AI Podcast Interviews Articles and Reports

Episode Summary: For some companies, big data remains an abstraction; for others, it's an integral part of the lifeblood of a business. Mat Harris is vice president at Sojern, a travel marketing platform that has leveraged big data to grow $3 billion in bookings and 1/3 of a billion traveler profiles across its platform. In this episode, Harris speaks about how Sojern and other businesses are using a combination of their data and other sources of data (what he calls third and "second" data sources) in order to make informed marketing decisions and better market their services to buyers. Harris sheds light on the direct ROI for big data in different businesses, and it's an interesting episode from the perspective of an executive who is using big data to make decisions on business directions.

Episode Summary: Companies looking to raise money are often asking what investors think of their company, their industry, and how they're making investment decisions in related companies. In this episode, I ask these questions of Robert Seidl, who is managing partner of Motus Ventures, an investment firm focusing funding early-stage software companies for autonomous Vehicles and the IoT. Seidl talks about various data sources and the people and networks from which investors draw information when they don’t have what they need on-hand, but need to make important investment decisions. He also shares his perspective on the high-energy and competitive investment world of AI, including his thoughts on the most exciting (and confusing) areas in the industry today.

Episode Summary: This week's interview was recorded live at Nuance's Silicon Valley office with guest Charles Ortiz, director of the AI and Natural Language (NL) Processing Lab for Nuance Communications in Silicon Valley. In this episode, Ortiz speaks about what he sees as the most important developments in natural language processing (NLP) over the last few years, what advancements brought us to where we are today, and where progress might take NLP in the coming years ahead (both at Nuance and beyond).

Episode Summary: Fifteen years ago, investing in AI may have seemed a bit far-fetched, but today it's not at all a rare occurrence; however, it's more rare to find entire firms dedicated to investing entirely in AI. In today's episode, we're joined by Saman Farid, co-founder of Comet Labs, an investment firm focused on investment in AI companies across industries. He speaks about his investment hypothesis in the future of AI, why he’s decided to hone his funds in this domain, and the different domains where he believes AI is ripe to disrupt on a global level in the coming few years.

Episode Summary: One of the most memorable moments from this interview is when our guest mentioned that Larry Page hired him to solve intelligence; very few people can say this, and this says something about today’s guest, Dr. Nando de Freitas - a senior researcher at Google and professor at Oxford - as well as the gravity of his present work. Today, I speak with Nando about a topic well known through his research at Google, deep learning. de Freitas gives his perspective on the basics of deep learning, the applications in conversational interfaces and recognizing images and videos, and what the future of this technology might look like in the nearer future.

Episode Summary: In this episode, we speak with Dr. Matteo Berlucchi, the founder of Your.MD, which uses artificial intelligence to create one of the first personal health assistant platforms in 70+ countries. Berlucchi talks about the challenges in making an AI do what you want, specifically helping people self diagnose and seek proper treatment. He discusses the multiple approaches to AI that are blended together in order to yield optimal results, and touches on the sometimes stark differences between what AI can do in the lab versus the functional application for tens of thousands of people. If you're interested in the diverse applications of AI and the challenges in running a startup, Dr. Berlucchi's makes for an interesting episode.

Episode Summary: CTO and Co-founder of Sumo Logic Christian Beedgen gives his take on how to glean return on investment from applying machine learning to companies. There are no easy answers, but Beedgen boils down simple concepts for thinking about humans thinking through causation, machines working out correlations, and how the combination of the two can glean us better ideas and get to answers faster than humans can do alone.

Episode Summary: Artificial intelligence (AI) and virtual reality (VR) are often seen as different trends, but there is a lot of overlap in these areas, where you might not expect. Lucid VR's CTO Adam Rowell speaks today about how AI plays a role in making VR work, augmenting the accuracy of images and making a more immersive and convincing experience for users. Rowell also touches on non-gaming VR apps that he and his company are excited about launching in the future.