From improving energy efficiency to helping address climate challenges, AI and accelerated computing are becoming key tools in the push for sustainability. In this episode of NVIDIA’s AI Podcast, Joshua Parker, senior director of corporate sustainability, shared his perspective on how these technologies are contributing to a more sustainable future. https://blogs.nvidia.com/blog/ai-energy-efficiency/

Companies in the US spend $15bn annually on talent acquisition. The most important metric in recruitment advertising is the conversion from the paid click on the job platform to the application the employer receives. Industry-wide, apply conversion is just 5%. Redirection of the candidate from the job platform to the company site is the biggest cause of abandonment; this step has a 70% bounce rate. In this episode of NVIDIA’s AI Podcast, host Noah Kravitz speaks with Mikhil Raja, Cofounder and CEO of SonicJobs, about how they have built AI Agents to enable candidates to complete applications directly on job platforms, without redirection, boosting completion rates to 26% from 5%. Raja delves deep into SonicJobs’ cutting-edge technology, which merges traditional AI with large language models (LLMs) to understand and interact with job application web flows. He also emphasizes the importance of fine-tuning foundational models to achieve more impactful and scalable innovations. SonicJobs is a member of the NVIDIA Inception program for startups.

Imagine having a robot that could help you clean up after a party — or fold heaps of laundry. Chengshu Eric Li and Josiah David Wong, two Stanford University Ph.D. students advised by renowned American computer scientist Professor Fei-Fei Li, are making that a ‌dream come true. In this episode of the AI Podcast, host Noah Kravitz spoke with the two about their project, BEHAVIOR-1K, which aims to enable robots to perform 1,000 household chores, including picking up fallen objects or cooking. To train the robots, they’re using the NVIDIA Omniverse platform, as well as reinforcement and imitation learning techniques. Listen to hear more about the breakthroughs and challenges Li and Wong experienced along the way.

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. https://blogs.nvidia.com/blog/2020/12/09/neurips-nvidia-caltech-anima-anandkumar/

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 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.

Basecamp Research is on a mission to capture the vastness of life on Earth at an unprecedented scale. Phil Lorenz, chief technology officer at Basecamp Research, discusses using AI and biodiversity data to advance fields like medicine and environmental conservation with host Noah Kravitz in this AI Podcast episode recorded live at the NVIDIA GTC global AI conference. Lorenz explains Basecamp’s systematic collection of biodiversity data in partnership with nature parks worldwide and its use of deep learning to analyze and apply it for use cases such as protein structure prediction and gene editing. He also emphasizes the importance of ethical data governance and touches on technological advancements that will help drive the future of AI in biology.

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.

Imagine building an engine with 54 billion parts. Now imagine each piece is the size of a gnat’s eyelash. That gives you some idea of the scale Jonah Alben works at. Jonah is the co-leader of GPU engineering at Nvidia. The engines he builds are GPUs. Without these chips your favorite computer games and special-effects movies would look pretty lame. GPUs also power scientific simulations of everything from a Mars lander to a protein spike on the coronavirus… and, oh yes, these days they do much of the heavy lifting for the latest and greatest form of computing: AI.

As NVIDIA’s vice president of worldwide AI initiatives, Keith Strier is thinking on a global scale. He leads an initiative called AI Nations, a worldwide program that helps government leaders and stakeholders develop plans to implement AI to advance national priorities and drive economic growth. Strier spoke to AI Podcast host Noah Kravitz about AI Nations, and how NVIDIA helps countries harness all the capabilities of AI — from enhancing their local startup ecosystems to developing autonomous public transportation systems.

Whether you're using the latest generation of AI enabled mobile apps or robust business systems powered on banks of powerful servers, chances are your technology was built, first, on a workstation. We spoke with Lenovo’s Mike Leach about how these workhorses are adapting to support a plethora of new kinds of AI applications.

Autonomous vehicles require a massive amount of data and computing power. Teaching a vehicle to see what’s on the road in front of it is a big part of the puzzle. Our guests today, Ford’s Nikita Jaipuria and Rohan Bhasin, are using Generative Adversarial Networks to help autonomous vehicle systems see as well in rain and snowy conditions as they do when it’s clear out.

Cleaning up our oceans, rivers, and waterways have become a major environmental issue. Leaders in the field are now looking to begin harnessing modern AI and machine learning techniques to help tackle this immense challenge. We spoke with the San Francisco Estuary Institute’s Lorenzo Flores on using machine learning to find trash in environmentally sensitive waterways.

We spoke with Jonathan Frankle, a PhD student at MIT and coauthor of a seminal paper outlining a technique, known as the “The Lottery Ticket,” hypothesis that promises to help advance our understanding of why neural networks, and deep learning, works so well.

Meet Media.Monks’ Wormhole, an alien-like, conversational robot with a quirky personality and the ability to offer keen marketing expertise. Lewis Smithingham, senior vice president of innovation and special ops at Media.Monks, a global marketing and advertising company, discusses the creation of Wormhole and AI’s potential to enhance media and entertainment with host Noah Kravitz in this AI Podcast episode recorded live at the NVIDIA GTC global AI conference. Wormhole was designed to showcase Monks.Flow, an AI-powered platform that streamlines marketing and content creation workflows. Smithingham delves into Media.Monks’ platforms for media, entertainment and advertising and speaks to its vision for a future where AI enhances creativity and allows for more personalized, scalable content creation. https://blogs.nvidia.com/blog/media-monks-ai-podcast/

We spoke with Capital One Senior Software Engineer Kyle Nicholson on how modern machine learning techniques have become a key tool for financial and credit analysis.

We brought back one of NVIDIA’s best explainers, Will Ramey, to provide an introduction to today’s AI boom and the key concepts behind it. Ramey, senior director and global head of developer programs at NVIDIA, led a webinar, "Deep Learning Demystified," as part of this year's GTC Digital online conference. https://developer.nvidia.com/gtc/2020/video/s22555

We spoke with a particle physicist Ryan Coffee, senior staff scientist at the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory on how he — and others in his field — are putting deep learning to work. We include questions from friends, family and acquaintances in a wide-ranging conversation complementing a deep-dive session led by Ryan Coffee as part of GTC Digital.

On this episode of the NVIDIA AI Podcast, we interview Stanford Professor Margot Gerritsen about what’s next in data science, the growing role of women in data science, and how data science intersects with modern AI. For more, tune into Professor Gerritsen's Women in Data Science podcast https://www.widsconference.org/podcast.html

Kathy Baxter, the architect of ethical AI practice at Salesforce, is helping her team and clients create more responsible technology. To do so, she supports employee education, the inclusion of safeguards in Salesforce technology, and collaboration with other companies to improve ethical AI across industries.

Matthew Putman, this week’s guest on the AI Podcast, knows that the devil is in the details. That’s why he’s the co-founder and CEO of Nanotronics, a Brooklyn-based company providing precision manufacturing enhanced by AI, automation and 3D imaging.

What John Madden was to pro football, Neda Cvijetic is to autonomous vehicles. No one’s better at explaining the action, in real time, than Cvijetic. Cvijetic, senior manager of autonomous vehicles at NVIDIA, drives our NVIDIA DRIVE Labs series of videos and blogs breaking down the science behind autonomous vehicles.

National Pothole Day is Jan. 15. Its timing is no accident. All over the Northern hemisphere, potholes are at their suspension-wrecking, spine-shaking worst this month. Thanks to AI, one startup is working all year long to alleviate this menace. Benjamin Schmidt, president and co-founder of RoadBotics, is using the tech to pave the way to better roads.

Spell, founded by Serkan Piantino, is making machine learning as easy as ABC. Piantino, CEO of the New York-based startup and former director of engineering for Facebook AI Research, explained to AI Podcast host Noah Kravitz how he’s bringing compute power to those that don’t have easy access to GPU clusters.

You can’t have an AI podcast and not interview someone using AI to make podcasts better. That’s why we reached out to serial entrepreneur Andrew Mason to talk to him about what he’s doing now. His company, Descript Podcast Studio, uses AI, natural language processing and automatic speech synthesis to make podcast editing easier and more collaborative.

In this episode of the NVIDIA AI Podcast, recorded live at the GTC 2024, host Noah Kravitz sits down with Adam Wenchel, co-founder and CEO of Arthur. Arthur enhances the performance of AI systems across various metrics like accuracy, explainability, and fairness. Wenchel shares insights into the challenges and opportunities of deploying generative AI. The discussion spans a range of topics, including AI bias, the observability of AI systems, and the practical implications of AI in business. For more on Arthur, visit arthur.ai.

At Oracle, customer service chatbots use conversational AI to respond to consumers with more speed and complexity. Suhas Uliyar, vice president of bots, AI and mobile product management at Oracle, stopped by to talk to AI Podcast host Noah Kravitz about how the newest wave of conversational AI can keep up with the nuances of human conversation.

Doina Precup is applying Romanian wisdom to the gender gap in the fields of AI and computer science. The associate professor at McGill University and research team lead at AI startup DeepMind spoke with AI Podcast host Noah Kravitz about her personal experiences, along with the AI4Good Lab she co-founded to give women more access to machine learning training. Growing up in Romania, Precup attended a high school that specialized in computer science and a technical university. She didn’t experience gender disparity in these learning environments. “If anything, programming was considered a very good job for women, because you did not need to be working in the fields,” she explained. It made the gap in Canadian universities and companies even more noticeable. At McGill, Precup saw that female students were hesitant to speak up or pursue graduate studies. Together with Angelique Mannella, CEO of AM Consulting and an Amazon employee, Precup was inspired to start the AI4Good Lab in 2017.

When your appliances break, the last thing you want to do is spend an hour on the phone trying to reach a customer service representative. Using computer vision, Drishyam.AI is eliminating service lines to help consumers more quickly. Satish Mandalika, the CEO and founder of the deep learning-based image recognition platform, spoke with AI Podcast host Noah Kravitz about the company. “Customer support is ripe for disruption,” Mandalika said. Drishyam.AI is changing the game by giving customers an app that they use to take a picture of the product they need help with at any time of day or night, rather than calling a help line. Using computer vision, Drishyam.AI analyzes the issue and communicates directly with manufacturers, rather than going through retail outlets. This is more efficient because a product’s lifetime warranty is usually held by the company that made it, rather than the stores selling it like Home Depot and Lowe’s.

Though creating an autonomous robot that can tidy a room seems like enough of an achievement, Tokyo-based Preferred Networks goes one step further. By integrating natural language processing (NLP) into their technology, their robots respond to commands and adjust their actions. Jun Hatori, a software engineer at Preferred Networks, stopped to talk with AI Podcast host Noah Kravitz about the company’s latest developments.

AI is still young, but software is available to help even relatively unsophisticated users harness it. That’s according to Ian Buck, general manager of NVIDIA’s accelerated computing group, who shared his views in our latest AI Podcast. Buck, who helped lay the foundation for GPU computing as a Stanford doctoral candidate, will deliver the keynote address at GTC DC on Nov. 5. To sign up for GTC DC, visit https://nvda.ws/2Jzg7T1 and use the 'GMPOD' promo code for a 20% discount.

Have you ever wondered what it takes to produce the complex imagery in films like Star Wars or Transformers? The man behind the magic, Colie Wertz, is here to explain. Wertz is a conceptual artist and modeler who works on film, television and video games. He sat down with AI Podcast host Noah Kravitz to explain his specialty in hard modeling, in which he produces digital models of objects with hard surfaces like vehicles, robots and computers. To make these images, Wertz has taken to using AI art tools such as GauGAN, a real-time painting web app that allows users to create realistic landscapes using generative adversarial networks.

In the future imagined by Pinar Yanardag, a postdoctoral research associate at MIT Media Lab, AI will collaborate with humans, not replace them. This is the concept behind her project, “How to Generate (Almost) Anything,” which she created with other students from the MIT Media Lab and professionals in the Boston area. Yanardag sat down with AI Podcast host Noah Kravitz to talk about this project, along with her other new creations.

We’ve all chosen the self-checkout stand over the human cashier, thinking it’ll take less time. But somehow, things take a terrible turn. The barcodes aren’t scanning, there’s a pop-up scolding you for not placing the product in the bagging area (though you did, of course), and an employee is coming over to fix the chaos. It would’ve taken less time to go to the cashier. Focal Systems is applying deep learning and computer vision to automate portions of retail stores in order to streamline store operations and get customers in and out more efficiently, without the pitfalls of the traditional self-checkout. CEO Francois Chaubard sat down with AI Podcast host Noah Kravitz to talk about how the company is changing retailers.

College students are many things — sleepy, overly caffeinated, stressed — but above all, they are hungry. Kiwi Campus is here to help. Co-founder and CEO of Kiwi Campus, Felipe Chávez, joined AI Podcast host Noah Kravitz to talk about Kiwi and its delivery service. Based in Berkeley, Calif., the company specializes in creating a robotic ecosystem for last mile delivery. Its solution is the Kiwibot. The small autonomous robot delivers orders seven days a week from 10 AM to 8 PM. Its coverage area includes UC Berkeley and the surrounding streets.

Charter Communications is working to make customer service smarter even before an operator picks up the phone. Charter Communications, also known as Spectrum, is using AI to improve their customer service and process data more intelligently. Senior Director of Wireless Engineering Jared Ritter took a break from his presentations at GTC Santa Clara to talk to AI Podcast host Noah Kravitz about Charter’s perspective on customer relations.

Can machine learning help predict extreme weather events and climate change? Christopher Bretherton, senior director of climate modeling at the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence, or AI2, explores the technology’s potential to enhance climate modeling with AI Podcast host Noah Kravitz in an episode recorded live at the NVIDIA GTC global AI conference. Bretherton explains how machine learning helps overcome the limitations of traditional climate models and underscores the role of localized predictions in empowering communities to prepare for climate-related risks. Through ongoing research and collaboration, Bretherton and his team aim to improve climate modeling and enable society to better mitigate and adapt to the impacts of climate change.

Artificial intelligence thrives on data, the more the better. But when we’re talking about putting data in many industries, such as health care, to work, things can get very complicated, very quickly. Walter De Brouwer is CEO of Doc.ai, a Silicon Valley based company that’s building a medical research platform that can address this issue with federated learning.

Imagine staring into the high-beams of an oncoming car. Now imagine trying to pick out a speck of dust in the glare of the headlights. That’s the challenge Olivier Guyon and Damien Gratadour face as they try to find the dull glint of an exoplanet — a planet orbiting a star outside our solar system — beside the bright light of its star. The pair -- Guyon is an instrument developer for Japan’s Subaru Telescope, and an astronomer at the University of Arizona; and Gratadour is an associate professor at the Observatoire de Paris and an instrument scientist at the Australian National University -- spoke with AI Podcast host Noah Kravitz about how they’re using GPU-powered extreme adaptive optics in very large telescopes to image nearby habitable planets.

The words “data science” often inspire feelings of dread or confusion. But Virtualitics, an AI-based analytics platform, is bringing creativity and excitement to the field through machine learning and immersive virtualization. In our latest episode of the AI Podcast, Virtualitics Machine Learning Projects Head Aakash Indurkhya spoke with AI Podcast host Noah Kravitz about why VR can now be so useful.