Data Skeptic

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...

A Long Way Till AGI

18 Jul 2023

Contributed by Lukas

Our guest today is Maciej Świechowski. Maciej is affiliated with QED Software and QED Games. He has a Ph.D. in Systems Research from the Polish Acade...

Brain Inspired AI

11 Jul 2023

Contributed by Lukas

Today on the show, we are joined by Lin Zhao and Lu Zhang. Lin is a Senior Research Scientist at United Imaging Intelligence, while Lu is a Ph.D. cand...

Computable AGI

03 Jul 2023

Contributed by Lukas

On today's show, we are joined by Michael Timothy Bennett, a Ph.D. student at the Australian National University. Michael's research is centered aroun...

AGI Can Be Safe

26 Jun 2023

Contributed by Lukas

We are joined by Koen Holtman, an independent AI researcher focusing on AI safety. Koen is the Founder of Holtman Systems Research, a research company...

AI Fails on Theory of Mind Tasks

19 Jun 2023

Contributed by Lukas

An assistant professor of Psychology at Harvard University, Tomer Ullman, joins us. Tomer discussed the theory of mind and whether machines can indeed...

AI for Mathematics Education

12 Jun 2023

Contributed by Lukas

The application of LLMs cuts across various industries. Today, we are joined by Steven Van Vaerenbergh, who discussed the application of AI in mathema...

Evaluating Jokes with LLMs

06 Jun 2023

Contributed by Lukas

Fabricio Goes, a Lecturer in Creative Computing at the University of Leicester, joins us today. Fabricio discussed what creativity entails and how to ...

Why Machines Will Never Rule the World

29 May 2023

Contributed by Lukas

Barry Smith and Jobst Landgrebe, authors of the book "Why Machines will never Rule the World," join us today. They discussed the limitations of AI sys...

A Psychopathological Approach to Safety in AGI

23 May 2023

Contributed by Lukas

While the possibilities with AGI emergence seem great, it also calls for safety concerns. On the show, Vahid Behzadan, an Assistant Professor of Compu...

The NLP Community Metasurvey

15 May 2023

Contributed by Lukas

Julian Michael, a postdoc at the Center for Data Science, New York University, joins us today. Julian's conversation with Kyle was centered on the NLP...

Skeptical Survey Interpretation

10 May 2023

Contributed by Lukas

Kyle shares his own perspectives on challenges getting insight from surveys. The discussion ranges from commentary on the market research industry to...

The Gallup Poll

01 May 2023

Contributed by Lukas

Jeff Jones, a Senior Editor at Gallup, joins us today. His conversation with Kyle spanned a range of topics on Gallup's poll creation process. He disc...

Inclusive Study Group Formation at Scale

25 Apr 2023

Contributed by Lukas

Gireeja Ranade, a University of California at Berkeley professor, speaks with us today. She presented her study on implementing inclusive study groups...

The PhilPapers Survey

21 Apr 2023

Contributed by Lukas

Today, we are joined by David Bourget. David is an Associate Professor in Philosophy at Western University in London, Ontario. David is also the co-di...

Non-Response Bias

10 Apr 2023

Contributed by Lukas

Today's show focused on an essential part of surveys — missing values. This is typically caused by a low response rate or non-response from responde...

Measuring Trust in Robots with Likert Scales

03 Apr 2023

Contributed by Lukas

We are joined by two guests today, Mariah, a Ph.D. student in the CORE Robotics Lab at Georgia Tech, and Matthew Gombolay, the Director of the CORE Ro...

CAREER Prediction

27 Mar 2023

Contributed by Lukas

Ever wondered what your next career would be? Today, Keyon Vafa, a computer science Ph.D. student at Columbia University, joins us to discuss his late...

The Panel Study of Income Dynamics

21 Mar 2023

Contributed by Lukas

Noura Insolera, a Research Investigator with the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID), joins us to share how PSID conducts longitudinal household sur...

Survey Design Working Session

14 Mar 2023

Contributed by Lukas

Susan Gerbic joins Kyle to review some of the surveys Data Skeptic has launch, draft a new survey about podcast listening habits, and then review the ...

Bot Detection and Dyadic Surveys

06 Mar 2023

Contributed by Lukas

The use of social bots to fill out online surveys is becoming prevalent. Today, we speak with Sara Bybee, a postdoctoral research scholar at the Unive...

Reproducible ESP Testing

20 Feb 2023

Contributed by Lukas

Our guest today is Zoltán Kekecs, a Ph.D. holder in Behavioural Science. Zoltán highlights the problem of low replicability in journal papers and il...

A Survey of Data Science Methodologies

13 Feb 2023

Contributed by Lukas

On the show, Iñigo Martinez, a Ph.D. student at the University of Navarra shares his survey results which investigated how data practitioners perform...

Opinion Dynamics Models

06 Feb 2023

Contributed by Lukas

On the show today, Dino Carpentras, a post-doctoral researcher at the Computational Social Science group at ETH Zürich joins us to discuss how opinio...

Casual Affective Triggers

30 Jan 2023

Contributed by Lukas

Crafting survey questions is one thing but getting your audience to fill it is yet another. On the show today, we speak with Alexander Nolte, an Assoc...

Conversational Surveys

23 Jan 2023

Contributed by Lukas

Traditional surveys have straight-jacket questions to be answered, thus restricting the information that can be gotten. Today, Ziang Xiao, a Postdoc R...

Do Results Generalize for Privacy and Security Surveys

17 Jan 2023

Contributed by Lukas

Today, Jenny Tang, a Ph.D. student of societal computing at Carnegie Mellon University discusses her work on the generalization of privacy and securit...

4 out of 5 Data Scientists Agree

10 Jan 2023

Contributed by Lukas

This episode kicks off the new season of the show, Data Skeptic: Surveys.  Linhda rejoins the show for a conversation with Kyle about her experience...

Crowdfunded Board Games

26 Dec 2022

Contributed by Lukas

It may be intuitive to think crowdfunding a project drives its innovation and novelty, but there are no empirical studies that prove this. On the show...

Russian Election Interference Effectiveness

19 Dec 2022

Contributed by Lukas

There were reports of Russia's interference in the 2016 US elections. In today's episode, Koustuv Saha, a researcher at Microsoft Research walks us th...

Placement Laundering Fraud

15 Dec 2022

Contributed by Lukas

There is an unsung kind of ad fraud brewing in the ad tech space — placement laundering fraud. On the show, Jeff Kline discusses what placement laun...

Data Clean Rooms

12 Dec 2022

Contributed by Lukas

Bosko Milekic, the Co-founder of Optable, a data collaboration platform for the media and advertising industry, joins us today. Bosko talked about the...

Dark Patterns in Site Design

05 Dec 2022

Contributed by Lukas

Kerstin Bongard-Blanchy is a Research Associate at the University of Luxembourg. She joins us to discuss her study that investigated dark patterns in ...

Internet Advertising Bureau Media Lab

03 Dec 2022

Contributed by Lukas

We are joined by Anthony Katsur, the CEO of IAB Tech Lab. Anthony discusses standards within the ad tech industry. He explained how IAB Tech Lab set a...

Your Mouse Reveals Your Gender and Age

28 Nov 2022

Contributed by Lukas

When we navigate a webpage, it is fairly easy for our mouse movement to be tracked and collected. Today, Luis Leiva, a Professor of Computer Science d...

Measuring Web Search Behavior

21 Nov 2022

Contributed by Lukas

On the show, Aleksandra Urman and Mykola Makhortykh join us to discuss their work on the comparative analysis of web search behavior using web trackin...

StrategyQA and Big Bench

18 Nov 2022

Contributed by Lukas

Did Aristotle Use a Laptop?  That's a question from the StrategyQA benchmark which highlights the stretch goals for current artificial intelligence s...

Ad Blockers Effect on News Consumption

14 Nov 2022

Contributed by Lukas

While at first glance, the use of ad blockers drops the revenue of news publishers, this may not be completely true. On the show today, Shunyao Yan, a...

Your Consent is Worth 75 Euros a Year

07 Nov 2022

Contributed by Lukas

People who do not want their data tracked and shared online can pay a token for a cookie paywall. But are the websites keeping to their side of the ba...

Automated Email Generation for Targeted Attacks

31 Oct 2022

Contributed by Lukas

The advancement of generative language models has been a force for good, but also for evil. On the show, Avisha Das, a post-doctoral scholar at the Un...

Tribal Marketing

24 Oct 2022

Contributed by Lukas

Peter Gloor, a Research Scientist at the MIT Center for Collective Intelligence, takes us on a new world of tribe classification. He extensively discu...

Nano-targetted Facebook Ads

17 Oct 2022

Contributed by Lukas

Debiasing GPT-3 Job Ads

10 Oct 2022

Contributed by Lukas

We hear about the impeccable achievements of GPT-3 models, but such large generative models come with their bias. On the show today, Conrad Borchers, ...

ML Ops in Production

06 Oct 2022

Contributed by Lukas

Moses Guttman from Clear ML joins us to share insights about how organizations leveraging machine learning keep their programs on track.  While many...

Ad Network Tomography

03 Oct 2022

Contributed by Lukas

Data sharing in the ad tech space has largely been a black box system. While it is obvious the data is being collected, the data sharing process is ob...

First Party Tracking Cookies

26 Sep 2022

Contributed by Lukas

When you accept cookies on a website, you cannot tell whether the cookies are used for tracking your personal data or not. Shaoor Munir's machine lear...

The Harms of Targeted Weight Loss Ads

19 Sep 2022

Contributed by Lukas

Liza Gak, a Ph.D. student at UC Berkeley, joins us to discuss her research on harmful weight loss advertising. She discussed how weight loss ads are n...

Podcast Advertising

12 Sep 2022

Contributed by Lukas

Growing your podcast to the point of monetization is not a walk in the park. Today, Rob Walch, the VP of Podcast Relations at Libsyn talks about podca...

Fairness in e-Commerce Search

05 Sep 2022

Contributed by Lukas

When we search for products in e-commerce stores, we do not care what goes on under the hood to generate the results. However, there may be an intenti...

Fraudulent Amazon Reviewers

29 Aug 2022

Contributed by Lukas

Chances are that you have bought a product online majorly because of the reviews you saw. Unfortunately, not all reviews are genuine. Today, Rajvardha...

Ad Targeting in Amazon Smart Speakers

22 Aug 2022

Contributed by Lukas

While we give attention to textual data on the web, many do not know the unique power of echo interactions with smart devices for ad targeting. Today,...

Adwords with Unknown Budgets

15 Aug 2022

Contributed by Lukas

Rajan Udwani, an Assistant Professor at the University of California Berkeley joins us to discuss his work on AdWords with unknown budgets. He discuss...

ML Ops Best Practices

12 Aug 2022

Contributed by Lukas

Today, we are joined by Piotr Niedźwiedź, Founder and CEO of Neptune.ai. Piotr discusses common MLOps activities by data science teams and how they ...

Affiliate Marketing Rabbithole

08 Aug 2022

Contributed by Lukas

Affiliate marketing creates an opportunity for marketers to gain a commission by promoting a product or service.  Cookies are typically used for trac...

Monetization of Youtube Conspiracy Theorists

01 Aug 2022

Contributed by Lukas

Cameron Ballard joins us today to discuss his work around YouTube conspiracy theories. He revealed interesting observations about conspiracy theories ...

User Perceptions of Problematic Ads

25 Jul 2022

Contributed by Lukas

Eric Zeng joins us to discuss his study around understanding bad ads and efforts that can be taken to limit bad ads online. He discussed how he and hi...

Political Digital Advertising Analysis

21 Jul 2022

Contributed by Lukas

NaLette Brodnax, a political scientist and an Assistant Professor in the McCourt School of Public Policy at Georgetown University joins us to discuss ...

Fraud Detection in Crowdfunding Campaigns

18 Jul 2022

Contributed by Lukas

Artificial Intelligence and Auction Design

11 Jul 2022

Contributed by Lukas

Privacy Preference Signals

04 Jul 2022

Contributed by Lukas

Have you ever wondered what goes on under the hood when you accept a website's cookies? Today, Maximilian Hils, a PhD student in Computer Science, at ...

Neural Architecture Search for CTR Prediction

27 Jun 2022

Contributed by Lukas

Ravi Krishna joins us today to talk about his recent work on a differentiable NAS framework for ads CTR prediction. He discussed what CTR prediction i...

Algorithmic PPC Management

21 Jun 2022

Contributed by Lukas

Effectively managing a large budget of pay per click advertising demands software solutions. When spending multi-million dollar budgets on hundreds of...

Data Skeptic: Ad Tech

18 Jun 2022

Contributed by Lukas

Increasingly, people get most if not all of the information they consume online. Alongside the web sites, videos, apps, and other destinations, we're ...

The Reliability of Mobile Phone Data

13 Jun 2022

Contributed by Lukas

Our mobile phones generate an incredible amount of data inbound and outbound. In today's episode, Nishant Kishore, a PhD graduate of Harvard Universit...

Haywire Algorithms

06 Jun 2022

Contributed by Lukas

The pandemic changed how we lived. And this had a ripple effect on the performance of machine learning models. Ravi Parikh joins us today to discuss h...

School Reopening Analysis

30 May 2022

Contributed by Lukas

Carly Lupton-Smith joins us today to speak about her research which investigated the consistency between household and county measures of school reope...

Modern Data Stacks

26 May 2022

Contributed by Lukas

Today, we are joined by Alexander Thor, a Product Manager at Vizlib, makers of Astrato. Astrato is a data analytics and business intelligence tool bui...

Emoji as a Predictor

23 May 2022

Contributed by Lukas

Emojis are arguably one of the most effective ways to express emotions when texting. In today's episode, Xuan Lu shares her research on the use of emo...

Polarizing Trends in the Gig Economy

16 May 2022

Contributed by Lukas

On the show today, Fabian Braesemann, a research fellow at the University of Oxford, joins us to discuss his study analyzing the gig economy. He revea...

Remote Learning in Applied Engineering

12 May 2022

Contributed by Lukas

On the show today, we interview Mouhamed Abdulla, a professor of Electrical Engineering at Sheridan Institute of Technology. Mouhamed joins us to disc...

Remote Productivity

09 May 2022

Contributed by Lukas

It is difficult to estimate the effect on remote working across the board. Darja Šmite, who speaks with us today, is a professor of Software Engineer...

Does Remote Learning Work?

01 May 2022

Contributed by Lukas

We explore this complex question in two interviews today.  First, Kasey Wagoner describes 3 approaches to remote lab sessions and an analysis of whic...

Covid-19 Impact on Bicycle Usage

25 Apr 2022

Contributed by Lukas

In this episode, we speak with Abdullah Kurkcu, a Lead Traffic Modeler. Abdullah joins us to discuss his recent study on the effect of COVID-19 on bic...

Learning Digital Fabrication Remotely

22 Apr 2022

Contributed by Lukas

Today, we are joined by Jennifer Jacobs and Nadya Peek, who discuss their experience in teaching remote classes for a course that is largely hands-on....

Remote Software Development

18 Apr 2022

Contributed by Lukas

Today, we are joined by Denae Ford, a Senior Researcher at Microsoft Research and an Affiliate Assistant Professor at the University of Washington. De...

Quantum K-Means

11 Apr 2022

Contributed by Lukas

In this episode, we interview Jonas Landman, a Postdoc candidate at the University of Edinburg. Jonas discusses his study around quantum learning wher...

K-Means in Practice

04 Apr 2022

Contributed by Lukas

K-means is widely used in real-life business problems. In this episode, Mujtaba Anwer, a researcher and Data Scientist walks us through some use cases...

Fair Hierarchical Clustering

28 Mar 2022

Contributed by Lukas

Building a fair machine learning model has become a critical consideration in today's world. In this episode, we speak with Anshuman Chabra, a Ph.D. c...

Matrix Factorization For k-Means

21 Mar 2022

Contributed by Lukas

Many people know K-means clustering as a powerful clustering technique but not all listeners will be as familiar with spectral clustering. In today's ...

Breathing K-Means

14 Mar 2022

Contributed by Lukas

In this episode, we speak with Bernd Fritzke, a proficient financial expert and a Data Science researcher on his recent research - the breathing K-mea...

Power K-Means

07 Mar 2022

Contributed by Lukas

In today's episode, Jason, an Assistant Professor of Statistical Science at Duke University talks about his research on K power means. K power means i...

Explainable K-Means

03 Mar 2022

Contributed by Lukas

In this episode, Kyle interviews Lucas Murtinho about the paper "Shallow decision treees for explainable k-means clustering" about the use of decision...

Customer Clustering

28 Feb 2022

Contributed by Lukas

Have you ever wondered how you can use clustering to extract meaningful insight from a time-series single-feature data? In today's episode, Ehsan spea...

k-means Image Segmentation

22 Feb 2022

Contributed by Lukas

Linh Da joins us to explore how image segmentation can be done using k-means clustering.  Image segmentation involves dividing an image into a distin...

Tracking Elephant Clusters

18 Feb 2022

Contributed by Lukas

In today's episode, Gregory Glatzer explained his machine learning project that involved the prediction of elephant movement and settlement, in a bid ...

k-means clustering

14 Feb 2022

Contributed by Lukas

Welcome to our new season, Data Skeptic: k-means clustering.  Each week will feature an interview or discussion related to this classic algorithm, it...

Snowflake Essentials

07 Feb 2022

Contributed by Lukas

Frank Bell, Snowflake Data Superhero, and SnowPro, joins us today to talk about his book "Snowflake Essentials: Getting Started with Big Data in the C...

Explainable Climate Science

31 Jan 2022

Contributed by Lukas

Zack Labe, a Post-Doctoral Researcher at Colorado State University, joins us today to discuss his work "Detecting Climate Signals using Explainable AI...

Energy Forecasting Pipelines

24 Jan 2022

Contributed by Lukas

Erin Boyle, the Head of Data Science at Myst AI, joins us today to talk about her work with Myst AI, a time series forecasting platform and service wi...

Matrix Profiles in Stumpy

17 Jan 2022

Contributed by Lukas

Sean Law, Principle Data Scientist, R&D at a Fortune 500 Company, comes on to talk about his creation of the STUMPY Python Library. Sponsored by Hello...

The Great Australian Prediction Project

14 Jan 2022

Contributed by Lukas

Data scientists and psychics have at least one major thing in common. Both professions attempt to predict the future. In the case of a data scientist,...

Water Demand Forecasting

10 Jan 2022

Contributed by Lukas

Georgia Papacharalampous, Researcher at the National Technical University of Athens, joins us today to talk about her work "Probabilistic water demand...

Open Telemetry

03 Jan 2022

Contributed by Lukas

John Watson, Principal Software Engineer at Splunk, joins us today to talk about Splunk and OpenTelemetry.