Talking Machines is currently THE machine learning podcast. Last fall when it started out, I was intrigued that someone was starting a podcast focusing specifically on machine learning. But I didn't really listen until this summer, which was my loss. Now that I'm catching up on it, I think it's terrific.
As an completely biased person, I think everyone should listen to it; but I do unabashedly love the subject material. The initial segment of each episode is usually a clear introduction to a common ML concepts, the likes of which you might encounter in an introductory ML class. Then the interviews touch on a wide range of the interviewee's research focus, work, and thoughts on the field. I'm not sure if it's interesting and fun as a cold-start introduction to the material, but as someone who works in the field, I'm firmly in their target audience. At times, it's almost a water-cooler discussion for the ML set.
Dr. Ryan Adams, a Cambridge-trained ML researcher, has a good combination of breadth and depth of knowledge in the field, and his insights guide the discussion to some interesting places.
Katherine Gorman brings an air of professionalism to the podcast. I imagine it's primarily her editing that keeps the final product smooth to listen to.
And the guests have been fantastic. I knew they were going to have great interview subjects when the first teaser was the Deep Learning Conspiracy (Hinton, LeCun, and Bengio). Ilya Sutskever's interview was insightful, as was Hanna Wallach's where she told the history of the Women In Machine Learning (WIML) conference. I'm not friends with Geoff Hinton, but Talking Machines gives me a glimpse into his more nuanced opinions on what's going on ML. Adams has the cachet to get prominent researchers to join the podcast; I imagine it helps that there are so few venues for these researchers to talk about their to listeners who actually care.
They've launched a kickstarter to fund their second season. I follow a pretty simple rule for Kickstarter-type-things: do I want to live in a world where this product exists?
I do, so I'm backing the second season.