AI Podcast Interviews Articles and Reports

Expertise: Data science and economics

Brief Recognition: Elena Grewal leads a team of data scientists responsible for the user’s online and offline travel experience at Airbnb. Her team partners with the product team to understand and optimize all parts of the product, using experimentation and machine learning in a wide variety of contexts. Prior to Airbnb, Elena was a doctoral candidate in the Economics of Education program at the Stanford University School of Education. She received a B.A. in Ethics, Politics, and Economics, with distinction, from Yale University, and a Masters degree in Economics at Stanford University. She was also the recipient of the Stanford Interdisciplinary Graduate Fellowship.

Episode Summary: How do you know if you’ve made the right decision for a hire? Often, employers go off gut instinct and make a decision retrospectively, but it turns out AI might be able to help out in human resource management through shedding light on best hiring decisions. In this episode, Pasha Roberts, chief scientist at Talent Analytics, tells us about how his company is working on helping companies make better decisions before they hire by applying machine learning and artificial intelligence to various data points on a given applicant, including information from aptitude tests that may help predict not only performance but retention.

Episode Summary: Big data is often a buzz word, but if you're trying to quantify data around homes in the U.S. and pair that with hard to quantify information  - like images - you're likely running into the frontiers of machine learning technology. This is something Zillow deals with daily. In this episode, Stan Humphries, chief analytics officer and economist for Zillow, speaks about where they're leveraging machine learning and artificial intelligence (hint: almost everywhere), and what he believes are the keys for deriving real ROI opportunities using this technology. Humphries also offers insights for how other companies can model the successful decision-making processes and implementation strategies used by Zillow.

Episode Summary: When Google’s DeepMind won against one of the best modern Go champions, is used multiple AI approaches and exposed gaps in some individual strategies. This even has shed more light on AI, but also on the utility in combining approaches to AI for individual problems. Data security is one of these problem areas where multiple AI approaches is being used to make our information safer. Dr. Sal Stolfo has been a professor at Columbia in Computer Science since 1972 and is now also the CEO of Allure Security, with a focus on engineering network intrusion detection solutions using AI applications. In this episode, Stolfo talks about the various styles of AI and statical methods that have been and are being used to detect malicious activity, as well as how he believes the future of security is going to have to adapt as increasing amounts of data become available.

Episode Summary: This episode's guest is Uri Sarid, PhD, CTO for MuleSoft, Inc. Sarid speaks about where he believes the future of machine learning (ML) applications in industry might go - he thinks applications might stay small and niche-based, and will develop based on how well each serves its individual purposes. He also gives his perspective on how companies may adapt to deal with these disparate ML technologies, and expands on his belief that finding ways to connect technologies will be an important path in the development of machine learning applications and platforms across industries.

Episode Summary: It isn’t by chance that birds fly in flocks and fish swim in schools -  they’re actually smarter when they act in a group. Could it be possible to extend that collective intelligence to human beings, and even AI? Louis Rosenberg is a PhD from Stanford, previously founder of Immersion and who now runs Unanimous AI, a company focusing on harnessing swarm intelligence with human beings. In this episode, Rosenberg speaks about how this collective-intelligence approach has been applied to human beings in terms of garnering improvements in a range of predictions, and he also touches on what this type of swarm intelligence might mean when we talk about multiple AI’s in the future.

Episode Summary: Predictive analytics and machine learning are all the rage in Silicon Valley, but how do companies actually derive value by leveraging these technologies? We asked this question to Dr. Ronen Meiri, CTO and Founder of DMWay, a predictive analytics and machine learning platform company based in Israel. In this episode, Ronen speaks about what his company does and how smart executives are starting to make decisions on how to choose and decide on a smart, user-friendly platform that fits their business' needs.

Episode Summary:  Our guest in this episode has spent a large part of his life on figuring out how to make machines more intelligent. Loop AI Labs' Chief Scientist Patrick Ehlen has worked on a number of important projects, from DARPA projects to big-company AI solutions at places like AT&T. Loop AI works on getting AI to make sense and meaning of information the way that humans do, like making meaning of unstructured text. Ehlen talks about the potential business applications for this technology and where it's making way its way into industry. Ehlen also touches on the implications for developers in the nascent AI field - like Loop AI - that are vying to implement its technology as an industry standard, and how such organizations will have to market themselves and deliver services to develop a thriving AI ecosystem.