Humans in the Loop: the Frontiers of Data Science

Activeloop, the dataset optimization company, is excited to be a part of CVPR 2021! For this edition of CVPR, Activeloop is proud to host two panel. Listen to the second panel on the Next-gen ML Infrastructure. Tune in to the conversation of leading experts from Activeloop (Davit Buniatyan), OctoML (Tianqi Chen), Weights & Biases (Lukas Biewald), YOLOv5 (Glenn Jocher) and more. Tune in and enjoy.

For this edition of CVPR, Activeloop is proud to host two panels. Listen to the first panel on the future of datasets. Tune in to the conversation of leading experts from Google (Jianing Wei), Princeton (Olga Russakovsky), Microsoft (Siddhartha Sen), RISELab at UC Berkeley (Joseph Gonzalez), and HuggingFace (Jeff Boudier).

Next guest of Humans in the Loop podcast is Onno Faber. Onno is a serial entrepreneur, speaker, investor and a possibility thinker. Onno is currently the founder two companies in the Health and BioTech space – Rarebase and AllStripes. To me, Onno’s superpower is his multidisciplinary approach to a passion his: drive to build things that solve problems. In his early teens, he even patented a solution to a problem that caused minor fallouts with his mom. Onno developed an app that attracted the attention of Sillicon Valley and even Ashton Kutcher, but his path was inadvertently affected by a rare disease called “Neurofibromatosis 2”, or NF2 for short. To Onno, this was yet another problem he could try to solve, which is why he started two companies on a mission to translate science into therapies for one or for many. Rarebase aligns the needs of the patients with therapeutic development, while Allstripe combats a common bottleneck of resource aggregation Onno believes that patients can’t be bystanders in drug development, and is on a mission to democratize drug discovery and development and make it work for everyone. In this episode, we talk about  Onno’s inspirational life story and mission, how rare are rare diseases, what is the role of data science in drug discovery and disease therapeutics. Enjoy the episode.

Today we are featuring a Luxembourg based company and one of the leading startups in the field of AI music composition - AIVA technologies, and their CEO Pierre Barreau as well as Denis Shtefan, the CTO of the company. They are working on transforming the way people make music with AI. Their creation, AIVA, short for Artificial Intelligence Virtual Artist, composes music for film directors, advertising agencies, and even game studios. In fact, AIVA is so good, it has passed several makeshift Turing tests.  In this episode we talk about how our guests got to start AIVA and what problem they are solving. We dive deep in the inspiration and creative process behind composing music people would like to listen to. What is the role of AI in the creative process? How did AIVA progress from generating single notes to creating complex compositions? We go over the current role of humans in the loop who work with AIVA, and discuss the future of music.  

In this episode, Black Mirror becomes a reality, because we’re featuring an intelligent chatbot serving as a companion, mentor and even lover. Today’s human in the loop is Artem Rodichev, Head of AI at Replika. Born in Kazakhstan, he’s worked in all major Russian tech companies, and ultimately, moved to Y-Combinator Alum startup Replika and somehow managed to get on the Forbes 30 under 30 list twice. Replika’s a company born out of its founder trying to revive her tragically deceased friend by utilizing his personal messages with the help of natural language processing and conversational AI. With Artem, we talk about the future of communication - empathetic chatbots that help people with anxiety, loneliness, depression or just have a good chat with them. We discuss the fundamental differences between talking to another human being and an empathetic chatbot, and how these can be used to make people happier. On the data science side of things, Artem walked us through Replika’s machine learning architecture - and their multimodal approach comprising vision, speech and text models. Because we were pretty constrained in terms of time, we concentrated on the text component powering their dialogue engine: retrieval, reranking, generative and other models. We’ve also touched upon GPT-3, and why it is not always the best solution to a given problem. Artem also explained how they evaluate what framework to use in which setting to provide a more immersive, and enjoyable experience to the user that makes them happier.

Our second guest is Rudradeb Mitra, founding CEO of Omdena. Omdena is a bottom-up collaborative platform that brings together engineers from all over the world to build impactful AI solutions. In 20 months, over 1700 engineers from 88 countries have collaborated on projects like preventing online violence against children or eradicating malaria. In the podcast, Ru shares his extremely inspiring life story with us, and how this experience shaped him and his life’s mission: using AI for good. In this episode, we dive into how culture shapes entrepreneurship, how causality affects machine learning practices and if human superpowers like intuition or empathy can be translated into AI. We also talk about building intelligent products, as well as self-reliant and efficient teams. Rudradeb is a book author, mentor for Google for Startups and Seedstars and an amazing podcast guest. Tune in and enjoy.  Follow Rudradeb on LinkedIn and follow Omdena.com

The first guest of our podcast is Ignacio Tartavull, CEO of Tiny Mile.  Ignacio was a successful entrepreneur running upscale hostels in Argentina. Later he transitioned to working in a neuroscience lab at Princeton, focusing on connectomics. In this episode, we dive deep into the intersection of neuroscience, AI and machine learning. We discuss how to scale up neuroscience from mapping neurons of a Roundworm to mapping and simulating the human brain while not destroying it in the process. We also touch upon consciousness and an interesting link between bottom-up neural activity study to psychological phenomena. In the second half of the podcast we discussed how AI has started shaping the future of logistics, delivery in particular. We learned how humanizing robots will solve the last mile delivery problem, and what role data science has in it. Lastly, we cover the true nature of competition in Silicon Valley and reasons why startups really fail.  Follow Ignacio at tartavull.com and tinymile.ai

Humans in the Loop sheds a light on thought leaders in various verticals of data science, machine learning, and artificial intelligence. Once every two weeks, we share our interviews with leading experts from around the world, where we explore how solving a machine and deep learning problem helps achieve business goals and foster innovation. Tune in to stay in the loop with the latest groundbreaking ideas on the AI/ML landscape.