AI Articles and Analysis in Media

Episode Summary: One facet of business that nearly any industry has in common is the need to stay on top of news in their respective market, including competitor strategies or understanding changes in news related to the field. Media monitoring is a domain that machine learning (ML) is well suited for, with it's ability to coax out headlines, contextual information, and financial data from the seemingly endless stream of social, blog, and other information on the web today. Signal is a company that uses ML specifically for these purposes. In this episode, we speak with Signal's Chief Data Scientist and Co-founder Dr. Miguel Martinez, who dives into real business use cases illustrating the use of machine learning for media monitoring across industries.

Security is a broad term, and in industry and government there are a myriad of "security" contexts on a variety of levels - from the individual to nation-wide. Artificial intelligence and machine learning technologies are being applied and developed across this spectrum.

Episode Summary: In this week's episode, we feature an in-person interview from Facebook's headquarters with Hussein Mehanna, director of engineering of the Core Machine Learning group. Mehanna and I talk in-depth about the topic of personalization, touching on the pros and cons, how it works at Facebook, and how his team is working to overcome technological barriers to implement personalization in a way that improves the customer experience. This interview was recorded in their famous "Building 20," which houses thousands of Facebook artificial intelligence employees and developers.

In the hundreds of researcher and executive interviews we've been fortunate enough to conduct in the last three years, few artificial intelligence applications are brought up more than marketing and advertising. During talks with execs and researchers from companies ranging from Facebook to Baidu, and IBM to AT&T, marketing has been a perennial theme in conversations of AI's hottest applications.

Despite what the media tends to depict, artificial intelligence is being put to better use than winning video games and board games. In fact, two of the world’s leading tech giants have begun using AI to help the blind perceive the world in helpful new ways.

Episode Summary: We’ve featured a number of artificial intelligence researchers on the show, but today we switch gears and dive into the business side of the industry. In this episode, Dr. Mazin Gilbert (who earned his PhD in Engineering) breaks down AT&T’s efforts to make more intelligent systems large-scale. How do they train their network to route traffic through the right nodes on holidays, when certain areas of traffic are overloaded? How can a system know, based on signals from hardware, which pieces might be going bad and need replacing and send out a message to alert the company? Making a network ‘aware’ is a large challenge, but Mazin gives an insider’s perspective as to how AT&T uses machine learning technologies in order to remain profitable.

Facebook's entry into the personal assistant game with it's "M" assistant is actually an interesting view to Facebook's big bet on the future of consumer AI.