Data Skeptic

This episode kicks off the next theme on Data Skeptic: artificial intelligence.  Kyle discusses what's to come for the show in 2018, why this topic is relevant, and how we intend to cover it.

Direct download: artificial-intelligence-a-podcast-approach.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 8:00am PDT

We break format from our regular programming today and bring you an excerpt from Max Tegmark's book "Life 3.0".  The first chapter is a short story titled "The Tale of the Omega Team".  Audio excerpted courtesy of Penguin Random House Audio from LIFE 3.0 by Max Tegmark, narrated by Rob Shapiro.  You can find "Life 3.0" at your favorite bookstore and the audio edition via penguinrandomhouseaudio.com.

Kyle will be giving a talk at the Monterey County SkeptiCamp 2018.

Direct download: the-tale-of-the-omega-team.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 8:00am PDT

This week, our host Kyle Polich is joined by guest Tim Henderson from Google to talk about the computational complexity foundations of modern cryptography and the complexity issues that underlie the field. A key question that arises during the discussion is whether we should trust the security of modern cryptography.

Direct download: complexity-and-cryptography.mp3
Category:data science -- posted at: 8:00am PDT

This episode features an interview with Rigel Smiroldo recorded at NIPS 2017 in Long Beach California.  We discuss data privacy, machine learning use cases, model deployment, and end-to-end machine learning.

Direct download: mercedes-benz-machine-learning-research.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 11:07pm PDT

When computers became commodity hardware and storage became incredibly cheap, we entered the era of so-call "big" data. Most definitions of big data will include something about not being able to process all the data on a single machine. Distributed computing is required for such large datasets.

Getting an algorithm to run on data spread out over a variety of different machines introduced new challenges for designing large-scale systems. First, there are concerns about the best strategy for spreading that data over many machines in an orderly fashion. Resolving ambiguity or disagreements across sources is sometimes required.

This episode discusses how such algorithms related to the complexity class NC.

Direct download: parallel-algorithms.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 8:00am PDT

In this week's episode, Scott Aaronson, a professor at the University of Texas at Austin, explains what a quantum computer is, various possible applications, the types of problems they are good at solving and much more. Kyle and Scott have a lively discussion about the capabilities and limits of quantum computers and computational complexity.

Direct download: quantum-computing.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 8:00am PDT

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