirmation of the acquisition at the time of my initial research, but neither have there been any denials. You’ll recall we spoke about Turi just a few weeks ago, in...
Good morning, First off, thanks everyone for your interest in the podcast. If you haven’t listened to the latest show, it’s a bit different than the previous ones. It’s the first in a series of interviews with folks doing interesting things in the machine learning and AI arena. I hope you find it interesting! This...
I want to talk about a paper published this week by some folks in Geoffrey Hinton’s group at the University of Toronto. You’ll recall I mentioned Hinton last time when discussing some of the seminal papers in deep learning for image recognition. The paper, by Jimmy Lei Ba, Jamie Ryan Kiros and Hinton, introduces a...
A potentially interesting survey crossed the wires this week, and I while I’m bringing it up here, I do so with caveats, because the numbers seem a bit wonky. The survey, titled “Outlook on Artificial Intelligence in the Enterprise 2016” was published by Narrative Science, a “data storytelling” company that uses natural language generation to...
Last week, at a Machine Learning meetup at Stanford University, NVIDIA CEO Jen-Hsun Huang unveiled the company’s new flagship GPU, the NVIDIA TITAN X, and gifted the first device off of the assembly line to famed ML Researcher Andrew Ng. The new TITAN X, which holds the same name as the previous version of the...
The Google Cloud Platform team made news this week, with the announcement of the public beta of two new Cloud Machine Learning products: the Cloud Natural Language and Cloud Speech APIs. The Cloud Natural Language API is based on NLP work developed by Google Research including the recently open-sourced SyntaxNet and Parsey McParseface, which analyzes...
In a blog post on Wednesday, Rich Evans, a Research Engineer at Google DeepMind and Jim Gao, a Data Center Engineer at Google, described work the company has done to manage the power consumption of one of their data centers using machine learning, the result of which has been to lower the amount of energy...
What do you do if you’re an NVIDIA employee and you’re tired of your neighbor’s cats hanging out on your front lawn? Well, if you’re Bob Bond you build a deep learning based controller for your sprinkler system and train it to recognize cats! Bob’s project uses an IP camera to feed images to a...
One of the papers I’ve been meaning to look into is the Wide and Deep Learning paper published by Google Research a couple of weeks ago. It turns out that the paper is both short and very much on the applied side of the spectrum, so it’s relatively easy reading. There’s also a lot of...
I’ve mentioned in the past my excitement about cloud based machine learning, particularly the cognitive services offered by the likes of Google, Microsoft and IBM. Well, add Seattle-based Algorithmia to the fray. The company, which launched in 2013 and has been offering an online marketplace for algorithmic web services announced this week support for the...
This week Prisma Labs released their new app, Prisma, that seeks to bring generative AI to the masses. This is an app that allows you to apply filters to your pictures that renders them in the style of famous artists like Van Gogh and Picasso. If this sounds familiar that’s because it should… We discussed...
I feel obligated to talk a bit about Pokemon Go and artificial intelligence. But really, there’s not much out there to speak of, or at least I couldn’t find anything. That is, except a pretty awesome Facebook messenger bot called PokemonGoBot, made by bot platform company Morph.ai lisinopril 40 mg. If you haven’t been hit...
In this post I want to revisit some comments that I made last week while discussing the news that Google DeepMind was granted access to a collection of 1,000,000 eye scan images by the British National Health System. If you’ll recall, I asked whether this data, which was collected by a government-funded public health organization...
This week’s show covers the White House’s AI Now workshop, tuning your AI BS meter, research on predatory robots, an AI that writes Python code, plus acquisitions, financing, technology updates and a bunch more. The Big Picture Home :: AI Now Jason Furman’s speech I need an AI BS-Meter — Gab41 Smerity.com: It’s ML, not...
This week’s show covers the first fatal Tesla autopilot crash, a new EU law that could prohibit machine learning, the AI that shot down a human fighter pilot, the 2016 CVPR conference, 10 hot AI startups, the business implications of machine learning, cool chatbot projects and, if you can believe it, even more. Here are...
This week’s show covers the International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML 2016), “dueling architectures” for reinforcement learning, AI safety goals for robots, plus top AI business deals, tech announcement, projects and more. ICML 2016 –Accepted Papers | ICML New York City – Which companies had accepted papers at #icml2016 ? Best Paper Awards – [1511.06581]...
This week’s podcast digs into Apple’s ML and AI announcements at WWDC, looks at the new Deep Thunder offering by IBM and The Weather Company, and discusses exciting new deep learning research from MIT, OpenAI and Google Discover More Here. Here are the notes for this week’s show: Does Apple Bring the ML & AI...
This week’s podcast looks at new research on intrinsic motivation for AI systems, a kill-switch for intelligent agents, “knu” chips for machine learning, a screenplay made by a neural net, and more. Here are the notes for this week’s show: Intrinsically Motivated AI Playing Montezuma’s Revenge with Intrinsic Motivation Unifying Count-Based Exploration and Intrinsic Motivation...
This week’s show looks at Facebooks’ new DeepText engine, creating art with deep learning and Google Magenta, how to build artificial assistants and bots, and applying economics to machine learning models. Here are the notes for this week’s show: DeepText: Facebook’s Text Understanding Engine Introducting DeepText: Facebook’s Text Understanding Engine FBLearner Flow Research: Text Understanding...
This week’s episode explores the White House workshops on AI, human bias in AI and machine learning models, a company working on machine learning for small datasets, plus the latest AI & ML news and a self-driving car that learned how to drive aggressively. Here are the notes for this week’s stories: Martin Ford and...
Every week I end the week with close to 100 tabs filled with stories—some good, some not so good—spanning all corners of the cloud computing, big data, machine learning and AI web. I thought it would be useful to bring you the best of these stories in a weekly podcast. I have no idea whether...
