Shows / Data Skeptic
Data Skeptic
The Data Skeptic Podcast features interviews and discussion of topics related to data science, statistics, machine learning, artificial intelligence and the like, all from the perspective of applying critical thinking and the scientific method to evaluate the veracity of claims and efficacy of approaches.
Episodes
- Data Skeptic
Authorship Attribution
In a recent paper, Leveraging Discourse Information Effectively for Authorship Attribution, authors Su Wang, Elisa Ferracane, and Raymond J. Mooney describe a…
- Data Skeptic
Very Large Corpora and Zipf's Law
The earliest efforts to apply machine learning to natural language tended to convert every token (every word, more or less) into a unique feature. While…
- Data Skeptic
Semantic search at Github
Github is many things besides source control. It's a social network, even though not everyone realizes it. It's a vast repository of code. It's a ticketing and…
- Data Skeptic
Let's Talk About Natural Language Processing
This episode reboots our podcast with the theme of Natural Language Processing for the next few months. We begin with introductions of Yoshi and Linh Da and…
- Data Skeptic
Data Science Hiring Processes
Kyle shares a few thoughts on mistakes observed by job applicants and also shares a few procedural insights listeners at early stages in their careers might…
Data SkepticDrug Discovery with Machine Learning
In today's episode, Kyle chats with Alexander Zhebrak, CTO of Insilico Medicine, Inc. Insilico self describes as artificial intelligence for drug discovery…
Data SkepticSign Language Recognition
At the NeurIPS 2018 conference, Stradigi AI premiered a training game which helps players learn American Sign Language. This episode brings the first of many…
Data SkepticData Ethics
This week, Kyle interviews Scott Nestler on the topic of Data Ethics. Today, no ubiquitous, formal ethical protocol exists for data science, although some have…
Data SkepticEscaping the Rabbit Hole
Kyle interviews Mick West, author of Escaping the Rabbit Hole: How to Debunk Conspiracy Theories Using Facts, Logic, and Respect about the nature of conspiracy…
Data Skeptic[MINI] Theorem Provers
Fake news attempts to lead readers/listeners/viewers to conclusions that are not descriptions of reality. They do this most often by presenting false premises…
Data SkepticAutomated Fact Checking
Fake news can be responded to with fact-checking. However, it's easier to create fake news than the fact check it. Full Fact is the UK's independent…
Data Skeptic[MINI] Single Source of Truth
In mathematics, truth is universal. In data, truth lies in the where clause of the query. As large organizations have grown to rely on their data more…
Data SkepticDetecting Fast Radio Bursts with Deep Learning
Fast radio bursts are an astrophysical phenomenon first observed in 2007. While many observations have been made, science has yet to explain the mechanism for…
Data SkepticBeing Bayesian
This episode explores the root concept of what it is to be Bayesian: describing knowledge of a system probabilistically, having an appropriate prior…
Data SkepticModeling Fake News
This is our interview with Dorje Brody about his recent paper with David Meier, How to model fake news. This paper uses the tools of communication theory and a…
Data SkepticThe Louvain Method for Community Detection
Without getting into definitions, we have an intuitive sense of what a "community" is. The Louvain Method for Community Detection is one of the best known…
Data SkepticCultural Cognition of Scientific Consensus
In this episode, our guest is Dan Kahan about his research into how people consume and interpret science news. In an era of fake news, motivated reasoning, and…
Data SkepticFalse Discovery Rates
A false discovery rate (FDR) is a methodology that can be useful when struggling with the problem of multiple comparisons. In any experiment, if the…
Data SkepticDeep Fakes
Digital videos can be described as sequences of still images and associated audio. Audio is easy to fake. What about video? A video can easily be broken down…
Data SkepticFake News Midterm
In this episode, Kyle reviews what we've learned so far in our series on Fake News and talks briefly about where we're going next.
Data SkepticQuality Score
Two weeks ago we discussed click through rates or CTRs and their usefulness and limits as a metric. Today, we discuss a related metric known as quality score…
Data SkepticThe Knowledge Illusion
Kyle interviews Steven Sloman, Professor in the school of Cognitive, Linguistic, and Psychological Sciences at Brown University. Steven is co-author of The…
Data SkepticClick Through Rates
A Click Through Rate (CTR) is the proportion of clicks to impressions of some item of content shared online. This terminology is most commonly used in digital…
Data SkepticAlgorithmic Detection of Fake News
The scale and frequency with which information can be distributed on social media makes the problem of fake news a rapidly metastasizing issue. To do any…
Data SkepticAnt Intelligence
If you prepared a list of creatures regarded as highly intelligent, it's unlikely ants would make the cut. This is expected, as on an individual level, ants do…
Data SkepticHuman Detection of Fake News
With publications such as "Prior exposure increases perceived accuracy of fake news", "Lazy, not biased: Susceptibility to partisan fake news is better…
Data SkepticSpam Filtering with Naive Bayes
Today's spam filters are advanced data driven tools. They rely on a variety of techniques to effectively and often seamlessly filter out junk email from good…
Data SkepticThe Spread of Fake News
How does fake news get spread online? Its not just a matter of manipulating search algorithms. The social platforms for sharing play a major role in the…
Data SkepticFake News
This episode kicks off our new theme of "Fake News" with guests Robert Sheaffer and Brad Schwartz. Fake news is a new label for an old idea. For our purposes…
- Data Skeptic
Dev Ops for Data Science
We revisit the 2018 Microsoft Build in this episode, focusing on the latest ideas in DevOps. Kyle interviews Cloud Developer Advocates Damien Brady, Paige…
Data SkepticFirst Order Logic
Logic is a fundamental of mathematical systems. It's roots are the values true and false and it's power is in what it's rules allow you to prove. Prepositional…
Data SkepticBlind Spots in Reinforcement Learning
An intelligent agent trained in a simulated environment may be prone to making mistakes in the real world due to discrepancies between the training and…
Data SkepticDefending Against Adversarial Attacks
In this week's episode, our host Kyle interviews Gokula Krishnan from ETH Zurich, about his recent contributions to defenses against adversarial attacks. The…
Data SkepticTransfer Learning
On a long car ride, Linhda and Kyle record a short episode. This discussion is about transfer learning, a technique using in machine learning to leverage…
Data SkepticMedical Imaging Training Techniques
Medical imaging is a highly effective tool used by clinicians to diagnose a wide array of diseases and injuries. However, it often requires exceptionally…
Data SkepticKalman Filters
Thanks to our sponsor Galvanize A Kalman Filter is a technique for taking a sequence of observations about an object or variable and determining the most…
- Data Skeptic
AI in Industry
There's so much to discuss on the AI side, it's hard to know where to begin. Luckily, Steve Guggenheimer, Microsoft's corporate vice president of AI Business…
Data SkepticAI in Games
Today's interview is with the authors of the textbook Artificial Intelligence and Games.
Data SkepticGame Theory
Thanks to our sponsor The Great Courses. This week's episode is a short primer on game theory. For tickets to the free Data Skeptic meetup in Chicago on…
Data SkepticThe Experimental Design of Paranormal Claims
In this episode of Data Skeptic, Kyle chats with Jerry Schwarz from the Independent Investigations Group (IIG)'s SF Bay Area chapter about testing claims of…
Data SkepticWinograd Schema Challenge
Our guest this week, Hector Levesque, joins us to discuss an alternative way to measure a machine's intelligence, called Winograd Schemas Challenge. The…
Data SkepticThe Imitation Game
This week on Data Skeptic, we begin with a skit to introduce the topic of this show: The Imitation Game. We open with a scene in the distant future. The year…
Data SkepticEugene Goostman
In this episode, Kyle shares his perspective on the chatbot Eugene Goostman which (some claim) "passed" the Turing Test. As a second topic Kyle also does an…
Data SkepticThe Theory of Formal Languages
In this episode, Kyle and Linhda discuss the theory of formal languages. Any language can (theoretically) be a formal language. The requirement is that the…
Data SkepticThe Loebner Prize
The Loebner Prize is a competition in the spirit of the Turing Test. Participants are welcome to submit conversational agent software to be judged by a panel…
Data SkepticChatbots
In this episode, Kyle chats with Vince from iv.ai and Heather Shapiro who works on the Microsoft Bot Framework. We solicit their advice on building a good…
Data SkepticThe Master Algorithm
In this week's episode, Kyle Polich interviews Pedro Domingos about his book, The Master Algorithm: How the quest for the ultimate learning machine will remake…
Data SkepticThe No Free Lunch Theorems
What's the best machine learning algorithm to use? I hear that XGBoost wins most of the Kaggle competitions that aren't won with deep learning. Should I just…
Data SkepticML at Sloan Kettering Cancer Center
For a long time, physicians have recognized that the tools they have aren't powerful enough to treat complex diseases, like cancer. In addition to data science…
Data SkepticOptimal Decision Making with POMDPs
In a previous episode, we discussed Markov Decision Processes or MDPs, a framework for decision making and planning. This episode explores the generalization…
Data SkepticAI Decision-Making
Making a decision is a complex task. Today's guest Dongho Kim discusses how he and his team at Prowler has been building a platform that will be accessible by…
Data Skeptic[MINI] Reinforcement Learning
In many real world situations, a person/agent doesn't necessarily know their own objectives or the mechanics of the world they're interacting with. However, if…
Data SkepticEvolutionary Computation
In this week's episode, Kyle is joined by Risto Miikkulainen, a professor of computer science and neuroscience at the University of Texas at Austin. They talk…
Data Skeptic[MINI] Markov Decision Processes
Formally, an MDP is defined as the tuple containing states, actions, the transition function, and the reward function. This podcast examines each of these and…
Data SkepticNeuroscience Frontiers
Last week on Data Skeptic, we visited the Laboratory of Neuroimaging, or LONI, at USC and learned about their data-driven platform that enables scientists from…
Data SkepticNeuroimaging and Big Data
Last year, Kyle had a chance to visit the Laboratory of Neuroimaging, or LONI, at USC, and learn about how some researchers are using data science to study the…
Data SkepticThe Agent Model of Artificial Intelligence
In artificial intelligence, the term 'agent' is used to mean an autonomous, thinking agent with the ability to interact with their environment. An agent could…
Data SkepticArtificial Intelligence, a Podcast Approach
This episode kicks off the next theme on Data Skeptic: artificial intelligence. Kyle discusses what's to come for the show in 2018, why this topic is relevant…
- Data Skeptic
Holiday reading 2017
We break format from our regular programming today and bring you an excerpt from Max Tegmark's book "Life 3.0". The first chapter is a short story titled "The…