Data Skeptic
Episodes
Cracking the Cold Start Problem
08 Dec 2025
Contributed by Lukas
In this episode of Data Skeptic, we dive deep into the technical foundations of building modern recommender systems. Unlike traditional machine learni...
Designing Recommender Systems for Digital Humanities
23 Nov 2025
Contributed by Lukas
In this episode of Data Skeptic, we explore the fascinating intersection of recommender systems and digital humanities with guest Florian Atzenhofer-B...
DataRec Library for Reproducible in Recommend Systems
13 Nov 2025
Contributed by Lukas
In this episode of Data Skeptic's Recommender Systems series, host Kyle Polich explores DataRec, a new Python library designed to bring reproducibilit...
Shilling Attacks on Recommender Systems
05 Nov 2025
Contributed by Lukas
In this episode of Data Skeptic's Recommender Systems series, Kyle sits down with Aditya Chichani, a senior machine learning engineer at Walmart, to e...
Music Playlist Recommendations
29 Oct 2025
Contributed by Lukas
In this episode, Rebecca Salganik, a PhD student at the University of Rochester with a background in vocal performance and composition, discusses her ...
Bypassing the Popularity Bias
15 Oct 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Sustainable Recommender Systems for Tourism
09 Oct 2025
Contributed by Lukas
In this episode, we speak with Ashmi Banerjee, a doctoral candidate at the Technical University of Munich, about her pioneering research on AI-powered...
Interpretable Real Estate Recommendations
22 Sep 2025
Contributed by Lukas
In this episode of Data Skeptic's Recommender Systems series, host Kyle Polich interviews Dr. Kunal Mukherjee, a postdoctoral research associate at Vi...
Why Am I Seeing This?
08 Sep 2025
Contributed by Lukas
In this episode of Data Skeptic, we explore the challenges of studying social media recommender systems when exposure data isn't accessible. Our guest...
Eco-aware GNN Recommenders
30 Aug 2025
Contributed by Lukas
In this episode of Data Skeptic, we dive into eco-friendly AI with Antonio Purificato, a PhD student from Sapienza University of Rome. Antonio discuss...
Networks and Recommender Systems
17 Aug 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Kyle reveals the next season's topic will be "Recommender Systems". Asaf shares insights on how network science contributes to the recommender syste...
Network of Past Guests Collaborations
21 Jul 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Kyle and Asaf discuss a project in which we link former guests of the podcast based on their co-authorship of academic papers.Â
The Network Diversion Problem
06 Jul 2025
Contributed by Lukas
In this episode, Professor Pål Grønås Drange from the University of Bergen, introduces the field of Parameterized Complexity - a powerful framework...
Complex Dynamic in Networks
28 Jun 2025
Contributed by Lukas
In this episode, we learn why simply analyzing the structure of a network is not enough, and how the dynamics - the actual mechanisms of interaction b...
Github Network Analysis
22 Jun 2025
Contributed by Lukas
In this episode we'll discuss how to use Github data as a network to extract insights about teamwork. Our guest, Gabriel Ramirez, manager of the notif...
Networks and Complexity
14 Jun 2025
Contributed by Lukas
In this episode, Kyle does an overview of the intersection of graph theory and computational complexity theory. In complexity theory, we are about t...
Graphs for Causal AI
24 May 2025
Contributed by Lukas
How to build artificial intelligence systems that understand cause and effect, moving beyond simple correlations? As we all know, correlation is not c...
Power Networks
16 May 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Unveiling Graph Datasets
08 May 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Network Manipulation
30 Apr 2025
Contributed by Lukas
In this episode we talk with Manita Pote, a PhD student at Indiana University Bloomington, specializing in online trust and safety, with a focus on de...
The Small World Hypothesis
21 Apr 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Kyle discusses the history and proof for the small world hypothesis.
Thinking in Networks
12 Apr 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Kyle asks Asaf questions about the new network science course he is now teaching. The conversation delves into topics such as contact tracing, tools...
Fraud Networks
01 Apr 2025
Contributed by Lukas
In this episode we talk with Bavo DC Campo, a data scientist and statistician, who shares his expertise on the intersection of actuarial science, frau...
Criminal Networks
17 Mar 2025
Contributed by Lukas
In this episode we talk with Justin Wang Ngai Yeung, a PhD candidate at the Network Science Institute at Northeastern University in London, who explor...
Graph Bugs
10 Mar 2025
Contributed by Lukas
In this episode today's guest is Celine Wüst, a master's student at ETH Zurich specializing in secure and reliable systems, shares her work on automa...
Organizational Network Analysis
03 Mar 2025
Contributed by Lukas
In this episode, Gabriel Petrescu, an organizational network analyst, discusses how network science can provide deep insights into organizational stru...
Organizational Networks
25 Feb 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Is it better to have your work team fully connected or sparsely connected? In this episode we'll try to answer this question and more with our guest ...
Networks of the Mind
18 Feb 2025
Contributed by Lukas
A man goes into a bar… This is the beginning of a riddle that our guest, Yoed Kennet, an assistant professor at the Technion's Faculty of Data and D...
LLMs and Graphs Synergy
10 Feb 2025
Contributed by Lukas
In this episode, Garima Agrawal, a senior researcher and AI consultant, brings her years of experience in data science and artificial intelligence. Li...
A Network of Networks
04 Feb 2025
Contributed by Lukas
In this episode, Bnaya Gross, a Fulbright postdoctoral fellow at the Center for Complex Network Research at Northwestern University, explores the tran...
Auditing LLMs and Twitter
29 Jan 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Our guests, Erwan Le Merrer and Gilles Tredan, are long-time collaborators in graph theory and distributed systems. They share their expertise on appl...
Fraud Detection with Graphs
22 Jan 2025
Contributed by Lukas
In this episode, Å imon MandlÃk, a PhD candidate at the Czech Technical University will talk with us about leveraging machine learning and graph-base...
Optimizing Supply Chains with GNN
15 Jan 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Thibaut Vidal, a professor at Polytechnique Montreal, specializes in leveraging advanced algorithms and machine learning to optimize supply chain oper...
The Mystery Behind Large Graphs
10 Jan 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Our guest in this episode is David Tench, a Grace Hopper postdoctoral fellow at Lawrence Berkeley National Labs, who specializes in scalable graph alg...
Customizing a Graph Solution
16 Dec 2024
Contributed by Lukas
In this episode, Dave Bechberger, principal Graph Architect at AWS and author of "Graph Databases in Action", brings deep insights into the field of g...
Graph Transformations
09 Dec 2024
Contributed by Lukas
In this episode, Adam Machowczyk, a PhD student at the University of Leicester, specializes in graph rewriting and its intersection with machine learn...
Networks for AB Testing
25 Nov 2024
Contributed by Lukas
In this episode, the data scientist Wentao Su shares his experience in AB testing on social media platforms like LinkedIn and TikTok. We talk about ho...
Lessons from eGamer Networks
18 Nov 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Alex Bisberg, a PhD candidate at the University of Southern California, specializes in network science and game analytics, with a focus on understandi...
Github Collaboration Network
11 Nov 2024
Contributed by Lukas
In this episode we discuss the GitHub Collaboration Network with Behnaz Moradi-Jamei, assistant professor at James Madison University. As a network ...
Graphs and ML for Robotics
04 Nov 2024
Contributed by Lukas
We are joined by Abhishek Paudel, a PhD Student at George Mason University with a research focus on robotics, machine learning, and planning under unc...
Graphs for HPC and LLMs
29 Oct 2024
Contributed by Lukas
We are joined by Maciej Besta, a senior researcher of sparse graph computations and large language models at the Scalable Parallel Computing Lab (SPCL...
Graph Databases and AI
21 Oct 2024
Contributed by Lukas
In this episode, we sit down with Yuanyuan Tian, a principal scientist manager at Microsoft Gray Systems Lab, to discuss the evolving role of graph da...
Network Analysis in Practice
14 Oct 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Our new season "Graphs and Networks" begins here! Â We are joined by new co-host Asaf Shapira, a network analysis consultant and the podcaster of NETf...
Animal Intelligence Final Exam
07 Oct 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Join us for our capstone episode on the Animal Intelligence season. We recap what we loved, what we learned, and things we wish we had gotten to spend...
Process Mining with LLMs
24 Sep 2024
Contributed by Lukas
David Obembe, a recent University of Tartu graduate, discussed his Masters thesis on integrating LLMs with process mining tools. He explained how proc...
Open Animal Tracks
17 Sep 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Our guest today is Risa Shinoda, a PhD student at Kyoto University Agricultural Systems Engineering Lab, where she applies computer vision techniques....
Bird Distribution Modeling with Satbird
10 Sep 2024
Contributed by Lukas
This episode features an interview with Mélisande Teng, a PhD candidate at Université de Montréal. Her research lies in the intersection of remote ...
Ant Encounters
26 Aug 2024
Contributed by Lukas
In this interview with author Deborah Gordon, Kyle asks questions about the mechanisms at work in an ant colony and what ants might teach us about h...
Computing Toolbox
19 Aug 2024
Contributed by Lukas
This season it's become clear that computing skills are vital for working in the natural sciences. In this episode, we were fortunate to speak with Ma...
Biodiversity Monitoring
14 Aug 2024
Contributed by Lukas
In this episode, we talked shop with Hager Radi about her biodiversity monitoring work. While biodiversity modeling may sound simple, count organisms ...
Hacking the Colony
08 Aug 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Today, Ashay Aswale and Tony Lopez shared their work on swarm robotics and what they have learned from ants. Robotic swarms must solve the same proble...
Primate Poses
31 Jul 2024
Contributed by Lukas
During this season we have talked with researchers working to utilize machine learning for behavioral observations. In previous episodes, you have hea...
Generating 3D Animals with YouDream
23 Jul 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Generative AI can struggle to create realistic animals and 2D representations often have mistakes like extra limbs and tails. If 2D wasn't hard enough...
Weird Communication
15 Jul 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Today, we sat down with Dr. Ignacio Escalante Meza to learn about opiliones and treehoppers. Opiliones, known as "daddy long legs" in the US, are unde...
Reducing the Impact of Ship Noise on Marine Mammals
01 Jul 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Human shipping operations have increased significantly in the past few decades. Â While that means international trade and cheap goods for humans, it ...
Analysis of Unstructured Data
28 Jun 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Robbie Moon from the Georgia Tech Scheller College of Business joins us to discuss the analysis of unstructured data and the application of NLP method...
iNaturalist
24 Jun 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Have you ever participated in citizen science? Do you want to? One of the most popular platforms for crowdsourcing biodiversity data is iNaturalist. I...
Learn to Code
18 Jun 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Do you code or are you interested in learning to code? Join us today and hear from three individuals that are at very different stages of their coding...
Animal Computer Interaction
10 Jun 2024
Contributed by Lukas
You've heard of Human Computer Interaction (HCI), now get ready for Animal Computer Interaction (ACI). Ilyena has made a career developing computer in...
Ape Gestures
03 Jun 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Cat observes great apes in the wild and in the lab to crack the code of their gestural communication. We discussed the challenges and benefits of stud...
Evaluating AI Abilities
27 May 2024
Contributed by Lukas
In this episode, Kozzy discusses his endeavors to compare the cognitive abilities of humans, animals, and AI programs. Specifically, we discussed obje...
HMMs for Behavior
20 May 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Théo Michelot has made a career out of tackling tough ecological questions using time-series data. How do scientists turn a series of GPS location ob...
Bioinspired Engineering
14 May 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Brian Taylor shares his research on magnetoreception. Animals like birds and sea turtles use magnetoreception to use the Earth's magnetic field for na...
Modelling Evolution
09 May 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Modeling evolutionary processes goes way beyond the Hardy-Weinberg Equilibrium we all learned in biology class. Natural selection comes from many sour...
Behavioral Genetics
30 Apr 2024
Contributed by Lukas
It's almost impossible to think about animal behavior without thinking of dogs! Our canine friends are a subspecies of wolf that has been co-evolving ...
Signal in the Noise
25 Apr 2024
Contributed by Lukas
In this episode, we are joined by Barbara Webb and Anna Hadjitofi. Barbara runs the Insect Robotics lab at the University of Edinburgh, and Anna is a ...
Pose Tracking
16 Apr 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Many researchers and students have painstakingly labeled precise details about the body positions of the creatures they study. Can AI be used for this...
Modeling Group Behavior
08 Apr 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Our guest in this episode is Sebastien Motsch, an assistant professor at Arizona State University, working in the School of Mathematical and Statistic...
Advances in Data Loggers
25 Mar 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Our guest in this episode is Ryan Hanscom. Ryan is a Ph.D. candidate in a joint doctoral evolution program at San Diego State University and the Unive...
What You Know About Intelligence is Wrong (fixed)
20 Mar 2024
Contributed by Lukas
We are joined by Hank Schlinger, a professor of psychology at California State University, Los Angeles. His research revolves around theoretical issue...
Animal Decision Making
12 Mar 2024
Contributed by Lukas
On today's episode, we are joined by Aimee Dunlap. Aimee is an assistant professor at the University of Missouri–St. Louis and the interim director ...
Octopus Cognition
08 Mar 2024
Contributed by Lukas
We are joined by Tamar Gutnick, a visiting professor at the University of Naples Federico II, Napoli, Italy. She studies the octopus nervous system an...
Optimal Foraging
28 Feb 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Claire Hemmingway, an assistant professor in the Department of Psychology and Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at the University of Tennessee in Knoxv...
Memory in Chess
12 Feb 2024
Contributed by Lukas
On today's show, we are joined by our co-host, Becky Hansis-O'Neil. Becky is a Ph.D. student at the University of Missouri, St Louis, where she studie...
OpenWorm
05 Feb 2024
Contributed by Lukas
On this episode, we are joined by Stephen Larson, the CEO of MetaCell and an affiliate of the OpenWorm foundation. Stephen discussed what the Openworm...
What the Antlion Knows
30 Jan 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Our guest is Becky Hansis-O'Neil, a Ph.D. student at the University of Missouri, St Louis, and our co-host for the new "Animal Intelligence" season. B...
AI Roundtable
17 Jan 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Kyle is joined by friends and former guests Pramit Choudhary and Frank Bell to have an open discussion of the impacts LLMs and machine learning have h...
Uncontrollable AI Risks
27 Dec 2023
Contributed by Lukas
We are joined by Darren McKee, a Policy Advisor and the host of Reality Check — a critical thinking podcast. Darren gave a background about himself ...
I LLM and You Can Too
23 Dec 2023
Contributed by Lukas
It took a massive financial investment for the first large language models (LLMs) to be created. Did their corporate backers lock these tools away f...
Q&A with Kyle
19 Dec 2023
Contributed by Lukas
We celebrate episode 1000000000 with some Q&A from host Kyle Polich. We boil this episode down to four key questions: 1) How do you find guests 2) W...
LLMs for Data Analysis
12 Dec 2023
Contributed by Lukas
In this episode, we are joined by Amir Netz, a Technical Fellow at Microsoft and the CTO of Microsoft Fabric. He discusses how companies can use Micro...
AI Platforms
04 Dec 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Our guest today is Eric Boyd, the Corporate Vice President of AI at Microsoft. Eric joins us to share how organizations can leverage AI for faster dev...
Deploying LLMs
27 Nov 2023
Contributed by Lukas
We are excited to be joined by Aaron Reich and Priyanka Shah. Aaron is the CTO at Avanade, while Priyanka leads their AI/IoT offering for the SEA Reg...
A Survey Assessing Github Copilot
20 Nov 2023
Contributed by Lukas
In this episode, we are joined by Jenny Liang, a PhD student at Carnegie Mellon University, where she studies the usability of code generation tools. ...
Program Aided Language Models
13 Nov 2023
Contributed by Lukas
We are joined by Aman Madaan and Shuyan Zhou. They are both PhD students at the Language Technology Institute at Carnegie Mellon University. They join...
Which Programming Language is ChatGPT Best At
06 Nov 2023
Contributed by Lukas
In this episode, we have Alessio Buscemi, a software engineer at Lifeware SA. Alessio was a post-doctoral researcher at the University of Luxembourg. ...
GraphText
31 Oct 2023
Contributed by Lukas
On the show today, we are joined by Jianan Zhao, a Computer Science student at Mila and the University of Montreal. His research focus is on graph dat...
arXiv Publication Patterns
23 Oct 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Today, we are joined by Rajiv Movva, a PhD student in Computer Science at Cornell Tech University. His research interest lies in the intersection of r...
Do LLMs Make Ethical Choices
16 Oct 2023
Contributed by Lukas
We are excited to be joined by Josh Albrecht, the CTO of Imbue. Imbue is a research company whose mission is to create AI agents that are more robust,...
Emergent Deception in LLMs
09 Oct 2023
Contributed by Lukas
On today's show, we are joined by Thilo Hagendorff, a Research Group Leader of Ethics of Generative AI at the University of Stuttgart. He joins us to ...
Agents with Theory of Mind Play Hanabi
02 Oct 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Nieves Montes, a Ph.D. student at the Artificial Intelligence Research Institute in Barcelona, Spain, joins us. Her PhD research revolves around value...
LLMs for Evil
25 Sep 2023
Contributed by Lukas
We are joined by Maximilian Mozes, a PhD student at the University College, London. His PhD research focuses on Natural Language Processing (NLP), par...
The Defeat of the Winograd Schema Challenge
11 Sep 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Our guest today is Vid Kocijan, a Machine Learning Engineer at Kumo AI. Vid has a Ph.D. in Computer Science at the University of Oxford. His research ...
LLMs in Social Science
04 Sep 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Today, We are joined by Petter Törnberg, an Assistant Professor in Computational Social Science at the University of Amsterdam and a Senior Researche...
LLMs in Music Composition
28 Aug 2023
Contributed by Lukas
In this episode, we are joined by Carlos Hernández Oliván, a Ph.D. student at the University of Zaragoza. Carlos's interest focuses on building new ...
Cuttlefish Model Tuning
21 Aug 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Hongyi Wang, a Senior Researcher at the Machine Learning Department at Carnegie Mellon University, joins us. His research is in the intersection of sy...
Which Professions Are Threatened by LLMs
15 Aug 2023
Contributed by Lukas
On today's episode, we have Daniel Rock, an Assistant Professor of Operations Information and Decisions at the Wharton School of the University of Pen...
Why Prompting is Hard
08 Aug 2023
Contributed by Lukas
We are excited to be joined by J.D. Zamfirescu-Pereira, a Ph.D. student at UC Berkeley. He focuses on the intersection of human-computer interaction (...
Automated Peer Review
31 Jul 2023
Contributed by Lukas
In this episode, we are joined by Ryan Liu, a Computer Science graduate of Carnegie Mellon University. Ryan will begin his Ph.D. program at Princeton ...
Prompt Refusal
24 Jul 2023
Contributed by Lukas
The creators of large language models impose restrictions on some of the types of requests one might make of them. LLMs commonly refuse to give advi...