Eye On A.I.

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.

COVID-19 has swept across the world was startling speed, but with equally startling speed, the machine learning community has responded. This week I speak with Irina Rish, a professor at the University of Montreal and a Mila academic member, who is helping head a task force to understand the virus. She talked about where the efforts currently stand and where they expect to go in the weeks and months ahead. Let me know when it's live.