One underappreciated fact about the explosion in genetic databases, like consumer sites that provide information about ancestry and health, is that they unlock valuable insights not only into an individual’s past and future, but also for that individual’s entire family. This raises serious concerns about privacy for people who have never submitted their genetic information for analysis, yet share much the same code as one who did. Today’s guest, Kuang Xu , is an expert in how genetic information...
Oct 18, 2021•28 min•Ep. 163
Readers of Eric Appel’s academic profile will note appointments in materials science, bioengineering and pediatrics, as well as fellowship appointments in the ChEM-H institute for human health research and the Woods Institute for the Environment. While the breadth of these appointments does not leap to mind as being particularly consistent, the connections quickly emerge for those who hear Appel talk about his research. Appel is an expert in gels, those wiggly, jiggly materials that aren’t quite...
Oct 04, 2021•28 min•Ep. 162
As the world has learned through the recent pandemic, epidemiological studies can be complicated by many unanticipated factors. Lianne Kurina is an expert in the design of epidemiological studies who says that the key to greater confidence is better design. The gold standard, she says, is the randomized controlled trial—a study that compares groups that are essentially identical by every apparent factor but one— the vaccinated vs. the unvaccinated, for instance. In the case of COVID-19 vaccinat...
Oct 01, 2021•28 min•Ep. 161
For decades, the general-purpose central processing unit—the CPU—has been the workhorse of the computer industry. It could handle any task—literally—even if most of those capabilities were unnecessary. This model was all well and good as chips grew smaller, faster and more efficient by the day, but less so as the pace of progress has slowed, says electrical engineer Priyanka Raina , an expert in chip design. Raina says that, to keep chips on their ever-improving trajectory, chip makers have shif...
Sep 18, 2021•28 min•Ep. 160
Most people know the seismograph, those ultrasensitive instruments that record every small shift in the Earth’s crust. But did you know that the very latest method for measuring earthquakes involves fiber optic cables that carry internet data around the world? Stanford geophysicist Biondo Biondi says that the waves of energy sent forth by an earthquake cause fiber optic cables to stretch and contract ever so slightly. Using precise mathematical algorithms, experts like Biondi can measure earthqu...
Aug 24, 2021•28 min•Ep. 159
Anyone who’s ever made weekend plans based on the weather forecast knows that prediction – about anything – is a tough business. But predictive models are increasingly used to make life-changing decisions everywhere from health and finance to justice and national elections. As the consequences have grown, so has the weight of uncertainty, says today’s guest, mathematician and statistician Emmanuel Candès . Candès knows this paradigm all too well. He is an expert in identifying flaws in today’s h...
Aug 23, 2021•28 min•Ep. 158
Electronics are everywhere these days, so much so that often we don't even register that we are using them. The use of electronics will only grow over time as engineers solve societal challenges through increased connectivity, faster computation, new high-tech gadgets, and energy sustainability. Against that backdrop, electrical engineers like Stanford’s Srabanti Chowdhury have been searching for new semiconductors that can expand the application space beyond the ubiquitous silicon. Among the op...
Jul 19, 2021•28 min•Ep. 157
It now seems more certain than ever that the world will make the all-important transition to electric vehicles, but that shift raises important questions about global preparedness. The world is going to need a lot of batteries to make it happen and engineers are rightly concerned about everything from the availability of raw materials to how many miles can I drive before I run out of juice? Simona Onori is an electrical engineer by training and a professor of energy resources engineering as well...
Jun 27, 2021•28 min•Ep. 156
Engineer Irene Lo studies markets, but not traditional marketplaces based in cash. Instead, she studies markets for goods/resources that place a high value on social goods like diversity, fairness and equity. Thus, Lo came to help San Francisco create an algorithm to assign kids more fairly to public schools across geographic, social, racial and economic boundaries. As it turns out, math is just the first step. The most challenging part was getting families to trust in the system, begetting a mu...
Jun 26, 2021•28 min•Ep. 155
Oft-heralded 3-dimensional printers can build objects ranging from simple spoons to advanced running shoes. While those objects are usually made very slowly, the latest printing technologies portend a new era of 3D printing in real-time for use in health care. The possibilities are endless, says Joseph DeSimone , who is an expert in translational medicine – the field of transferring promising technological breakthroughs into real-world products. He says printers he developed have led to the firs...
Jun 13, 2021•28 min•Ep. 154
Tina Hernandez-Boussard is an expert in biomedical informatics who says a new era of understanding the real outcomes of our health care systems is on the horizon thanks to big data, artificial intelligence, and the growing availability of electronic health data. She says that the combination of these tools and data holds the promise of providing never-before-possible insights into whether health procedures truly improve patient quality of life and for which populations. With these tools, she say...
Jun 12, 2021•28 min•Ep. 153
Nate Persily is a professor at Stanford Law School and an expert in election law. He sees the most recent presidential election as a fundamental change in the way Americans vote. For the first time ever, the majority of voters cast their ballot by mail, rather than at a polling place. It “was an earthquake,” Persily says, speaking metaphorically about the 2020 election’s profound implications for future elections. But not all agree it was a success. Republicans and Democrats are further apart th...
Jun 03, 2021•28 min•Ep. 152
Whether by injury or disease, paralysis has afflicted humans through the ages. Only now have science and technology converged to a point where scientists can contemplate a day when computers and the human mind can communicate directly to restore a certain degree of independence to people with debilitating spinal injuries and other physical conditions that impede or prevent movement. Electrical engineer Krishna Shenoy is an expert in such brain-computer interfaces and has built machinery by which...
Jun 02, 2021•28 min•Ep. 151
Sam Wineburg , a research psychologist at Stanford’s Graduate School of Education, recently conducted a nationwide study of the fact-checking skills of thousands of American high school students. He didn’t go about it with a survey asking the kids to self-report their own behaviors. Instead, he devised a live experiment that charged the 3,000 students in the study to determine the veracity of a now-famous bit of fake news from the 2016 election. Wineburg and team were then able to follow along a...
May 16, 2021•28 min•Ep. 150
Many have now become familiar with the term herd immunity, an idea few outside the infectious disease community knew just a few short months ago. It’s an elusive concept to comprehend, and harder still to achieve, but Stanford epidemiologist Dr. Julie Parsonnet says it’s important to understand just what herd immunity does – and doesn’t – mean for today’s pandemic. Broadly speaking, herd immunity is reached when enough people have either recovered from or have been fully vaccinated against an in...
May 16, 2021•28 min•Ep. 149
Imagine typing words into a text editor and watching on a nearby television as a well-known celebrity speaks those words within seconds. Computer graphics expert Maneesh Agrawala has imagined it and has created a video editing software that can do it, too. Given enough raw video, Agrawala’s application can produce polished, photorealistic video of any person saying virtually anything he types in. While he acknowledges concerns about manufactured “deep fakes” of political leaders or others speaki...
May 04, 2021•28 min•Ep. 148
Biology is not typically considered a mathematically intensive science, says Noah Rosenberg , an expert in genetics, but all that is about to change. Math, statistics, data and computer science have coalesced into a growing interest in applying quantitative skills to this traditionally qualitative field. The result will be better and more accurate models of life, ranging from genetic inheritance to the entirety of human society. The yield will be a greater understanding and, quite possibly, revo...
May 03, 2021•28 min•Ep. 147
Slowly but surely, the highly centralized, industrial electric grid that supplies power to the vast majority of American homes and business is changing. Our existing system of massive power plants and huge networks of high-voltage wires is giving way to a much leaner, decentralized system of small-scale power generation on a more personal, neighborhood- or residence-level scale. In other words, we’re going from an “infrastructure-centric” model to a “human-centric” one, says grid expert Ram Raja...
Apr 22, 2021•28 min•Ep. 146
The world’s once linear — take it, treat it, use it, dispose it — model of freshwater usage is changing fast. Despite two-thirds of Earth being covered in water, just 2.5% of it is fit for human consumption. And that share is dwindling by the day, says civil and environmental engineer and expert in water treatment and distribution systems Meagan Mauter . With a rapidly increasing population and climate change disrupting traditional weather and distribution patterns, access to freshwater is heade...
Apr 21, 2021•28 min•Ep. 145
Humankind has long harnessed the wind to its advantage. From ancient mariners to millers grinding grist, the wind has been an ally for millennia, but only now do engineers have at their disposal advanced computer simulations to better understand the details of wind flow and to optimize designs. Catherine Gorle is one such engineer who has made it her career to design better built environments able to improve walkability, temper extreme winds, shuffle air pollution far away and dissipate heat isl...
Apr 07, 2021•28 min
As the world moves to more efficient and cleaner energy solutions, there is a growing divide between the clean-energy haves and have-nots, says Anthony Kinslow II, PhD, a lecturer in civil and environmental engineering. Too often the divide falls along racial and socio-economic lines, as minority and low-income communities do not benefit from clean energy to the degree that whiter and wealthier communities do. The problem is founded in history and in the federal government’s askew system of fina...
Apr 06, 2021•28 min•Ep. 144
Electrical engineer Kunle Olukotun has built a career out of building computer chips for the world. These days his attention is focused on new-age chips that will broaden the reach of artificial intelligence to new uses and new audiences—making AI more democratic. The future will be dominated by AI, he says, and one key to that change rests in the hardware that makes it all possible—faster, smaller, more powerful computer chips. He imagines a world filled with highly efficient, specialized chips...
Mar 27, 2021•28 min•Ep. 142
Julie Owono is a lawyer, executive director of Internet Sans Frontières and a fellow at the Stanford Center on Philanthropy and Civil Society . She wants the world to know that the internet is the not the same for every person, everywhere. Born in Cameroon, and having grown up in Russia, she understands firsthand that every nation sets and maintains its own content standards. Owono has dedicated her career to establishing and securing basic digital rights, but also to developing standards by whi...
Mar 09, 2021•28 min•Ep. 141
Words are a window into human psychology, society, and culture, says Stanford linguist and computer scientist Dan Jurafsky . The words we choose reveal what we think, how we feel and even what our biases are. And, more and more, computers are being trained to comprehend those words, a fact easily apparent in voice-recognition apps like Siri, Alexa and Cortana. Jurafsky says that his field, known as natural language processing (NLP), is now in the midst of a shift from simply trying to understand...
Mar 08, 2021•28 min•Ep. 140
When Riitta Katila looks at old photos or movies about the space program of the 1960s, she sees one common thread among the people depicted there — homogeneity. The engineers and technicians who first put humans on the moon were, almost without exception, white and male. While society has come a long way in the decades since, Katila, who is an expert in technology strategy and organizational learning, says there’s still a long way to go. She notes that companies need innovation not only to reach...
Feb 19, 2021•28 min•Ep. 139
As the silicon chip embarks upon its second half-century of dominance in computing and communications, the field is confronting fundamental boundaries that threaten to halt that progress in its tracks. The transistor cannot get much better or smaller and the copper wires that connect them cannot carry much more data than they do now. But, says electrical engineer David Miller , an alternative technology that uses light instead of electricity has the potential to transmit vastly more data than pr...
Feb 10, 2021•28 min•Ep. 138
In recent decades, medical and biological science have advanced by leaps and bounds using technologies that allow us to peer into the brain in myriad new and insightful ways — MRI, CT, PET, EEG, etc. However, Stanford electrical engineer Jin Hyung Lee says, we are still missing critical insights that could lead to a cure for currently incurable brain diseases like Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, epilepsy and others. Even in diagnosis, we still rely on “diagnosis of exclusion,” where tests are used to ...
Feb 05, 2021•28 min•Ep. 137
Stanford’s Mark Schnitzer says several of the more exciting recent advances in his field of applied physics have come through developing new imaging technologies that peer into the brain as never before. What’s more, Schnitzer says the insights gained have put the world closer to solving long-vexing brain diseases, like Parkinson’s and others, where the circuitry of the brain seems to be malfunctioning. Schnitzer says that these new imaging methods are helping medical science discern the specifi...
Jan 29, 2021•28 min•Ep. 136
The old maxim holds that a lie spreads much faster than a truth, but it has taken the global reach and lightning speed of social media to lay it bare before the world. One problem of the age of misinformation, says sociologist and former journalist Mutale Nkonde , a fellow at the Stanford Center on Philanthropy and Civil Society ( PACS ), is that the artificial intelligence algorithms used to profile users and disseminate information to them, whether truthful or not, are inherently biased agains...
Jan 23, 2021•28 min•Ep. 135
Stanford’s Karen Liu is a computer scientist who works in robotics. She hopes that someday machines might take on caregiving roles, like helping medical patients get dressed and undressed each day. That quest has provided her a special insight into just what a monumental challenge such seemingly simple tasks are. After all, she points out, it takes a human child several years to learn to dress themselves — imagine what it takes to teach a robot to help a person who is frail or physically comprom...
Jan 15, 2021•28 min•Ep. 134
