The Data Skeptic Podcast features interviews and discussion of topics related to data science, statistics, machine learning, artificial intelligence and the lik...
Alex Bisberg, a PhD candidate at the University of Southern California, specializes in network science and game analytics, with a focus on understanding social and competitive success in multiplayer online games. In this episode, listeners can expect to learn from a network perspective about players interactions and patterns of behavior. Through his research on games, Alex sheds light on how network analysis and statistical tests might explain positive contagious behaviors, such as generosity, and explore the dynamics of collaboration and competition in gaming environments. These insights offer valuable lessons not only for game developers in enhancing player experience, engagement and retention, but also for anyone interested in understanding the ways that virtual interactions shape social networks and behavior.
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37:52
Github Collaboration Network
In this episode we discuss the GitHub Collaboration Network with Behnaz Moradi-Jamei, assistant professor at James Madison University. As a network scientist, Behnaz created and analyzed a network of about 700,000 contributors to Github's repository. The network of collaborators on GitHub was created by identifying developers (nodes) and linking them with edges based on shared contributions to the same repositories. This means that if two developers contributed to the same project, an edge (connection) was formed between them, representing a collaborative relationship network consisting of 32 million such connections. By using algorithms for Community Detection, Behnaz's analysis reveals insights into how developer communities form, function, and evolve, that can be used as guidance for OSS community managers.
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42:24
Graphs and ML for Robotics
We are joined by Abhishek Paudel, a PhD Student at George Mason University with a research focus on robotics, machine learning, and planning under uncertainty, using graph-based methods to enhance robot behavior. He explains how graph-based approaches can model environments, capture spatial relationships, and provide a framework for integrating multiple levels of planning and decision-making.
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41:59
Graphs for HPC and LLMs
We are joined by Maciej Besta, a senior researcher of sparse graph computations and large language models at the Scalable Parallel Computing Lab (SPCL). In this episode, we explore the intersection of graph theory and high-performance computing (HPC), Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) and LLMs.
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52:08
Graph Databases and AI
In this episode, we sit down with Yuanyuan Tian, a principal scientist manager at Microsoft Gray Systems Lab, to discuss the evolving role of graph databases in various industries such as fraud detection in finance and insurance, security, healthcare, and supply chain optimization.
The Data Skeptic Podcast features interviews and discussion of topics related to data science, statistics, machine learning, artificial intelligence and the like, all from the perspective of applying critical thinking and the scientific method to evaluate the veracity of claims and efficacy of approaches.
Ireland