Eye On A.I.

This week, I talk to Ron Schmelzer and Kathleen Walch, founders of Cognilytica, a research, advisory, and education firm focused on artificial Intelligence. We talked about the rise of MLOps, data labeling, unsupervised learning and what it will take to get us to human-level artificial general intelligence.

This week I talk to the inimitable Ben Goertzel, about his non-profit foundation, SingularityNET, his work with the robotic head, Sophia, his talking Philip K. Dick avatar, his work in medical AI, his frustration over Big Tech's dominance of AI research and his own quest for AGI.

AI commentator and investor Kaifu Lee talks about his book AI 2041 in which he considers possible futures for humanity if deep learning applications develop as planned.

NSCAI staff Justin Lynch, Ryan Carpenter and Lance Lantier talk about how the 1986 Goldwater Nichols Act that reorganized the US military inspired the commission's recommendations to reorganize the Department of Defense to drive adoption of emerging and disruptive technology capabilities.

NSCAI staff Christie Lawrence and Rama Elleru talk about how intellectual property protections play an unexpected role in guiding US innovation and contribute to the global competition with China for dominance in AI.

NSCAI staff Tess Deblanc-Knowles and Mike Garris talk about the steps the US government needs to take to foster AI innovation in the years ahead.

NSCAI staff Paul Leka and Christie Lawrence talk about forming an international emerging technology coalition to strengthen and coordinate the use of emerging technology for democratic ends.

NSCAI staff Mike Garris and Mike Jackson spoke about what needs to be done to lay the foundations for an AI-infused national security going forward.

NSCAI staff Aristotle Vainikos and Parker Wild spoke about the commission's recommendations for establishing public-private innovation hubs around the country that can encourage and tap the entrepreneurial potential between the coasts and expand the participation of private enterprise in national security.

NSCAI staff Mike Jackson and Darren Wright talk about the commission's recommendations for bringing the intelligence community up to speed with AI. They spoke about the organizational changes needed and the culture shift required to ensure that the intelligence community is integrating AI in its work.

NSCAI staff David Kumashiro and Courtney Barno talked about the commission's recommendations on democratizing AI for the warfighter and enabling bottom-up AI innovation.

NSCAI staff Kevin McGuinness and Raina Davis talked about the commission's recommendations for increasing public visibility about the government's AI needs and lowering the barrier to entry for companies that want to help meet those needs.

NSCAI staff Chris Rice and Courtney Barno talk about what the US has to do to get up to speed on its AI military capabilities by 2025 in order to outpace our competitors, particularly China.

NSCAI staff Justin Lynch, Lance Lantier and Shaantam Chawla, talked about educating the warfighter for the AI era. They spoke about what kind of training warfighters need to effectively integrate AI, from commanders to infantry men and women and how that integration will change the nature of warfare and the military's perception of itself in the years ahead.

Ylli Bajraktari, executive director of the National Security Commission on AI, talked about what he considers the most important recommendations in the commission's final report and about the need for Congress and the White House to act swiftly to counter China's concerted efforts to beat the US in deploying this critical technology around the world.

This week, I talk to Cade Metz, the New York Times' lead reporter on artificial intelligence, about his new book, "Genius Makers, the Mavericks Who Brought AI to Google Facebook and the World." The book focuses on some of the personalities and companies responsible for the current wave of AI innovation and touches on some of the controversies swirling around the new technology today.

Kent Walker, who oversees the Google's AI ethics and responsible AI innovation, talks about how Google reviews AI systems for trust and safety and the outlook for safe AI going forward.

Daeil Kim, cofounder of AI.Reverie, talks about the role that synthetic data can play in training AI models.

Alan Aspuru Guzik, a professor at the University of Toronto, talks about his work in new materials discovery with machine learning and building a fully automated materials lab that can synthesize molecules discovered in a computer.

Director of the Pentagon's Joint AI Center, Lieutenant General Michael S. Groen talks about improving war fighting and the challenge of China.

David Yi and Yohan Lee from Riiid Labs, the leading startup applying machine-learning to education, talk about making personalized instruction available to anyone in the world with an internet-connected device. They spoke about the family of algorithms behind their system and the recently concluded Riiid AIEd Challenge, a Kaggle competition that engaged more than 3,400 teams across the world in developing knowledge tracing algorithms.

Turing award winner Yoshua Bengio and his colleague Julian Serban, co-founder of Korbit, an AI ed-tech startup with the aim of democratizing education, talk about enhancing education through the application of deep learning systems that can track student behavior predict their performance and deliver strategies to both improve performance and prevent students from losing interest.

Geoff Hinton has lived at the outer reaches of machine learning research since an aborted attempt at a carpentry career a half century ago. He spoke to me about his work In 2020 and what he sees on the horizon for AI.

Chris Darby, CEO of the CIA-backed tech investment company In-Q-Tel, talks about the commission's recommendation that AI for national security be extended to biotechnology, and that bio-data be considered an instrument of national power.

Eric Horvitz, chief research scientist at Microsoft and a commissioner on the National Security Commission on AI, talks about ensuring interoperability of AI systems with US allies and working to make all AI systems reliable.

An open-source compiler called TVM helps data scientists optimize their model's performance on specific hardware.

NSCAI commissioner Steve Chien, technical supervisor of the artificial intelligence group at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, talks about the growing demand for AI solutions in space, from coordinating an increasing number of earth-orbiting objects to protecting critical communication satellites from attack.

This week, NSCAI commissioner Jose-Marie Griffiths talks about her line of effort's recommendations to increase STEM related educational funding by $8 billion in order to prime the pump for an AI ready workforce and to make a variety of bureaucratic changes that will open AI related career pathways for government employees.

Jason Matheny, a commissioner at the National Security Commission on AI and head of Georgetown University's Center for Security and Emerging Technology, talks about coordinating AI developments with NATO and making India the focus of the US's Indo-Pacific AI strategy to counter China.

Alex Ratner, an assistant professor at the University of Washington and a cofounder and CEO of Snorkel AI, talks about programmatically labeling training data for supervised learning models.

In the second episode of a series on the machine-learning pipeline, Joe Hellerstein, a professor at UC Berkeley, talks about data wrangling.

Turing Award winner David Patterson talks about the end of Moore's law and the evolution of computer chips from general purpose CPUs to GPUs to the recent Cambrian explosion of specialized AI chips, including Google's TPU, in the first episode of five about the machine-learning model-development pipeline with Ameet Talwalkar, co-founder of Determined AI, an open-source platform for ML model development.

NSCAI commissioner Gilman Louie talks about great power competition in the digital age and the US need for a more technologically literate diplomatic core to counter China's increasing diplomatic efforts on the technology front.

Ken Ford, an NSCAI commissioner, talks about turning AI from a tool to a teammate and unshackling research and implementation of AI from government bureaucracy in order to compete with nimbler countries such as China.

Katharina McFarland, an NSCAI commissioner, talks about the commission's recommendations on inserting AI into the National Defense Strategy and how war games should integrate AI enabled applications in order to inform US military doctrine

Eric Horvitz, Chief Scientific Officer at Microsoft and a commissioner with the National Security Commission on AI, talks about the commission's recommendations that responsible and ethical uses be a primary consideration in any AI system for national security.

Jason Matheny, an NSCAI commissioner who now leads a think tank at Georgetown University focused on the intersections of technology, policy and national security, spoke in this week's episode about the Commission's recommendations on export controls for sensitive technology and the difficult problem of protecting digital assets like algorithms and data.

Mignon Clyburn, an NSCAI commissioner and longtime regulator at the FCC, talks about the Commission's recommendations to increase competency in artificial intelligence at the Department of Defense and other government agencies. Ms. Clyburn talked about establishing a National Reserve Digital Corps with a scholarship program modeled after the ROTC and the creation of a United States Digital Service Academy similar to mint a new class of civil servants with deep technical knowledge.

The Alexa Prize Socialbot Grand Challenge is a competition for university students to create a social bot that can converse coherently and engagingly with humans. This year's prize goes to the team from Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia. I speak with Prem Natarajan, vice president of natural understanding in the Alexa AI organization, about the prize, the evolution of conversational AI, its current challenges and its future promise

Qualcomm Technologies is powering the shift to fifth generation wireless communications, known as 5G. In this sponsored episode, I speak to two of the company's product managers leading the company's efforts to use AI to enhance 5G, reduce on-device power consumption, and give developers the tools necessary to make devices smarter and faster.

This week I speak to Lieutenant General Jack Shanahan, recently retired Director of the Pentagon's Joint Artificial Intelligence Center,or JAIC. He was instrumental in starting Project Maven to integrate state-of-the-art computer vision into drone technology. He then started the JAIC, the central hub for the military's AI efforts. Gen. Shanahan spoke about the challenges of nurturing innovation within a rigid and multilayered organization like the DOD and the threats the US faces ahead.

This week I speak to Stanford professor Fei-Fei Li, one of the people responsible for the current AI revolution. Fei-Fei talked about her early days running a New Jersey dry cleaner to finance her Princeton education, her creation of ImageNet, the world's first large labeled image data set, which allowed the validation of neural networks, and her latest work on ambient intelligence, which promises to transform elder care.

Pietro Perona, a professor at the California Institute of Technology, is one of the brains behind a pair of smartphone apps that help you do just that: eBird and iNaturalist. But simple as the apps are to use in identifying tens of thousands of species, the science behind them is complex. Gathering enough examples for each species to train a neural network is impossible, so much of Prof. Perona's work has been focused on making machines more efficient learners, requiring less training data.

In this week's episode, the last in a series of six, we talked to Eric Horvitz. Commissioner at the National Security Commission on AI and Chief Research Scientist at Microsoft, about the commission's recommendations to Congress about the need for training, standards and documentation to govern the application of AI in the national security space.

In this week's episode, we talk with NSCAI Commissioner Gilman Louie about line of effort's recommendations to Congress on how to maintain US leadership in AI hardware and 5G. He spoke about the need for a national microelectronic strategy and policies that would advance spectrum sharing for 5G to create a global alternative to the Chinese telecommunications giant Huawei.

NSCAI Commissioner Jason Matheny talks about his line of effort regarding cooperation on AI with key allies and partners. He spoke about his group's recommendations that the government establish a senior national security point of contact for AI and convene a multilateral working group for AI collaboration and interoperability - as well as the need for AI war games.

In the third episode of six episodes looking at the National Security Commission on AI 's first quarter recommendations to Congress, we speak with Katharina McFarland, a former Assistant Secretary of Defense for Acquisition, about the commission's recommendation that the Department of Defense and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence establish a steering committee on emerging technology to ensure that AI for national security gets top priority in the years ahead.

In this week's episode, we speak to Jose-Marie Griffiths, a commissioner on the National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence, about the commission's recommendations on how to strengthen the federal government's AI workforce. The recommendations focused on raising understanding of AI within the government and the need to streamline government hiring practices in order to attract and retain talent.

In April 2020, the National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence issued its first-quarter recommendations to Congress, covering seven lines of effort, six of which are public and one of which is classified. In the first of a series of podcast episodes about those recommendations, we spoke with Andrew Moore, a professor at Carnegie Mellon University and NSCAI commissioner about the commission's recommendations on increased AI R&D funding.

COVID-19 continues to sweep through the human population, killing some and damaging the health of others. While this podcast is normally focused on machine-learning, this week I talk to Vittorio Sebastiano, an assistant professor of stem cell biology at Stanford University, about groundbreaking tech that could someday help restore scarred tissue to pre-COVID health. Vittorio talked about his hunt for machine-learning collaborators to understand the process further.