O'reilly Radar Podcast - O'reilly Media Podcast

The O'Reilly Radar Podcast: The maturity of AI in enterprise, bridging the AI gaps, and what the U.S. can do with $4 trillion.This week, I sit down with Aman Naimat, senior vice president of technology at Demandbase, and co-founder and CTO of Spiderbook. We talk about his project to build a knowledge graph of the entire business world using natural language processing and deep learning. We also talk about the role AI is playing in those companies today and what’s going to drive AI adoption in the future.Here are a few highlights: Surveying AI adoption We were studying businesses for the purpose of helping sales people talk accounts, and we realized we could use our technology to study entire markets. So, we decided to study entire markets of how companies are adopting AI or big data. Really, the way it works is, we built a knowledge graph of how businesses interact with each other, their behavioral signals, who's doing business with whom, who are their partners, customers, su

O'Reilly Radar Podcast: David Beyer on AI adoption challenges, the complexities of getting an AI ROI, and the dangers of hype.This week, I sit down with David Beyer, an investor with Amplify Partners. We talk about machine learning and artificial intelligence, the challenges he’s seeing in AI adoption, and what he thinks is missing from the AI conversation.Here are a few highlights: Complexities of AI adoption AI adoption is actually a multifaceted question. It's something that touches on policy at the government level. It touches on labor markets and questions around equity and fairness. It touches on broad commercial questions around industries and how they evolve over time. There's many, many ways to address this. I think a good way to think about AI adoption at the broader, more abstract level of sectors or categories is to actually zoom down a bit and look at what it is actually replacing. The way to do that is to think at the atomic level of jobs and work. What is

The O'Reilly Radar Podcast: Turning personalization into a two-way conversation.In this week's Radar Podcast, O’Reilly’s Mac Slocum chats with Sara Watson, a technology critic and writer in residence at Digital Asia Hub. Watson is also a research fellow at the Tow Center for Digital Journalism at Columbia and an affiliate with the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society at Harvard. They talk about how to optimize personalized experience for consumers, the role of machine learning in this space, and what will drive the evolution of personalized experiences.Here are a few highlights: Accountability across the life cycle of data One of the things I'm paying a lot of attention to is how the machine learning application of this changes what can and can't be explained about personalization. One of the things I'm really looking for as a consumer is to say, "Okay. Why am I seeing this?" That's really interesting to me. I think more and more we're not going to be able to answer that questio

The O'Reilly Radar Podcast: The value humans bring to AI, guaranteed job programs, and the lack of AI productivity.This week, I sit down with Tom Davenport. Davenport is a professor of Information Technology and Management at Babson College, the co-founder of the International Institute for Analytics, a fellow at the MIT Center for Digital Business, and a senior advisor for Deloitte Analytics. He also pioneered the concept of “competing on analytics.” We talk about how his ideas have evolved since writing the seminal work on that topic, Competing on Analytics: The New Science of Winning; his new book Only Humans Need Apply: Winners and Losers in the Age of Smart Machines, which looks at how AI is impacting businesses; and we talk more broadly about how AI is impacting society and what we need to do to keep ourselves on a utopian path.Here are some highlights: How AI will impact jobs In terms of AI impact, there are various schools of thought. Tim O'Reilly's in the very optimistic school.

The O’Reilly Radar Podcast: AI on the hype curve, imagining nurturing technology, and gaps in the AI conversation.This week, I sit down with anthropologist, futurist, Intel Fellow, and director of interaction and experience research at Intel, Genevieve Bell. We talk about what she’s learning from current AI research, why the resurgence of AI is different this time, and five things that are missing from the AI conversation.Here are some highlights: AI’s place on the wow-ahh-hmm curve of human existence I think in some ways, for me, the reason of wanting to put AI into a lineage is many of the ways we respond to it as human beings are remarkably familiar. I'm sure you and many of your viewers and listeners know about the Gartner Hype Curve, the notion of, at first you don’t talk about it very much, then the arc of it's everywhere, and then it goes to the valley of it not being so spectacular until it stabilizes. I think most humans respond to technology not dissimilarly. There's this momen

The O'Reilly Radar Podcast: The art and science of fostering serendipity skills.On this week's episode of the Radar Podcast, O'Reilly's Mac Slocum chats with award-winning author Pagan Kennedy about the art and science of serendipity—how people find, invent, and see opportunities nobody else sees, and why serendipity is actually a skill rather than just dumb luck.Here are some highlights: The roots of serendipity It's really helpful to go back to the original definition of serendipity, which arose in a very whimsical, serendipitous way back in the 1700s. There was this English eccentric named Horace Walpole who was fascinated with a fairy tale called 'The Three Princes of Serendip.' In this fairy tale, the three princes are Sherlock Homes-like detectives who have amazing skills, forensic skills. They can see clues that nobody else can see. Walpole was thinking about this and very delighted with this idea, so he came up with this word 'serendipity.' In that original definition, Walpole re

The O'Reilly Radar Podcast: Designing for mainstream AI, natural language interfaces, and the importance of reinventing yourself.This week we're featuring a conversation from earlier this year—O'Reilly's Mary Treseler chats with Giles Colborne, managing director of cxpartners. They talk about the transformative effects of AI on design, designing for natural language interactions, and why designers need to nurture the ability to reinvent themselves.The conditions are ripe for AI to enter the mainstream Mobile is the platform people want to use. ... That means that a lot of businesses are seeing their traffic shift to a channel that actually doesn't work as well, but people would like it to work well. At the same time, mobile devices have become incredibly powerful. Organizations are suddenly finding themselves flooded with data about user behavior. Really interesting data. It's impossible for a person to understand, but if you have a very powerful device in the user's hand, and you have powerful computers

The O'Reilly Radar Podcast: Imbuing robots with magic, eschewing deception in AI, and problematic assumptions of human-taught reinforcement learning.In this episode, I sit down with Brad Knox, founder and CEO of Emoters, a startup building a product called bots_alive—animal-like robots that have a strong illusion of life. We chat about the approach the company is taking, why robots or agents that pass themselves off as human without any transparency should be illegal, and some challenges and applications of reinforcement learning and interactive machine learning.Here are some links to things we talked about and some highlights from our conversation: Links: bots_alive Bot Party Knox's article: Framing reinforcement learning from human reward: Reward positivity, temporal discounting, episodicity, and performance Knox's article: Power to the People: The Role of Humans in Interactive Machine Learning bots_alive's NSF award: Design, deployment, and algorithmic optimization

The O'Reilly Radar Podcast: Big data for security, challenges in fraud detection, and the growing complexity of fraudster behavior.This week, I sit down with Fang Yu, cofounder and CTO of DataVisor, where she focuses on big data for security. We talk about the current state of the fraud landscape, how fraudsters are evolving, and how data analytics and behavior analysis can help defend against—and prevent—attacks.Here are some highlights from our chat: Challenges in using supervised machine learning for fraud detection In the past few years, machine learning has taken a big role in fraud detection. There are a number of supervised machine learning techniques and breakthroughs, especially for voice, image recognition, etc. There's also an application for machine learning to detect fraud, but it's a little challenging because supervised machine learning needs labels. It needs to know what good users and bad users look like, and to know what good behavior is, what bad behavior is; the problem in many f

The O'Reilly Radar Podcast: Thinking critically about AI, modeling language, and overcoming hurdles.This week, I sit down with Hilary Mason, who is a data scientist in residence at Accel Partners and founder and CEO of Fast Forward Labs. We chat about current research projects at Fast Forward Labs, adoption hurdles companies face with emerging technologies, and the AI technology ecosystem—what's most intriguing for the short term and what will have the biggest long-term impact.Here are some highlights: Missing wisdom There are a few things missing [from the AI conversation]. I think we tend to focus on the hype and eventual potential without thinking critically about how we get there and what can go wrong along the way. We have a very optimistic conversation, which is something I appreciate. I'm an optimist, and I'm very excited about all of this stuff, but we don't really have a lot of critical work being done in things like how do we debug these systems, what are the consequences when

O'Reilly Radar Podcast: SNAFU Catchers, knowing how things work, and the proper response to system discrepancies.In this week's episode, O'Reilly's Mac Slocum sits down with Richard Cook and David Woods. Cook is a physician, researcher, and educator, who is currently a research scientist in the Department of Integrated Systems Engineering at Ohio State University, and emeritus professor of health care systems safety at Sweden’s KTH. Woods also is a professor at Ohio State University and is leading the Initiative on Complexity in Natural, Social, and Engineered Systems, and he's the co-director of Ohio State University’s Cognitive Systems Engineering Laboratory. They chat about SNAFU Catchers; anomaly response; and the importance of not only understanding how things fail, but how things normally work.Here are a few highlights: Catching situations abnormal Cook: We're trying to understand how Internet-facing businesses manage to handle all the various problems, difficulties, and oppor

The O'Reilly Radar Podcast: Prediction algorithms, cognitive biases, and how our brains come online.On this week's episode, I chat with Sam Wang, professor of neuroscience and molecular biology at Princeton. Wang is also a co-founder of the Princeton Election Consortium, a site focused on analyzing and predicting U.S. national elections. We talk about the site's prediction algorithm and this crazy election cycle, and the role neuroscience may have played. We also talk about the current research Wang and his team are working on, the U.S. BRAIN Initiative, and the powerful role governments play in academic research.Here are some highlights: Predicting elections What we do at the [Princeton Election Consortium] site is we collect publicly available polls. This is a website that's at election.princeton.edu. We take those polls and then feed them into a script that I've written and scripts that my students have written, and on an automated basis, we take those polling data and we turn the pol

The O'Reilly Radar Podcast: Navigating the increasing globalization of industry and commerce.In this episode of the Radar Podcast, I chat with John Bassett III, chairman of the board of the Vaughan-Bassett Furniture Company. We talk about globalization and the effect it's had on the furniture industry, the international trade battle he waged (which was written about by Beth Macy in her book Factory Man), Bassett's book Making it in America, and what entrepreneurs need to know to succeed in business today.Here are some highlights: Panic sets in They started making furniture in China, and we competed very well through the 1990s. All of this changed dramatically in 2001 when they became a member of the World Trade Organization (WTO). Once they were in the WTO, their prices plummeted, and the bottom dropped out of the market. By that time, I had left the Bassett Industries and joined my wife's family furniture company called Vaughan-Bassett Furniture on January 1, 1983. I was over here at the time

The O'Reilly Radar Podcast: perceptual robotics, post-evolutionary humans, and designing our future with intent.In this Radar Podcast episode, I chat with Haakon Faste, a design educator and innovation consultant. We talk about his interesting career path, including his perceptual robotics work, his teaching approaches, and his mission with the Ralf A. Faste Foundation. We also talk about navigating our way to a "post-human" world and the importance of designing to make the world a more human-centered place.Here are a few highlights: Multimodal interface systems What these robotics systems allow you to do, which is really exciting, is you can take someone who's an expert at a certain scale, maybe they're an athlete, and you can put them into a robotic system and ask them to perform their craft, if you will. You can imagine taking an expert, someone like Tiger Woods who's a fantastic golfer, having him climb into a robot suit and show his perfect golf swing, record it, and then have novices cli

The O'Reilly Radar Podcast: Bot hype, bot UX, and bots in the workplace.This week on the Radar Podcast, we're featuring the first episode of the newly launched O'Reilly Bots Podcast, which you can find on Stitcher, iTunes, SoundCloud and RSS. O'Reilly's Jon Bruner is joined by Pete Skomoroch, the co-founder and CEO of Skipflag, to talk about bots—about what's driving the sudden interest, what we can expect from the technology, and some interesting emerging applications.Here are some highlights: The uncanny bot valley I've seen a lot of hype waves over the years in tech, but this one is growing pretty rapidly. That exact story I've heard from a few people, where CIOs from big companies are actually saying, 'All right, what's our bot strategy? I want to stop, I want to retask some people to dig into this.' There's been a lot of things like that in the past, where it could feel misguided because, 'Wait, it's too early—we don't even know what this is yet.' At

In this O’Reilly Radar Podcast: The impact of minimal IoT product security and the case for new pro-security business models.This week's Radar Podcast episode is a special cross-over edition from the O'Reilly Security Podcast, which you can find on iTunes, Stitcher, RSS, or SoundCloud. O'Reilly strategic content director Courtney Nash chats with Cory Doctorow, a journalist, activist and science fiction writer. They talk about nascent pro-security industries, the EFF's lawsuit against the U.S. government, and the new W3C DRM specification.Here are some highlights: Auditing IoT products is a liability for security researchers Think about the conditions under which IoT companies operate. Their business plan—the thing they show to VCs to get the money to go into the business—is to monetize data. They're all designed with security as an afterthought. They're all designed with the minimum viable security to make this product not immediately burst into flames after you put it inside your body or put your b

The O'Reilly Radar Podcast: Natural language understanding and natural language processing applications, our future with chatbots, and open source indexing.This week, I talk with Alyona Medelyan, co-founder and CEO at Thematic and founder and CEO at Entopix. We talk about natural language understanding, the challenges of analyzing unstructured text, and her open source indexing tool Maui that she's been working on for the past 10 years.Here are some highlights: Use cases of Natural Language Understanding Natural Language Understanding is really a sub area of Natural Language Processing (NLP). In general, NLP deals with using computers to understand human language, but not all NLP tasks require actual understanding. For example, if we take part of speech tagging, when an algorithm decides whether a word is a noun or an adjective or a verb, in order for the the algorithm to perform this accurately, we don't really need to know what the words mean. You can achieve quite a lot by simply coun

The O'Reilly Radar Podcast: Eleanor Saitta on security countermeasures at the human level, the relationship between security and design, and understanding security design as a separate discipline.This week's episode features a special cross-over conversation from the O'Reilly Security Podcast, which you can find on Stitcher, iTunes, SoundCloud, or RSS. O'Reilly's Courtney Nash chats with Eleanor Saitta, a security architect at Etsy. They talk about the importance of thinking of security in a human context and the increasingly critical relationship between security and design.Here are a few highlights: Detecting fraudulant patterns at the human level Look at banking fraud and fraud detection systems. Although financial malware is a real issue, and we are seeing more and more people who end up with malware running on their phones that then attacks bank authenticators or logs into their account and makes transfers. These are starting to be very real issues, let alone credit card numbers and all t

The O'Reilly Radar Podcast: Color Genomics, genetic testing access, and the future of precision medicine.This week, I chat with Othman Laraki, co-founder of Color Genomics. We chat about challenges and opportunities in genetic testing, the future of precision medicine, and the hurdles medicine and health care are currently facing (and how we can overcome them).Here are some highlights: Genetics testing for everyone Genetics, we felt, had come to a point where there was an opportunity to have a very big impact by essentially mixing some of the best of the biology world with software—in many ways, genetics had started to become, in part, a software problem. It felt like it was starting to be possible to build products that made genetics accessible to a much broader population by both dropping costs as well as increasing access, so making this information more accessible to a much broader population in a scalable way. ... For example, one of the things we did that we'r

The O'Reilly Radar Podcast: Conversations with Daniele Quercia and Frank Cuypers.This week's episode features two conversations I've had recently centered around smart cities. First, I chat with Daniele Quercia, research team lead at Bell Labs. We talk about research he's working on now; the launch of goodcitylife.org (including smelly maps and happy maps); why our use of technology shouldn't just aim to make a city smart, but to improve the day-to-day quality of life of it's citizens; and about the emerging areas of urban informatics he's finding most compelling. In our second segment, I chat with Frank Cuypers, associate professor at the University of Antwerp and strategist at Destination Think! We chat about the importance of urban DNA, his nonprofit project Why Your City, and why there's no such thing as a smart city.Here are some highlights: Alternative smart city agendas Daniele Quercia: "The idea and the rhetoric behind Smart City is one of efficiency and security. Usually th