Episodes
#78 · Thu, Mar 5, 2020 · Loading viewsAnn Druyan is the writer, producer, director, and one of the most important and impactful communicators of science in our time. She co-wrote the 1980 science documentary series Cosmos hosted by Carl Sagan, whom she married in 1981, and her love for whom, with the help of NASA, was recorded as brain waves on a golden record along with other things our civilization has to offer and launched into space on the Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 spacecraft that are now, 42 years later, still active, reaching out farther into deep space than any human-made object ever has. This was a profound and beautiful decision she made as a Creative Director of NASA's Voyager Interstellar Message Project. In 2014, she went on to create the second season of Cosmos, called Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey, and in 2020, the new third season called Cosmos: Possible Worlds, which is being released this upcoming Monday, March 9. It is hosted, once again, by the fun and brilliant Neil deGrasse Tyson.
#77 · Tue, Mar 3, 2020 · Loading viewsAlex Garland, writer and director of many imaginative and philosophical films from the dreamlike exploration of human self-destruction in the movie Annihilation to the deep questions of consciousness and intelligence raised in the movie Ex Machina, which to me is one of the greatest movies on artificial intelligence ever made. I'm releasing this podcast to coincide with the release of his new series called Devs that will premiere this Thursday, March 5, on Hulu as part of "FX on Hulu". It explores many of the themes this very podcast is about: from quantum mechanics to artificial life to simulation to the modern nature of power in the tech world.
#76 · Sat, Feb 29, 2020 · Loading viewsJohn Hopfield is professor at Princeton, whose life's work weaved beautifully through biology, chemistry, neuroscience, and physics. Most crucially, he saw the messy world of biology through the piercing eyes of a physicist. He is perhaps best known for his work on associate neural networks, now known as Hopfield networks that were one of the early ideas that catalyzed the development of the modern field of deep learning.
#75 · Wed, Feb 26, 2020 · Loading viewsMarcus Hutter is a senior research scientist at DeepMind and professor at Australian National University. Throughout his career of research, including with Jürgen Schmidhuber and Shane Legg, he has proposed a lot of interesting ideas in and around the field of artificial general intelligence, including the development of the AIXI model which is a mathematical approach to AGI that incorporates ideas of Kolmogorov complexity, Solomonoff induction, and reinforcement learning.
#74 · Mon, Feb 24, 2020 · Loading viewsMichael I Jordan is a professor at Berkeley, and one of the most influential people in the history of machine learning, statistics, and artificial intelligence. He has been cited over 170,000 times and has mentored many of the world-class researchers defining the field of AI today, including Andrew Ng, Zoubin Ghahramani, Ben Taskar, and Yoshua Bengio.
#73 · Thu, Feb 20, 2020 · Loading viewsAndrew Ng is one of the most impactful educators, researchers, innovators, and leaders in artificial intelligence and technology space in general. He co-founded Coursera and Google Brain, launched deeplearning.ai, Landing.ai, and the AI fund, and was the Chief Scientist at Baidu. As a Stanford professor, and with Coursera and deeplearning.ai, he has helped educate and inspire millions of students including me.
#72 · Mon, Feb 17, 2020 · Loading viewsScott Aaronson is a professor at UT Austin, director of its Quantum Information Center, and previously a professor at MIT. His research interests center around the capabilities and limits of quantum computers and computational complexity theory more generally.
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#71 · Fri, Feb 14, 2020 · Loading viewsVladimir Vapnik is the co-inventor of support vector machines, support vector clustering, VC theory, and many foundational ideas in statistical learning. He was born in the Soviet Union, worked at the Institute of Control Sciences in Moscow, then in the US, worked at AT&T, NEC Labs, Facebook AI Research, and now is a professor at Columbia University. His work has been cited over 200,000 times.
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#70 · Wed, Feb 5, 2020 · Loading viewsJim Keller is a legendary microprocessor engineer, having worked at AMD, Apple, Tesla, and now Intel. He's known for his work on the AMD K7, K8, K12 and Zen microarchitectures, Apple A4, A5 processors, and co-author of the specifications for the x86-64 instruction set and HyperTransport interconnect.
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#69 · Wed, Jan 29, 2020 · Loading viewsDavid Chalmers is a philosopher and cognitive scientist specializing in philosophy of mind, philosophy of language, and consciousness. He is perhaps best known for formulating the hard problem of consciousness which could be stated as "why does the feeling which accompanies awareness of sensory information exist at all?"
#68 · Sat, Jan 25, 2020 · Loading viewsCristos Goodrow is VP of Engineering at Google and head of Search and Discovery at YouTube (aka YouTube Algorithm).
#67 · Tue, Jan 21, 2020 · Loading viewsPaul Krugman is a Nobel Prize winner in economics, professor at CUNY, and columnist at the New York Times. His academic work centers around international economics, economic geography, liquidity traps, and currency crises.
#66 · Fri, Jan 17, 2020 · Loading viewsAyanna Howard is a roboticist and professor at Georgia Tech, director of Human-Automation Systems lab, with research interests in human-robot interaction, assistive robots in the home, therapy gaming apps, and remote robotic exploration of extreme environments.
#65 · Tue, Jan 14, 2020 · Loading viewsDaniel Kahneman is a psychologist and economist notable for his work on the psychology of judgment and decision-making, as well as behavioral economics, for which he was awarded the 2002 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences.
#64 · Tue, Jan 7, 2020 · Loading viewsGrant Sanderson is an educator and YouTuber known for his educational math channel 3Blue1Brown.
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#62 · Mon, Dec 30, 2019 · Loading viewsDonald Ervin Knuth is an American computer scientist, mathematician, and professor emeritus at Stanford University. He is the 1974 recipient of the ACM Turing Award, informally considered the Nobel Prize of computer science. Knuth has been called the "father of the analysis of algorithms".
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#61 · Sat, Dec 28, 2019 · Loading viewsMelanie Mitchell is a professor of computer science at Portland State University. She has worked at the Santa Fe Institute and Los Alamos National Laboratory.
#60 · Wed, Dec 25, 2019 · Loading viewsSylvester James Gates Jr., known as S. James Gates Jr. or Jim Gates, is an American theoretical physicist who works on supersymmetry, supergravity, and superstring theory.
#59 · Sat, Dec 21, 2019 · Loading viewsSebastian Thrun is an entrepreneur, educator, and computer scientist from Germany. He is CEO of Kitty Hawk Corporation, and chairman and co-founder of Udacity. Before that, he was a Google VP and Fellow, a Professor of Computer Science at Stanford University, and before that at Carnegie Mellon University.
#58 · Tue, Dec 17, 2019 · Loading viewsMichael David Stevens is an American educator, public speaker, comedian, entertainer, editor, and internet celebrity, best known for creating and hosting the popular education YouTube channel Vsauce.
#57 · Sat, Dec 14, 2019 · Loading viewsRohit Prasad is vice president and head scientist, Amazon Alexa, the voice service that powers Amazon’s family of Echo products, Amazon Fire TV and third-party offerings.
#56 · Wed, Dec 11, 2019 · Loading viewsJudea Pearl is an Israeli-American computer scientist and philosopher, best known for championing the probabilistic approach to artificial intelligence and the development of Bayesian networks.
#55 · Thu, Dec 5, 2019 · Loading viewsWhitney Cummings is a stand-up comedian, actress, filmmaker, and podcaster.
#54 · Mon, Dec 2, 2019 · Loading viewsRaymond Thomas Dalio is a billionaire, American hedge fund manager, author and philanthropist who has served as co-chief investment officer of the world's largest hedge fund, Bridgewater Associates, since 1985.
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