The Robot Brains Podcast

For Episode 13, we're joined by industry pioneer, Dean Ayanna Howard. She began working at NASA's JPL at 18-years old to help build the Mars Rover and never slowed down from there. She is a successful roboticist, entrepreneur, educator, and is the author of the recent book: Sex, Race, and Robots: How to be Human in the Age of AI.

Dr. Ayanna Howard is the current dean of The Ohio State University College of Engineering...

If any company is at the top of most people’s minds when it comes to AI, it’s DeepMind. They have been at the forefront of many major breakthroughs including AlphaGo, the first AI to beat a human Go world champion and AlphaFold, which revolutionized protein structure prediction.

Our guest on this week’s episode, Shakir Mohamed, joined DeepMind in the early days and has been an instrumental part of their success ever since...

It doesn’t matter what country you live in, or what industry you build a career in, STEM skills are increasingly important - particularly for children and students who are yet to join the world of work. Introducing robotics to children at a young age in the same way that we enroll them in soccer or piano lessons should be a real consideration. However, the participation costs are often so prohibitive that it's out of the question for most schools and parents...

On Episode 10 of Season 2, Pieter is joined by the CEO of SafelyYou, George Netscher. Pieter and George first met at UC Berkeley's AI lab when George was pursuing a PhD with a clear picture in his mind of how he would use it. And seven years later, George has stayed true to his mission of building AI to help people with dementia live better.

SafelyYou’s AI is raising the profile of technology solutions in the fight against dementia...

For Episode 9, we welcome an AI researcher and entrepreneur who has been on a remarkable journey, Flora Tasse. She grew up in Cameroon, where she completed her Bachelors in Mathematics at the University of Buea. She received a second Bachelors and a Masters in Computer Science at Rhodes and Cape Town in South Africa. She then went on to the UK, and earned her PhD in 3D computer vision at Cambridge, as well as interning at Microsoft and Google...

For Episode 8, Pieter Abbeel interviews Alex Kendall, the co-founder and CEO of Wayve, the London-based company pioneering AI technology to enable autonomous vehicles to drive in complex, never-seen-before environments. Alex is a world expert in deep learning and computer vision. Before founding Wayve, Alex was a research fellow at Cambridge University where he earned his Ph.D. in Computer Vision and Robotics...

One thing every AI researcher knows is that most foundational AI research is actually happening in open-source. Indeed, most AI researchers publish their research findings openly on arxiv, a freely accessible, open repository originally mostly used by physics researchers. And the code underlying many AI breakthroughs is often published on github, where it’s readily accessible to anyone...

Previous guests on our podcasts - from Tesla, Aurora, Waymo - are building the brains of the cars and trucks of our future. This episode's guest, Professor Cathy Wu, is building the roadways of our future. She is building machine-learning to predict the ideal infrastructure for the world's future mobility, the cost of building this infrastructure, and most importantly, what's the solution that eliminates traffic jams and gridlock forever...

Analyzing a person’s blood (and the cells within it) is often used to diagnose many health conditions and illnesses, from infections to leukemia and bone marrow disorders. Generally it's a long and expensive process. You have to go to the doctor, have a sample taken, wait for a couple of days for a trained professional to analyze the blood, and finally get your diagnosis.

Athelas is using machine learning to dramatically improve the speed and efficiency of testing blood cells...

*Warning* Explicit language used in the episode.

Benedict Evans, long-time technology analyst and occasional VC at firms such as Andreessen Horowitz, is well-known for his analysis of mobile, media and technology trends. He writes a popular weekly newsletter on the most important happenings in tech and he is also famous for his annual presentations that analyze macro and strategic trends in the tech industry...