Machine Learning for Genomics

Genomics data is some of the biggest #bigdata, and doing machine learning on it is unlocking new ways of thinking about evolution, genomic diseases like cancer, and what really makes each of us different for everyone else. This episode touches on some of the things that make machine learning on genomics data so challenging, and the algorithms designed to do it anyway.

Climate Modeling

Hot enough for you? Climate models suggest that it's only going to get warmer in the coming years. This episode unpacks those models, so you understand how they work.

A lot of the episodes we do are about fun studies we hear about, like "if you're interested, this is kinda cool"--this episode is much more important than that. Understanding these models, and taking action on them where appropriate, will have huge implications in the years to come.

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Reinforcement Learning Gone Wrong

Last week’s episode on artificial intelligence gets a huge payoff this week—we’ll explore a wonderful couple of papers about all the ways that artificial intelligence can go wrong. Malevolent actors? You bet. Collateral damage? Of course. Reward hacking? Naturally! It’s fun to think about, and the discussion starting now will have reverberations for decades to come.

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Reinforcement Learning for Artificial Intelligence

There’s a ton of excitement about reinforcement learning, a form of semi-supervised machine learning that underpins a lot of today’s cutting-edge artificial intelligence algorithms. Here’s a crash course in the algorithmic machinery behind AlphaGo, and self-driving cars, and major logistical optimization projects—and the robots that, tomorrow, will clean our houses and (hopefully) not take over the world…

Differential Privacy: how to study people without being weird and gross

Apple wants to study iPhone users' activities and use it to improve performance. Google collects data on what people are doing online to try to improve their Chrome browser. Do you like the idea of this data being collected? Maybe not, if it's being collected on you--but you probably also realize that there is some benefit to be had from the improved iPhones and web browsers. Differential privacy is a set of policies that walks the line between individual privacy and better data, including even some old-school tricks that scientists use to get people to answer embarrassing questions honestly.

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How the sausage gets made

Something a little different in this episode--we'll be talking about the technical plumbing that gets our podcast from our brains to your ears. As it turns out, it's a multi-step bucket brigade process of RSS feeds, links to downloads, and lots of hand-waving when it comes to trying to figure out how many of you (listeners) are out there.

Conjoint analysis: like AB testing, but on steroids

Conjoint analysis is like AB tester, but more bigger more better: instead of testing one or two things, you can test potentially dozens of options. Where might you use something like this? Well, if you wanted to design an entire hotel chain completely from scratch, and to do it in a data-driven way. You'll never look at Courtyard by Marriott the same way again.

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Traffic Metering Algorithms

This episode is for all you (us) traffic nerds--we're talking about the hidden structure underlying traffic on-ramp metering systems. These systems slow down the flow of traffic onto highways so that the highways don't get overloaded with cars and clog up. If you're someone who listens to podcasts while commuting, and especially if your area has on-ramp metering, you'll never look at highway access control the same way again (yeah, we know this is super nerdy; it's also super awesome).

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Um Detector 2: the dynamic time warp

One tricky thing about working with time series data, like the audio data in our "um" detector (remember that? because we barely do...), is that sometimes events look really similar but one is a little bit stretched and squeezed relative to the other. Besides having an amazing name, the dynamic time warp is a handy algorithm for aligning two time series sequences that are close in shape, but don't quite line up out of the box.

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Inside a data analysis: fraud hunting at Enron

It's storytime this week--the story, from beginning to end, of how Katie designed and built the main project for Udacity's Intro to Machine Learning class, when she was developing the course. The project was to use email and financial data to hunt for signatures of fraud at Enron, one of the biggest cases of corporate fraud in history; that description makes the project sound pretty clean but getting the data into the right shape, and even doing some dataset merging (that hadn't ever been done before), made this project much more interesting to design than it might appear. Here's the story of what a data analysis like this looks like...from the inside.

Data Contamination

Supervised machine learning assumes that the features and labels used for building a classifier are isolated from each other--basically, that you can't cheat by peeking. Turns out this can be easier said than done. In this episode, we'll talk about the many (and diverse!) cases where label information contaminates features, ruining data science competitions along the way.

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Model Interpretation (and Trust Issues)

Machine learning algorithms can be black boxes--inputs go in, outputs come out, and what happens in the middle is anybody's guess. But understanding how a model arrives at an answer is critical for interpreting the model, and for knowing if it's doing something reasonable (one could even say... trustworthy). We'll talk about a new algorithm called LIME that seeks to make any model more understandable and interpretable.

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Updates! Political Science Fraud and AlphaGo

We've got updates for you about topics from past shows! First, the political science scandal of the year 2015 has a new chapter, we'll remind you about the original story and then dive into what has happened since. Then, we've got an update on AlphaGo, and his/her/its much-anticipated match against the human champion of the game Go.

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Ecological Inference and Simpson's Paradox

Simpson's paradox is the data science equivalent of looking through one eye and seeing a very clear trend, and then looking through the other eye and seeing the very clear opposite trend. In one case, you see a trend one way in a group, but then breaking the group into subgroups gives the exact opposite trend. Confused? Scratching your head? Welcome to the tricky world of ecological inference.

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Discriminatory Algorithms

Sometimes when we say an algorithm discriminates, we mean it can tell the difference between two types of items. But in this episode, we'll talk about another, more troublesome side to discrimination: algorithms can be... racist? Sexist? Ageist? Yes to all of the above. It's an important thing to be aware of, especially when doing people-centered data science. We'll discuss how and why this happens, and what solutions are out there (or not).

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Recommendation Engines and Privacy

This episode started out as a discussion of recommendation engines, like Netflix uses to suggest movies. There's still a lot of that in here. But a related topic, which is both interesting and important, is how to keep data private in the era of large-scale recommendation engines--what mistakes have been made surrounding supposedly anonymized data, how data ends up de-anonymized, and why it matters for you.

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A Data Scientist's View of the War Against Cancer

In this episode, we're taking many episodes' worth of insights and unpacking an extremely complex and important question--in what ways are we winning the fight against cancer, where might that fight go in the coming decade, and how do we know when we're making progress? No matter how tricky you might think this problem is to solve, the fact is, once you get in there trying to solve it, it's even trickier than you thought.