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Towards Data Science - 32. Bahador Khaleghi - Explainable AI and AI interpretability
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32. Bahador Khaleghi - Explainable AI and AI interpretability

Towards Data Science

05/06/20

43m

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If I were to ask you to explain why you’re reading this blog post, you could answer in many different ways.

For example, you could tell me “it’s because I felt like it”, or “because my neurons fired in a specific way that led me to click on the link that was advertised to me”. Or you might go even deeper and relate your answer to the fundamental laws of quantum physics.

The point is, explanations need to be targeted to a certain level of abstraction in order to be effective.

That’s true in life, but it’s also true in machine learning, where explainable AI is getting more and more attention as a way to ensure that models are working properly, in a way that makes sense to us. Understanding explainability and how to leverage it is becoming increasingly important, and that’s why I wanted to speak with Bahador Khaleghi, a data scientist at H20.ai whose technical focus is on explainability and interpretability in machine learning.

Previous Episode

Most of us want to change our identities. And we usually have an idealized version of ourselves that we aspire to become — one who’s fitter, smarter, healthier, more famous, wealthier, more centered, or whatever.

But you can’t change your identity in a fundamental way without also changing what you do in your day-to-day life. You don’t get fitter without working out regularly. You don’t get smarter without studying regularly.

To change yourself, you must first change your habits. But how do you do that?

Recently, books like Atomic Habits and Deep Work have focused on answering that question in general terms, and they’re definitely worth reading. But habit formation in the context of data science, analytics, machine learning, and startups comes with a unique set of challenges, and deserves attention in its own right. And that’s why I wanted to sit down with today’s guest, Russell Pollari.

Russell may now be the CTO of the world’s largest marketplace for income share mentorships (and the very same company I work at every day!) but he was once — and not too long ago — a physics PhD student with next to no coding ability and a classic case of the grad school blues. To get to where he is today, he’s had to learn a lot, and in his quest to optimize that process, he’s focused a lot of his attention on habit formation and self-improvement in the context of tech, data science and startups.

Next Episode

One of the most interesting recent trends in machine learning has been the combination of different types of data in order to be able to unlock new use cases for deep learning. If the 2010s were the decade of computer vision and voice recognition, the 2020s may very well be the decade we finally figure out how to make machines that can see and hear the world around them, making them that much more context-aware and potentially even humanlike.

The push towards integrating diverse data sources has received a lot of attention, from academics as well as companies. And one of those companies is Twenty Billion Neurons, and its founder Roland Memisevic, is our guest for this latest episode of the Towards Data Science podcast. Roland is a former academic who’s been knee-deep in deep learning since well before the hype that was sparked by AlexNet in 2012. His company has been working on deep learning-powered developer tools, as well as an automated fitness coach that combines video and audio data to keep users engaged throughout their workout routines.

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