Pavel Iakubovskii: Kaggle Master at Hugging Face
AI Master Group
Pavel holds two gold medals, two silver medals and three bronze on Kaggle. He’s also the author of several well-known libraries, including one that has about 20,000 stars on GitHub. Currently, he's a member of the open source engineering team at Hugging Face. This episode covers Pavel's journey from growing up in a small town in Russia, to becoming a Kaggle competition master and computer vision engineer at Hugging Face. The conversation also covers many insights about Hugging Face itself, including Hugging Face Hub, Enterprise Hub, the Transformers library, the Diffusers library for...
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Max Mozgovoy: the End of Traditional UX Research?
AI Master Group
This episode features a conversation with Max Mozgovoy, co-founder of VoxDiscover, which plans to use Gen AI to interview customers for user experience (UX) research done by app developers, or for customer lifecycle research, to build customer journey maps or personas, or to identify which features to add or change for the next version of product or service. The underlying idea of VoxDiscover is to use an AI voice agent to capture customer feedback right in the app or on a website, automating the insight as well, thereby achieving a much lower cost as compared to external service...
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Marwa Kechaou: A Keen Eye for Computer Vision
AI Master Group
With a PhD in machine learning and a specialization in computer vision, Marwa has done deep learning projects across several industries and is currently at Alohi, a Switzerland-based startup with 4 million users of document solutions like Sign.Plus, Fax.Plus and Scan.Plus. In this episode, she describes her journey from formal studies to hands-on work in industry, to her present role as a primary engineer at Alohi. The conversation also touches on what it’s like to maintain a connection to a top university as a Research Fellow, while also working full-time at a startup. Marwa also discusses...
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Iqbal Hossain: The UofAZ Knowledge Map Story
AI Master Group
Iqbal holds a PhD in Computer Science and Engineering, with a specialization in computer algorithms and graph theory. He is currently the Research Data Science Director at the University of Arizona. Aside from his innovative achievement in creating a knowledge map for the university (kmap.arizona.edu), he has one of the most remarkable and inspiring stories you’ll ever hear about overcoming disadvantages. (He grew up in a rural part of Bangladesh and was in 11th grade before he ever saw electricity.) In this episode, Iqbal describes the brief he was working on when he created the University...
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Jeffrey Spyropoulos: Making Analytics Count at JCP
AI Master Group
Jeffrey is one of those rare people who knew exactly what he wanted to do from an early age: Use mathematics to solve business problems. After earning his Masters Degree in Statistics from the University of Chicago, he went on to do high-impact analytics work in banking, retail and telco, holding senior leadership positions at top companies like Sally Beauty, HSN, AT&T and Bloomin' Brands. Currently, he leads Digital Analytics at JCPenney. In this episode, Jeffrey shares a detailed and very insightful analysis of all the factors and trade-offs involved in making a build vs buy decision for...
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Tapan Khopkar: A ‘MasterClass’ in Marketing Mix
AI Master Group
Tapan is the Executive Director of Marketing Sciences at OMD. This episode is a very thorough compendium of marketing science principles and practices, as applied to decisions about paid media. Topics include: • Marketing Mix Modeling (MMM) vs Multi-Touch Attribution (MTA) vs experiments, including how to use each and for what purpose • KPIs: Incremental sales vs top-of-funnel metrics like awareness and consideration • How to design incremental changes in the direction that a model is pointing • Testing a new marketing mix in various...
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Aida Farahani: From 2D to 3D in Seconds
AI Master Group
With a specialization in 3D deep learning, Aida is doing ground-breaking work related to 3D simulations. In this episode, she first describes why meshes or point clouds are computationally-expensive for simulating changes to shapes. She then describes why “implicit fields” are much more efficient for this, as described in the widely-cited “DeepSDF paper.” Next she describes a special-case problem: Predicting the deformation of 2D objects into 3D shapes, such as when metal blanks are stamped into the shape of a car door, for example, which is a case that violates one of the assumptions...
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Nikhil Patel: Inside Sally Beauty’s Data Strategy
AI Master Group
Nikhil is the Data Science Director at Sally Beauty Holdings, which is a $3.7 billion specialty retailer, with more than 10,000 products sold through over 4,000 stores, as well as online. Prior to his current role, Nikhil held a senior leadership role at Harman International, working with panel data from top CPG brands like P&G, Unilever and Kraft. In this episode, Nikhil describes his 19-year journey, starting from a Masters degree in Applied Mathematics, leading up to his current role at Sally Beauty. Within that, he describes several times when he needed to supplement his formal...
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Victor Perrine: From Bananas to $Billions
AI Master Group
Victor (Viko) Perrine is the Global Director of New Growth Initiatives at Circle K. Prior to that, he’s held senior leadership roles at Delek US Holdings and at UGP Inc. In this episode, Viko describes a major new initiative called Lift that's unique to Circle K, which just launched in Europe, plus future development plans for that. Building on this, he describes the day-to-day for a global innovation leadership role, and he shares the success factors that help him to identify good target projects for innovation and growth. He also describes a project from earlier in his career that...
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Ray Pettit: New Models for AI Literacy?
AI Master Group
Ray is the Chief Data and Analytics Officer at Valhalla AI Solutions. Prior to that, he held senior leadership roles at the Advertising Research Foundation, at the Institute for Experiential AI, and at comScore. In this episode, Ray discusses challenges associates with promoting meaningful AI literacy in business, starting with fundamental questions, like what is “AI literacy” exactly? (Is it merely the ability to use AI tools, or is a deeper understanding of the science behind those tools required?) He also discusses the reverse problem, where recent graduates from AI/ML programs lack...
info_outlineDave is a fractional CTO and DevOps engineer with over 25 years of experience in systems and software engineering. He's the President and Senior Solutions Architect of Stern DevOps Group, which is a consultancy focused on early stage companies. He's also the author of a new book: Hackproof Your Startup, and that book is a key topic of the show.
In this episode, Dave discusses IT and AI security for early-stage start-ups. The conversation begins with a review of what happened in the famous Codespaces hack. Dave asserts that many companies are still vulnerable to the type of ransomware attack that put Codespaces out of business, and that the risk mitigation solution is fairly straightforward (the elements of which he describes on the show). Other topics include cybersecurity as an asset, infrastructure as code, principle of least privilege, and isolating IT environments. The conversation concludes with a what-if scenario where Dave answers the question: “If someone were to steal my laptop or cell phone. What would I suddenly wish I had done before that happened?”