Bharat Sandhu, Director of Azure AI and Mixed Reality at Microsoft, joins Chris and Daniel to talk about how Microsoft is making AI accessible and productive for users, and how AI solutions can address real world challenges that customers face. He also shares Microsoft’s research-to-product process, along with the advances they have made in computer vision, image captioning, and how researchers were able to make AI that can describe images as well as people do.
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Transcript
Play the audio to listen along while you enjoy the transcript. 🎧
Welcome to another edition of the Practical AI podcast. My name is Chris Benson, I’m a principal emerging tech strategist at Lockheed Martin, and with me as always is Daniel Whitenack, a data scientist with SIL International. How’s it going today, Daniel?
It’s going great. I think we discussed when we recorded last week, which was pre-U.S. Thanksgiving, our plans for Tofurkey for Thanksgiving, which I had… I’m not sure if you partook as well…
I did… So anyone who listens to us regularly hears Daniel and I talk about our plant-based meals. And I’ll take a two-second divergence - I had an interesting entry into Thanksgiving dinner that has nothing to with AI/ML whatsoever. We were just about 5-10 minutes from sitting down, and I got a call from a neighbor saying “I have a large, black snake in my house. Can you come help me?” Anyone that listens to us knows I’m the animal–
Yeah, and you’re on-call for that sort of thing, I think…
I am. So totally separate from all this, what we’re talking about today, I do a bunch of animal stuff, and I actually run a snake hotline. How weird is that? Do you know anyone else that runs a snake hotline?
So I get the call, I go, and I have a neighbor with a large, black Kingsnake in their basement. They were very upset, because they were not very snake-savvy people… So I calm them down, we got the screams to stop, and I picked the Kingsnake up and carried it delicately outside, released it, educated them along the way as the screaming stopped…
You made an unexpected house visit on Thanksgiving, in other words…
It was, it was… And then I dashed home, just in time to sit down for Thanksgiving dinner. So it was a memorable Thanksgiving dinner in that way.
[04:06] Yeah, that’s great.
A little odd story that goes with it.
Yeah. That’s awesome. Well, we have some interesting things to discuss today, including - you know, if you were to have taken a picture of that experience, you might have wanted to come up with a caption for it, and that might have been somewhat difficult. That’s one of the tasks that we’re gonna discuss today.
Indeed.
