Knowledge Distillation with Helen Byrne
Knowledge Distillation is the podcast that brings together a mixture of experts from across the Artificial Intelligence community.
We talk to the world’s leading researchers about their experiences developing cutting-edge models as well as the technologists taking AI tools out of the lab and turning them into commercial products and services.
Knowledge Distillation also takes a critical look at the impact of artificial intelligence on society – opting for expert analysis instead of hysterical headlines.
We are committed to featuring at least 50% female voices on the podcast – elevating the many brilliant women working in AI.
Host Helen Byrne is a VP at the British AI compute systems maker Graphcore where she leads the Solution Architects team, helping innovators build their AI solutions using Graphcore’s technology.
Helen previously led AI Field Engineering and worked in AI Research, tackling problems in distributed machine learning.
Before landing in Artificial Intelligence, Helen worked in FinTech, and as a secondary school teacher. Her background is in mathematics and she has a MSc in Artificial Intelligence.
Knowledge Distillation is produced by Iain Mackenzie.
Knowledge Distillation with Helen Byrne
Neuroscience and AI with Basis co-founder Emily Mackevicius
Emily Mackevicius is a co-founder and director of Basis, a nonprofit applied research organization focused on understanding and building intelligence while advancing society’s ability to solve intractable problems.
Emily is a member of the Simons Society of Fellows, and a postdoc in the Aronov lab and the Center for Theoretical Neuroscience at Columbia’s Zuckerman Institute.
Her research uncovers how complex cognitive behaviors are generated by networks of neurons through local interactions and learning mechanisms.
Links to work mentioned in this episode:
- Basis, the research institute co-founded by Emily: basis.ai
- Emily's work with Fang et. al. relating brain computations to AI/ML algorithms: https://elifesciences.org/articles/80680
- Basis blog post about this work (Fang et. al.): https://www.basis.ai/blog/sr-fang2023/
- Stachenfeld et al. paper: https://www.nature.com/articles/nn.4650
- Emily's work with Michale Fee relating Reinforcement Learning algorithms to brain areas that birds use when they learn to sing: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0959438817302349
- Emily's work with Aronov lab colleagues on how the hippocampus forms one-shot/episodic memory 'barcodes' in food-caching birds: https://www.cell.com/cell/fulltext/S0092-8674(24)00235-6
- NPR story about this work: https://www.npr.org/2024/04/05/1198909635/chickadee-bird-brain-memory-brain-pattern-food
- Github collab-creatures repo for the Basis collaborative intelligent systems project: https://github.com/BasisResearch/collab-creatures
- Basis's core open-source code repository for causal reasoning, ChiRho: https://basisresearch.github.io/chirho/getting_started.html
- Basis's city policy dashboard, polis: http://polis.basis.ai/