Stories in AI

Had an amazing conversation conversation with Dr. Babak Hodjat, the CTO of Evolutionary AI at Cognizant. Babak is a deep thinker, researcher and a practical entrepreneur and we discussed evolutionary computing, how to use AI to optimize for multiple outcomes, Data lakes and Lakehouses, AI winters and the most important work in Deep Learning today. I hope you enjoy this conversation as much as I did. Chapters 00:00 Babak's Story - Evolutionary AI, Siri, Intelligence, Sentience 05:30 What is AI? 08:20 What is Evolutionary AI? 12:00 Optimizing for multiple outcomes 20:00 Lots of what's happening is not AI 23:30 DataLakes and Lakehouses 25:30 Examples of great AI in the Enterprise 30:30 Is an AI winter coming? 33:30 What is the future of AI? 37:30 The most important work in AI today 39:00 Rapid fire : AGI, entrepreneurship, practice Babak's Bio: Babak Hodjat (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Babak_Hodjat) is the CTO for AI at Cognizant where he leads a team of developers and researchers bringing advanced AI solutions to businesses. Babak is the former co-founder and CEO of Sentient, responsible for the core technology behind the world’s largest distributed artificial intelligence system. Babak was also the founder of the world's first AI-driven hedge-fund, Sentient Investment Management. Babak is a serial entrepreneur, having started a number of Silicon Valley companies as main inventor and technologist. Prior to co-founding Sentient, Babak was senior director of engineering at Sybase iAnywhere, where he led mobile solutions engineering. Prior to Sybase, Babak was co-founder, CTO and board member of Dejima Inc. Babak is the primary inventor of Dejima’s patented, agent-oriented technology applied to intelligent interfaces for mobile and enterprise computing – the technology behind Apple’s Siri. Babak has published many papers in the fields of Artificial Life, Agent-Oriented Software Engineering, and Distributed Artificial Intelligence, and has 31 granted or pending patents to his name. He is an expert in numerous fields of AI, including natural language processing, machine learning, genetic algorithms, distributed AI, and has founded multiple companies in these areas. Babak holds a PhD in Machine Intelligence from Kyushu University, in Fukuoka, Japan. Reach Babak at https://www.linkedin.com/in/babakhodjat/

I had a great conversation about AI in defense and national security applications with Dr. Amanda Muller. Amanda is a Technical Fellow leading Responsible AI at Northrop Grumman. We talked about national security use cases, the new age of war, the role of policy and governance and why the government is concerned about AI in everyday lives. Chapters 00:00 Dr. Amanda Muller's story 08:45 AI in Defence & Warfare 13:45 Why the DoD cares about AI in everyday life 16:50 Where is US in the AI race today 20:00 Ethical AI frameworks 26:40 How is the US government leveraging and driving AI 29:30 Is the US moving fast enough in AI 36:00 The "Biased" landscape 38:00 Data Literacy, learning resources, everything else Show Notes/Resources: For Northrop Grumman's AI initiatives, visit https://www.northropgrumman.com/what-we-do/artificial-intelligence-and-machine-learning/ Resource Alert: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCYO_jab_esuFRV4b17AJtAw is a Youtube channel explaining complex topics in simple terms AI within the DOD/Joint AI Center: https://www.AI.mil Carnegie Mellon University's AI blog: https://www.sei.cmu.edu/our-work/artificial-intelligence-engineering/ Stories in AI: https://www.youtube.com/c/GaneshPadmanabhan/featured for practical insights on AI from the industry LinkedIN: https://www.linkedin.com/in/amandacmuller/ Dr. Amanda Muller is a Consulting (AI) Systems Engineer and Technical Fellow based in Northern Virgina. Dr. Muller currently serves as the Responsible AI Lead for Northrop Grumman. In this role, she is responsible for coordinating the strategy, policy, and governance efforts related to Artificial Intelligence ethics across the Northrop Grumman enterprise. As a Mission Systems Technical Fellow specializing in User Experience and Human-Systems Integration, she also serves as a subject matter expert on proposals, program reviews, and research efforts. Prior to her current role, Dr. Muller worked for Northrop Grumman Space Systems in Redondo Beach, California, as a Systems Engineer. She led the User Experience teams for several restricted space programs, conducting user research in operational environments around the world. Previously, Dr. Muller served as a Systems Engineer on State Health and Human Services programs, as a Human Factors Engineer in Aurora, Colorado, and as the Human-Systems Integration lead for airborne platforms in Melbourne, Florida. In addition to her program roles, Dr. Muller has been a mentor in the Mentoring the Technical Professional program for over seven years. Dr. Muller’s publications include a book chapter in Emerging Trends in Systems Engineering Leadership: Practical Research from Women Leaders (in press), and peer-reviewed articles in Information Fusion, Journal of Defense Modeling and Simulation, WSEAS Transactions on Advances in Engineering Education, and the Annals of Biomedial Engineering. Dr. Muller holds a Ph.D. in Engineering from Wright State University in Dayton, Ohio, and B.S. and M.S. degrees in Biomedical Engineering from Worcester Polytechnic Institute in Worcester, Massachusetts. She also holds a graduate certificate in Design Thinking for Strategic Innovation from Stanford University. Dr. Muller is a Certified Systems Engineering Professional (INCOSE), Professional Scrum Master (Scrum.org), and is certified in Professional Scrum with User Experience (Scrum.org).

Listen to the conversation I had with Dr. Yinyin Liu about user-centric AI. We talked about user trust, the misalignment of incentives, how to build user-first AI products, data science as a career choice and much more. Take a listen! Chapters 00:00 Welcome YinYin 01:00 Yinyin's story 05:40 Bringing AI closer to users 09:00 How do users view AI today 17:00 Goals misalignment between users and companies 20:34 User-first AI products 26:40 Data Science and AI as a career choice 33:00 Lessons as an immigrant women first-time founder 38:00 Know more about Una Travel Yinyin Liu is a co-founder and the CTO of XOKind. XOKind was founded with the mission of building the next generation of smart assistants to help simplify human planning and decision making. Through her years of experience in the machine learning domain, Yinyin has worked on data science solutions in various verticals and has always been passionate about building packaging the right AI technology to solve problems for enterprises and end-users. Previously, Yinyin was the Head of Data Science in the Artificial Intelligence Products Group at Intel. Prior to working at Intel, Yinyin was a Principal Data Scientist at Nervana Systems (acquired by Intel in 2016), also a ML researcher at Qualcomm working on Deep Learning, Robotics and Neuromorphic computing. Yinyin LinkedIn Yinyin twitter @yinyin_liu Link: https://www.xokind.com/

Listen to this fascinating conversation with Akshay Bhargava, founder of Bridgeweave, and ex-CEO Barclays Wealth where we explored the changing investment and asset management landscape, the new data driven retail investor, the evolution of the wealth industry to be more enablement focussed, the role of AI, the future of Fintech and much more. I hope you enjoy the conversation as much as I do. Chapters: 00:00 Akshaya's Story 05:00 The future of Wealth & Asset Management 09:20 The rise of the new knowledge-driven digital investor 13:30 Does AI level the playing field for retail investors and hedge funds 16:00 Future of investing 20:00 Future of Financial products 24:00 Co-creating products with your customers 30:10 Alternative Assets, Crypto and Art 32:00 Advice to organizations on leveraging AI to transform 36:00 Rapid fire questions - AGI, personal practice, GenZ users Shownotes: Investor Education Resources: https://investorai.co.uk/join-our-webinar Download the InvestorAi App from Apple App Store and Google Play Store: https://investorai.co.uk/ Reach out to Akshaya.Bhargava@Bridgeweave.com if you want to connect with Akshaya, refer my name and this show! :) Bio: Akshaya Bhargava is the founder of Bridgeweave, a Fintech firm that uses AI models to provide institutional quality research signals and investment ideas to investors, advisors and asset managers. Bridgeweave's flagship product is InvestorAi, available on a mobile for end investors in equity markets. From 2014-2017, Akshaya was the global CEO of Wealth and Investment Management, Barclays plc. Prior to that, he founded InfraHedge, a hedge fund managed account platform, which was acquired by State Street Corporation in 2013 He has been CEO of Butterfield Fulcrum Group (acquired by MUFJ Group) and the founding CEO of Progeon (acquired by Infosys and renamed Infosys BPO in 2006). He started his career at Citibank where he spent 22 years in a variety of senior roles including as Country Manager, Citibank Czech Republic and many other senior roles. LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/akshaya-bhargava-15549714/

Had a wonderful conversation with Marisa Tschopp, a researcher at scip ag who lives in the intersection of AI and human psychology, and we had a fabulous conversation about human behavioral changes in the age of AI, how we should embrace humanizing machines, and how to define trustworthiness with AI. This discussion was definitely more humanities than machines and I really enjoyed it a lot, I hope you do too. 00:00 Marisa's Background 04:38 The intersection of psychology and AI 08:03 Why you cannot de-humanize machines 16:02 How is human behavior changing 21:00 Should we trust AI 27:00 Definition of trustworthiness with AI 36:00 Your I in AI 40:00 AGI, Legal Autonomous machines Marisa's Bio Marisa is a researcher at scip ag and Women in AI Ambassador Switzerland. She is researching AI and technology from a psychological perspective, with a wide range of questions related to psychological phenomena with a specific interest in ethical implications. Her research areas are about trust (What does it take to trust AI?), behavioral performance measurement of conversational AI (How smart is Siri?), and lethal autonomous weapons system (killer robots and how to ban them!), agency, leadership And gender equality. As an organizational psychologist, she has experience in social and educational institutions with a specific passion for digital teaching-learning trends. She has been teaching in several higher education institutions in Germany and Switzerland. She published various media articles, book chapters, and papers and is a frequent speaker on conferences and events worldwide. Marisa holds a Master’s degree in Psychology of Excellence in Business and Education from the Ludwig-Maximilians-University of Munich, Germany, as well as a BA business degree, focusing on market and consumer psychology. As a doctoral student at the Leibniz-Institut für Wissensmedien (IWM), she is investigating human machine interaction with a specific focus on relationship and communication patterns between humans and conversational AI.

I had a great conversation with Valeria, Sadovykh, Ph.D who leads Digital Transformation at PwC and we discussed leadership in the age of AI, human psychology, some amazing AI stories from her customers, trust and ethics and much more, I hope you enjoy this discussion as much as I did. 00:00 Valeria Sadovykh's Story 04:29 Conspiracy theories & humanizing AI 09:39 Companionship of compliance 12:25 Enterprise Innovation and State of AI 16:00 AI in Action - where are we now 26:00 Transitioning into Industry 5.0 29:15 Tesla AI Day - quick review 32:50 Ethical AI and Trust 39:00 Advice to Data/AI Enthusiasts 44:40 Rapid Fire - AGI, Personal practice Valeria Sadovykh, PhD - Bio Valeria Sadovykh is a leading expert in the decision making and decision intelligence aspects of AI. She is a Digital Transformation Lead at PwC with a focus on leveraging emerging technology and strategic partnerships to solve organisational challenges. Valeria’s expertise, in the utilization of AI, ML and digital transformations, has shaped the business decisions of various multinational corporations across a range of industries. Valeria has led strategic IT developments involving emerging technology, Industry 4.0, digital transformation, intelligent automation, and mass customization. She has successfully delivered business-critical projects leading to enhanced workplace efficiencies, operational decision-making, sustainable practices, and optimizing the customer journey. In addition to her consulting career, Valeria is also actively involved in academia. She has a series of academic and media publications in top tier journals/conference proceedings within Information Systems/Computer Science domains. She holds a PhD in Information Systems from the University of Auckland, New Zealand. Her primary research interests are online decision-making, decision intelligence, human biases, ethical AI, and disruption and adoption of AI and ML. She has lived and worked in Singapore, New Zealand, Malaysia, Hong Kong, Australia, Europe and now the US. LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/valeria-sadovykh/