Staving off disaster through AI safety research

While covering Applied Machine Learning Days in Switzerland, Chris met El Mahdi El Mhamdi by chance, and was fascinated with his work doing AI safety research at EPFL. El Mahdi agreed to come on the show to share his research into the vulnerabilities in machine learning that bad actors can take advantage of. We cover everything from poisoned data sets and hacked machines to AI-generated propaganda and fake news, so grab your James Bond 007 kit from Q Branch, and join us for this important conversation on the dark side of artificial intelligence.

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Featuring:

• El Mahdi El Mhamdi – Website, X
• Chris Benson – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, X

Show Notes:

• El Mahdi El Mhamdi on LinkedIn
• Google Scholar
• Personal blog
• World Health Organization | Ten threats to global health in 2019
• AggregaThor
• The Hidden Vulnerability of Distributed Learning in Byzantium
• Machine Learning with Adversaries: Byzantine Tolerant Gradient Descent
• Asynchronous Byzantine Machine Learning (the case of SGD)

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Creators and Guests

Host

Chris Benson

Cohost @ Practical AI Podcast • Principal AI / Autonomy Research Engineer specializing in fully autonomous UxS swarming with embodied intelligence.

Guest

El Mahdi El Mhamdi

What is Practical AI?

Making artificial intelligence practical, productive & accessible to everyone. Practical AI is a show in which technology professionals, business people, students, enthusiasts, and expert guests engage in lively discussions about Artificial Intelligence and related topics (Machine Learning, Deep Learning, Neural Networks, GANs, MLOps, AIOps, LLMs & more).

The focus is on productive implementations and real-world scenarios that are accessible to everyone. If you want to keep up with the latest advances in AI, while keeping one foot in the real world, then this is the show for you!