Rajiv Shah: Data Robot Data Scientists

Our guest this week, Dr. Rajiv Shah, recently generated a lively discussion on Reddit. Subject of the debate was reproducibility of an article published in the notable science journal Nature. In this case unlike episode 7 of 26.1, where Dr. Rachael Tatman touched on her efforts to get industry AI folks to follow academia’s standards for reproducibility, Dr. Shah shared how using the same dataset as the article authors, he was unable to reproduce the results. In this case the aim of the paper's authors were to predict aftershocks of Haiti's disastrous earthquakes, a disaster the country and its people continue to struggle with today. Though we open our discussion about the buzz Raj got on Reddit, like every episode, we manage a discursive discussion in 26.1 minutes that touches on AI in manufacturing, C-level leaders getting to speed with AI practices, and the need for lay people to acquire a literacy about AI methods.