Polly Fordyce — Microfluidic Platforms and Machine Learning

Polly Fordyce — Microfluidic Platforms and Machine Learning

Author: Lukas Biewald April 29, 2021 Duration: 45:55
Polly explains how microfluidics allow bioengineering researchers to create high throughput data, and shares her experiences with biology and machine learning. --- Polly Fordyce is an Assistant Professor of Genetics and Bioengineering and fellow of the ChEM-H Institute at Stanford. She is the Principal Investigator of The Fordyce Lab, which focuses on developing and applying new microfluidic platforms for quantitative, high-throughput biophysics and biochemistry. Twitter: https://twitter.com/fordycelab​ Website: http://www.fordycelab.com/​ --- Topics Discussed: 0:00​ Sneak peek, intro 2:11​ Background on protein sequencing 7:38​ How changes to a protein's sequence alters its structure and function 11:07​ Microfluidics and machine learning 19:25​ Why protein folding is important 25:17​ Collaborating with ML practitioners 31:46​ Transfer learning and big data sets in biology 38:42​ Where Polly hopes bioengineering research will go 42:43​ Advice for students Transcript: http://wandb.me/gd-polly-fordyce​ Links Discussed: "The Weather Makers": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wea...​ --- Get our podcast on these platforms: Apple Podcasts: http://wandb.me/apple-podcasts​​​ Spotify: http://wandb.me/spotify​​ Google Podcasts: http://wandb.me/google-podcasts​​​ YouTube: http://wandb.me/youtube​​​ Soundcloud: http://wandb.me/soundcloud​​ Join our community of ML practitioners where we host AMAs, share interesting projects and meet other people working in Deep Learning: http://wandb.me/slack​​​ Check out Fully Connected, which features curated machine learning reports by researchers exploring deep learning techniques, Kagglers showcasing winning models, industry leaders sharing best practices, and more: https://wandb.ai/fully-connected

Lukas Biewald hosts Gradient Dissent: Conversations on AI, a series that moves beyond theoretical discussions to examine how artificial intelligence is actually built and deployed. Each episode features a direct, unscripted talk with a leading practitioner-you’ll hear from engineers and researchers at places like NVIDIA, Meta, Google, Lyft, and OpenAI. The focus is on the tangible challenges and breakthroughs they encounter, from initial research to the complex reality of putting models into production. This isn't about abstract futures; it's a grounded look at the decisions shaping the field right now. Biewald, bringing his perspective from Weights & Biases, steers conversations toward the practical trade-offs and collaborative efforts that define modern AI work. For anyone in technology or business who wants to understand the mechanics behind the headlines, this podcast offers a rare, candid window into the process. You’ll come away with a clearer sense of how ideas become functional systems and what it really takes to operate at the cutting edge.
Author: Language: English Episodes: 100

Gradient Dissent: Conversations on AI
Podcast Episodes
D. Sculley — Technical Debt, Trade-offs, and Kaggle [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 1:00:26
D. Sculley is CEO of Kaggle, the beloved and well-known data science and machine learning community.D. discusses his influential 2015 paper "Machine Learning: The High Interest Credit Card of Technical Debt" and what the…
Emad Mostaque — Stable Diffusion, Stability AI, and What’s Next [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 1:10:29
Emad Mostaque is CEO and co-founder of Stability AI, a startup and network of decentralized developer communities building open AI tools. Stability AI is the company behind Stable Diffusion, the well-known, open source,…
Jehan Wickramasuriya — AI in High-Stress Scenarios [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 1:00:02
Jehan Wickramasuriya is the Vice President of AI, Platform & Data Services at Motorola Solutions, a global leader in public safety and enterprise security.In this episode, Jehan discusses how Motorola Solutions uses AI t…
Will Falcon — Making Lightning the Apple of ML [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 45:21
Will Falcon is the CEO and co-founder of Lightning AI, a platform that enables users to quickly build and publish ML models.In this episode, Will explains how Lightning addresses the challenges of a fragmented AI ecosyst…
Aaron Colak — ML and NLP in Experience Management [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 50:00
Aaron Colak is the Leader of Core Machine Learning at Qualtrics, an experiment management company that takes large language models and applies them to real-world, B2B use cases.In this episode, Aaron describes mixing cla…
Jordan Fisher — Skipping the Line with Autonomous Checkout [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 57:58
Jordan Fisher is the CEO and co-founder of Standard AI, an autonomous checkout company that’s pushing the boundaries of computer vision.In this episode, Jordan discusses “the Wild West” of the MLOps stack and tells Lukas…
Drago Anguelov — Robustness, Safety, and Scalability at Waymo [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 1:09:01
Drago Anguelov is a Distinguished Scientist and Head of Research at Waymo, an autonomous driving technology company and subsidiary of Alphabet Inc.We begin by discussing Drago's work on the original Inception architectur…
Boris Dayma — The Story Behind DALL·E mini, the Viral Phenomenon [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 35:59
Check out this report by Boris about DALL-E mini:https://wandb.ai/dalle-mini/dalle-mini/reports/DALL-E-mini-Generate-images-from-any-text-prompt--VmlldzoyMDE4NDAyhttps://wandb.ai/_scott/wandb_example/reports/Collaboratio…
Tristan Handy — The Work Behind the Data Work [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 1:00:48
Tristan Handy is CEO and founder of dbt Labs. dbt (data build tool) simplifies the data transformation workflow and helps organizations make better decisions.Lukas and Tristan dive into the history of the modern data sta…