Summary We have machines that can listen to and process human speech in a variety of languages, but dealing with unstructured sounds in our environment is a much greater challenge. The team at Audio Analytic are working to impart a sense of hearing to our myriad devices with their sound recognition technology. In this episode Dr. Chris Mitchell and Dr. Thomas le Cornu describe the challenges that they are faced with in the collection and labelling of high quality data to make this possible, including the lack of a publicly available collection of audio samples to work from, the need for custom metadata throughout the processing pipeline, and the need for customized data processing tools for working with sound data. This was a great conversation about the complexities of working in a niche domain of data analysis and how to build a pipeline of high quality data from collection to analysis.

Announcements

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Interview

Introduction How did you get involved in the area of data management? Can you start by describing what you are building at Audio Analytic?

What was your motivation for building an AI platform for sound recognition?

What are some of the ways that your platform is being used? What are the unique challenges that you have faced in working with arbitrary sound data? How do you handle the collection and labelling of the source data that you rely on for building your models?

Beyond just collection and storage, what is your process for defining a taxonomy of the audio data that you are working with? How has the taxonomy had to evolve, and what assumptions have had to change, as you progressed in building the data set and the resulting models?

challenges of building an embeddable AI model

update cycle

difficulty of identifying relevant audio and dealing with literal noise in the input data rights and ownership challenges in collection of source data What was your design process for constructing a pipeline for the audio data that you need to process? Can you describe how your overall data management system is