Women in AI

AI assistants are making a huge impact in healthcare, and another really exciting company that have created a virtual assistant is Sense.ly, whose virtual nurse avatar, Molly, helps people engage with their health. Today i’m going to be chatting to their VP of user experience, Cathy Pearl to hear more about how Molly helps patients. Cathy as worked on everything from helicopter pilot simulators at NASA to a conversational iPad app in which Esquire magazine’s style columnist tells you what you should wear on a first date.

Depression is the leading cause of disability globally, and the cost of mental illness to society has doubled in the last 10 years in every region of the world. Alison Darcy, CEO and Founder of Woebot Labs is joining me today to discuss her work in addressing the mental health crisis with a chatbot that delivers cognitive behaviour therapy.

Is Deep Learning just a field of technical research that won’t affect the general public? Absolutely not - we’ve not seen such a powerful and disruptive technology since the inception of the internet itself - deep learning is transforming every industry it touches from finance to healthcare, self driving cars to smart cities. Mai joins us today to discuss the importance of making the application of deep learning accessible and hassle free for businesses. Even when a business understands the importance of AI and the impact it can have in industry, it’s hard to know where to start and how to afford the relevant staff and technologies.

Lisha from Amplify Partners joins us today to discuss her work in funding companies who are using machine learning and data to solve problems.

On this episode, Zeynep from the University of Amsterdam and the Max Planck shares her expertise exploring zero-shot learning as a method to scale up visual category recognition as well talking about discovering and synthesizing novel concepts with minimal supervision.

Aparna joins us to discuss her work in driving Facebook's program to build new algorithms for ranking and personalization, and shipping them to power products for over 2 billion people.

Adriana discusses her work in deep learning and how it has achieved remarkable results in fields such as: computer vision, speech recognition and natural language processing as well as transforming medicine.

Anne Hsu, Assistant Professor at University of London, joins us to discuss the progression and importance of creating psychologically aware AI. These models can understand users’ motivations and provide empathetic dialogues to help create more meaningful and engaging conversations.

In this episode, Noura discusses her work in unsupervised deep learning as well as NLP and optimisation. As Yann LeCun said recently, unsupervised learning is the ‘holy grail’ of AI research as it allows machines to replicate the way humans learn, and we discuss Noura's progressions in unsupervised learning...

However useful AI assistants are, they’re still not perfect. They’re designed to serve us through dialogue, but to be effective they must not only understand natural language, but be able to generate sentences that communicate back in a human-like manner. Layla El Asri from Maluuba, a Canadian AI company teaching machines to think, reason, and communicate with humans joins us on this episode to discuss her work leading a team to improve natural language understanding in these assistants.

In this episode, Doina shares her journey to where she is today in AI, as well as discussing her work at McGill University, and the exciting projects she's involved in at DeepMind Montreal. The landscape of AI in Montreal is rapidly advancing, and we discuss progressions, obstacles, and current research that Doina is working on.

This week Ira Kemelmacher, assistant professor at Allen School of Computer Science and Research Scientist at Facebook joins us to discuss her current work in computer vision. If you open up your internet browser and search for a singing cat or a talking baby, you’ll find edited examples that create the illusion of real speech. These videos provide immense entertainment, but is these a useful application of this?

Understanding public opinion is important in many applications, such as improving company's product or service, marketing research, recommendation systems, decision and policy making and even predicting results of elections. Social media is a very powerful tool to transfer information and express emotions for users and a rich source of data that enables researchers to mine public opinion, but social media is a breeding ground for rumours that get miscommunicated into fact - how can we use AI to help eliminate this?

Antonia is a PhD candidate at Imperial College London, in the Bio-Inspired Computer Vision Group. Her research focuses on unsupervised learning and generative models. She received her masters in Biomedical Engineering from Imperial College London with an exchange year at the University of California, Davis. Antonia has interned at Twitter (Magic Pony), Cortexica and UNMADE. In this episode we discuss the implementation of generative modelling to synthesise new data samples, and the challenges faced in this work.

Nikita Johnson, founder and CEO of RE•WORK discusses the motivation behind the Women in AI series. The episode touches on how she came to found the AI events company, and shares some exciting insights of the upcoming Deep Learning Summit and AI Assistants Summit in London, highlighting some of the influential women who will be sharing their research at the event.