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Shalini De Mello, a principal research scientist at NVIDIA who’s made her mark inventing computer vision technology that contributes to driver safety, finished 2020 with a bang — presenting two posters at the prestigious NeurIPS conference in December. A 10-year NVIDIA veteran, De Mello works on self-supervised and few-shot learning, 3D reconstruction, viewpoint estimation and human-computer interaction. She told NVIDIA AI Podcast host Noah Kravitz about her NeurIPS submissions on reconstructing 3D meshes and self-learning transformations for improving head and gaze redirection — both significant challenges for computer vision. https://blogs.nvidia.com/blog/2021/04/07/nvidia-research-shalini-de-mello/

Drawing on his trifecta of degrees in math, music and music technology, Tlacael Esparza, co-founder and CTO of Sunhouse, is revolutionizing electronic drumming. Esparza has created Sensory Percussion, a combination of hardware and software that uses sensors and AI to allow a single drum to produce a complex range of sounds depending on where and how the musician hits it. In the latest installment of the NVIDIA AI Podcast, Esparza spoke with host Noah Kravitz about the tech behind the tool, and what inspired him to create Sunhouse. Esparza has been doing drumstick tricks of his own for many years — prior to founding Sunhouse, he toured with a variety of bands and recorded drums for many albums. Esparza’s musical skill and programming knowledge formed the basis for Sensory Percussion. Partnering with his brother, Tenoch, and with support from a New York University startup accelerator, Sunhouse was born in 2014. Since then, it’s become successful with live performers. Esparza is especially proud of its popularity in the New York jazz community and among drumming legends like Marcus Gilmore and Wilco’s Glenn Kotche. https://blogs.nvidia.com/blog/2021/03/31/sunhouse-tlacael-esparza/

Call it Moneyball for deep learning. New York Times writer Cade Metz tells the funny, inspiring — and ultimately triumphant — tale of how a dogged group of AI researchers bet their careers on the long-dismissed technology of deep learning. In this episode of the AI Podcast we caught up with New York Times technology correspondent Cade Metz, who tells the tale of how deep learning turned the computing world upside down in his new book, ‘Genius Makers.’ https://blogs.nvidia.com/blog/2021/03/17/ai-cade-metz

Since NVIDIA announced construction of the U.K.’s most powerful supercomputer — Cambridge-1 — Marc Hamilton, vice president of solutions architecture and engineering, has been (remotely) overseeing its building across the pond. Cambridge-1, which will be available for U.K. healthcare researchers to work on pressing problems, is being built on NVIDIA DGX SuperPOD architecture for a whopping 400 petaflops of AI performance. Located at KAO Data, a data center using 100% renewable energy, Cambridge-1 will rank among the world’s top 3 most energy-efficient supercomputers on the current Green500 list. Hamilton points to the concentration of leading healthcare companies in the U.K. as a primary reason for Cambridge-1’s location. AstraZeneca, GSK, Oxford Nanopore and more have already announced their intent to harness the supercomputer for research in the coming months.

Pooja Rao, a doctor, data scientist and entrepreneur, wants to make cutting-edge medical care available to communities around the world, regardless of their resources. Her startup, Qure.ai, is doing exactly that, with technology that’s used in 150+ healthcare facilities in 27 countries. Rao is the cofounder and head of research and development at the Mumbai-based company, which started in 2016. The company develops AI technology that interprets medical images, with a focus on pulmonary and neurological scans. https://blogs.nvidia.com/blog/2021/02/18/pooja-rao-qure-ai/

Not many can claim to be a computer programmer, nonfiction author and poet, but Brian Christian has established himself as all three. Christian has just released his newest book, The Alignment Problem, which delves into the disparity that occurs when AI models don’t do exactly what they’re intended to do. The book follows on the success of Christian’s previous work, "The Most Human Human and Algorithms to Live By." Now a visiting scholar at UC Berkeley, Christian joined AI Podcast host Noah Kravitz to talk about the alignment problem and some new techniques being used to address the issue. The alignment problem can be caused by a range of reasons — such as data bias, or datasets used incorrectly and out of context. As AI takes on a variety of tasks, from medical diagnostics to parole sentencing decisions, machine learning researchers are expressing concern over the problem. Listen to the full podcast to hear about this and more — including Christian’s book club experience with Elon Musk and why he chose to double major in philosophy and computer science.

Sam Liang is making things easier for the creators of the NVIDIA AI Podcast — and just about every remote worker. He’s the CEO and co-founder of Otter.ai, which uses AI to produce speech-to-text transcriptions in real time or from recording uploads. The platform has a range of capabilities, from differentiating between multiple people, to understanding accents, to parsing through various background noises. And now, Otter.ai is making live captioning possible on a variety of platforms, including Zoom, Skype and Microsoft Teams. Even Liang’s conversation with AI Podcast host Noah Kravitz was captioned in real time over Skype. This new capability has been enthusiastically received by remote workers — Liang says that Otter.ai has already transcribed tens of millions of meetings. Liang envisions even more practical effects of Otter.ai’s live captions. The platform can already identify keywords. Soon he thinks it’ll be recognizing action items, helping manage agendas and providing notifications. https://blogs.nvidia.com/blog/2021/01/21/otter-ai-sam-liang/

Canadian high schooler Ana DuCristea has a clever solution for the quarantine blues, as days blur into weeks. Using AI and natural language processing, she programmed an app capable of setting customizable reminders so you won’t miss any important activities, like baking banana bread or whipping up Dalgona coffee. DuCristea, who’s familiar with Python and has taken a variety of online AI courses, set to work on the app after winning a Jetson Nano Developer Kit this summer at AI4ALL, an AI summer camp. She’d long been frustrated with the simplicity of current reminder apps and decided to create her own solution. Using Python and the Nano, DuCristea developed an app in just two months that integrates with mobile and PC messaging program Discord. With the app, users can message a bot on Discord requesting a reminder for a specific task, date and time.

Brendon Cassidy, CTO and chief scientist at Super Hi-Fi, uses AI to give everyone the experience of a radio station tailored to their unique tastes. Super Hi-Fi, an AI startup and member of the NVIDIA Inception program, develops technology that produces smooth transitions, intersperses content meaningfully and adjusts volume and crossfade. Started three years ago, Super Hi-Fi first partnered with iHeartRadio and is now also used by companies such as Peloton and Sonos. Results are showing that users like this personalized approach. Cassidy notes that they tested MagicStitch, one of their tools that eliminates the gap between songs, and found that customers listening with MagicStitch turned on spent 10 percent more time streaming music. https://blogs.nvidia.com/blog/2020/12/23/super-hifi-ai/

Anima Anandkumar is setting a personal record this week with seven of her team’s research papers accepted to NeurIPS 2020. The 34th annual Neural Information Processing Systems conference is taking place virtually from Dec. 6-12. The premier event on neural networks, NeurIPS draws thousands of the world’s best researchers every year. Anandkumar, NVIDIA’s director of machine learning research and Bren professor at CalTech’s CMS Department, joined AI Podcast host Noah Kravitz to talk about what to expect at the conference, and to explain what she sees as the future of AI.

We've got an expert on AI powered translation joining us on the show today. Spence Green is CEO at Lilt, a Silicon Valley based AI-powered enterprise translation software and services company. Lilt's mission is to make more of the world's information accessible to more of the world's people, regardless of where they were born and what language they speak. Spence is here to talk to us about how they're doing it.

Pindar Van Arman, an American artist and roboticist, designs painting robots that explore the differences between human and computational creativity. Since his first system in 2005 he has built multiple artificially-creative multiple robots. The most famous, Cloud Painter, was awarded first place at Robotart 2018. PIndar, his robots, and their work have been featured all over the media, including on NPR, BBC, HBO, Vice, and the documentary "Machine" a film about artificial intelligence. You can see and learn more about Pindar on his website, cloudpainter.com. In fact, unless you're driving, you should go ahead and load it into your browser right now, so you can look at the art you listen to him talk. For more from Pindar Van Arman, check out: http://www.cloudpainter.com http://www.artonomo.us And explore his work on NVIDIA's AI Art Gallery: https://www.nvidia.com/ai-art-gallery/pindar-van-arman

Jeff Herbst is a fixture of the AI startup ecosystem. Which makes sense since he’s the VP of business development at NVIDIA and head of NVIDIA Inception, a virtual accelerator that currently has over 6,000 members in a wide range of industries. Ahead of the GPU Technology Conference, taking place Oct. 5-9, Herbst joined AI Podcast host Noah Kravitz to talk about what opportunities are available to startups at the conference, and how NVIDIA Inception is accelerating startups in every industry. Learn more about NVIDIA Inception at https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/deep-learning-ai/startups/ Follow Jeff Herbst at @jeffatNvdia

Today we're talking graphics, the intersection of AI and graphics specifically. There may be no better guest to talk AI and graphics than our guest today, David Luebke. David is vice president of graphics research at NVIDIA. He co-founded NVIDIA Research in 2006, after eight years on the faculty of the University of Virginia.

It’s a modern television trope – detectives trying to solve a case “enhance” a blurry image, digitally, giving them a crystal clear image of their suspect. Until recently, this was little more than science fiction. Now, however, it’s a key tool for photographers around the world. Topaz Labs pioneered the intersection of deep learning and photo noise reduction. Their sprawling suite of image editing plugins are relied by pro and amateur photographers alike. We spoke with Topaz founder and CTO, Feng “Albert” Yang, to learn where AI and photography are going next.

It's all come full circle. Real-time graphics technology, namely, GPUs, sparked the modern AI boom. Now modern AI, driven by GPUs, is remaking graphics. This episodes guest is Aaron Lefohn, senior director of realtime rendering research at NVIDIA. Aaron's international team of scientists played a key role in founding the field of AI computer graphics. They were the first to bring AI to real-time computer graphics. They invented key technologies that brought ray tracing to real time computer graphics. Now they're at the forefront of combining AI and ray tracing to rapidly increase the realism of real-time graphics.

Hugging Face is more than just an adorable emoji — it’s a company that’s demystifying AI by transforming the latest developments in deep learning into usable code for businesses and researchers. Research engineer Sam Shleifer spoke with AI Podcast host Noah Kravitz about Hugging Face NLP technology, which is in use at over 1,000 companies, including Apple, Bing and Grammarly, across fields ranging from finance to medical technology. Hugging Face’s models serve a variety of purposes for their customers, including autocompletion, customer service automation and translation. Their popular web application, Write with Transformer, can even take half-formed thoughts and suggest options for completion. Shleifer is currently at work developing models that are accessible to everyone, whether they are proficient coders or not. In the next few years, Shleifer envisions the continued growth of smaller NLP models that power a wave of chat apps with state-of-the-art translation capabilities.

Michael Kirk and Raphael Attie, scientists at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, regularly face terabytes of data in their quest to analyze images of the sun. This computational challenge, which could take a year or more on a CPU, has been reduced to less than a week on Quadro RTX data science workstations. Kirk and Attie spoke to AI Podcast host Noah Kravitz about the workflow they follow to study these images, and what they hope to find. The lessons they’ve learned are useful for those in both science and industry grappling with how to best put torrents of data to work.

Jared Dame, Z by HP's director of business development and strategy for AI, data science and edge technologies, spoke to AI Podcast host Noah Kravitz about the role HP’s workstations play in cutting-edge AI and data science.

Understanding the U.S. tax code can take years of study — it’s 80,000 pages long. Software company Intuit has decided that it’s a job for AI. Ashok Srivastava, its senior vice president and chief data officer, spoke to AI Podcast host Noah Kravitz about how the company is utilizing machine learning to help customers with taxes and aid small businesses through the financial effects of COVID-19.