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. Before joining Ohio State, she was Professor at Georgia Tech, where she was ...
Mar 30, 2022•53 min•Season 2Ep. 13
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. Shakir is a Senior Staff Scientist at DeepMind, an Associate Fellow at ...
Mar 23, 2022•52 min•Season 2Ep. 12
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 11 of Season 2, we're joi...
Mar 16, 2022•41 min•Season 2Ep. 11
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. While still a young company, SafelyYou has successfully reduce...
Mar 09, 2022•50 min•Season 2Ep. 10
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. Rather than joining a tech giant, Flora decided ins...
Mar 02, 2022•54 min•Season 2Ep. 9
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. Wayve is building global momentum for the use of deep learning to solve self-driving...
Feb 23, 2022•57 min•Season 2Ep. 8
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. Historically, these papers and codebases have originated from the leading universities and tech companies. Bu...
Feb 16, 2022•36 min•Season 2Ep. 7
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. Currently at MIT's Institute for Data, Systems, and Soci...
Feb 09, 2022•34 min•Season 2Ep. 6
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. From a simple fing...
Feb 02, 2022•44 min•Season 2Ep. 5
*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. He’s a voice of reason trying to sort out the technology issues of the day. In this e...
Jan 26, 2022•48 min•Season 2Ep. 4
While the world’s temperature rises, there are scores of scientists working around the globe to study causes and solutions. One scientist in particular, David Rolnick , has stood out as a pioneer of machine-learning in the fight against climate change. David successfully built a broader movement including others like Andrew Ng , Yoshua Bengio , Demis Hassabis , and Jennifer Chayes to champion the amazing possibilities that exist at the intersection of AI and the climate. He organized the first-e...
Jan 19, 2022•33 min•Season 2Ep. 3
In the second episode of Season Two of The Robot Brains, Pieter Abbeel interviews the Chief Technology Officer of Etsy , Mike Fisher . Etsy is a global online marketplace, where people come together to make, sell, buy, and collect unique items. It was founded in 2005 as an accessible listing site for DIY crafters and artists to sell their wares before blossoming into a widely-respected and mainstream online shopping site. It still maintains its whimsical brand balanced by its listing on the NASD...
Jan 12, 2022•38 min•Season 2Ep. 2
In Episode One of Season Two, Host Pieter Abbeel is joined by guest (and close collaborator) Sergey Levine , professor at UC Berkeley, EECS . Sergey discusses the early years of his career, how Andrew Ng influenced him to become interested in machine learning, his current projects, and his lab's recent accomplishments. The conversation concludes with Sergey's view on the dangers of machines not being intelligent enough and his advice for students seeking a career in robotic. | SUBSCRIBE TO THE R...
Jan 05, 2022•50 min•Season 2Ep. 1
Join host Pieter Abbeel on Season 2 of the The Robot Brains podcast as he explores how far humanity has come in its mission to create conscious computers, mindful machines, and rational robots. Episode 1 of Season Two will air on 1/5/22. Over the course of the season, you’ll learn about robots and AI that can drive you around a city, diagnose your health symptoms, and even keep your grandma safe from falls. Subscribe right now in Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you like to get your podcasts ...
Dec 26, 2021•2 min
On the last episode (Ep.22) of Season One of The Robot Brains Podcast our guest is Ilya Sutskever. Ilya is the Co-Founder and Chief Scientist of OpenAI. As a PhD student at Toronto, Ilya was one of the authors on the 2012 AlexNet paper that completely changed the field of AI, resulting in the widespread adoption of deep learning, resulting in the avalanche of AI breakthroughs we’ve seen the past 10 years. After the AlexNet breakthrough in computer vision, at Google, among many other breakthrough...
Aug 25, 2021•1 hr 3 min•Season 1Ep. 22
On the penultimate episode (Ep.21) of Season One of The Robot Brains Podcast our guest is Josh Lessing. Josh is the CTO of AppHarvest, one of the leading pioneers in Agricultural Technology (or AgTech). Farming is one of the world's oldest industries, but in many ways the technologies and techniques used by farmers hasn't progressed much in centuries. But with recent advances in AI and robotics, AgTech looks certain to transform the entire industry. At AppHarvest, Josh is helping to build some o...
Aug 18, 2021•54 min•Season 1Ep. 21
On Ep.20 of The Robot Brains Podcast, Pieter Abbeel is joined by Fei-Fei Li. Her legendary status in the field of AI precedes her on our podcast because she's been discussed frequently by many of our previous guests - many of whom are her former students. She is the Sequoia Capital Professor of Computer Science at Stanford University, Co-Director of the Stanford Institute for Human-Centred Artificial Intelligence (Stanford HAI). She was also the leading scientist and instigator of ImageNet, argu...
Aug 11, 2021•1 hr 2 min•Season 1Ep. 20
Joining us for episode 19 of The Robot Brains Podcast is Boris Krumrey, Global VP of Automation Solutions at UI Path. We have all heard of physical robots, autonomous machines that help humans with tasks in the real world, but what about "software robots"? Digital helpers who can be built, trained and used to help increasingly digital workforces with their computer based tasks - from HR teams onboarding new hires to updating spreadsheets or presentation slides. UIPath is a market leader in this ...
Aug 04, 2021•1 hr•Season 1Ep. 19
In episode 18 of The Robot Brains Podcast our host Pieter Abbeel meets Chris Urmson. Chris is one of the world-leading pioneers in self-driving. He led the Google self-driving project for several years - which later became Waymo. Then, in 2017, he co-founded his own self-driving company, Aurora where he is currently the CEO. In this episode, he discusses his involvement of the DARPA Grand Challenge, departure from Google, and his (and Aurora's) vision for the future of autonomous vehicles. | Vis...
Jul 28, 2021•45 min•Season 1Ep. 18
In episode 17 of our host Pieter Abbeel meets Peter Puchwein. Peter is the Vice President of Innovation at KNAPP, one of the world market leaders in warehouse logistics and automation. During their interview Pieter and Peter discuss the many ways that KNAPP has "innovation" in its DNA: from the company's forward-thinking founder Gunter Knapp back in 1952 to the multi-million investments made in hardware and software R&D today. Peter explains how the use of industrial robotics in particular a...
Jul 21, 2021•1 hr 4 min•Season 1Ep. 17
In Ep.16 of The Robot Brains Podcast, Pieter Abbeel sits down with AMP Robotics CEO and founder, Matanya Horowitz. Matanya is the founder and CEO of AMP Robotics, an industrial AI robotics company using automation to modernize recycling. An estimated $200bn worth of recyclable materials go un-recycled by municipal waste centres around the world. AMP’s incredible "waste sorting robots" recover this recyclable material from waste at superhuman speeds and with extremely high accuracy. Matanya's AI-...
Jul 14, 2021•55 min•Season 1Ep. 16
On Episode 15 of The Robot Brains Podcast, Pieter Abbeel is joined by Anca Dragan. Anca is a professor at UC Berkeley, where she is the director of the Interact Lab where she is working on the goal of enabling robots to work with, around, and in support of people. Because of her success in the field, Forbes magazine dubbed Anca: "the woman teaching AI about human values". Alongside her academic research, Anca is also a staff research scientist at the autonomous vehicle startup Waymo. In her disc...
Jul 07, 2021•1 hr 41 min•Season 1Ep. 15
In episode 14 of The Robot Brains Podcast we sit down and chat with Mike Volpi of Index Ventures. Index is one of the largest and best known VC firms in Silicon Valley. Mike joined Index Ventures in 2009, helping to establish the firm's San Francisco office which has become one of the largest parts of their business today. Mike invests primarily in infrastructure, open-source, and artificial intelligence companies and he's currently on the boards of Aurora, Cockroach Labs, Confluent, Elastic, Ko...
Jun 30, 2021•1 hr 25 min•Season 1Ep. 14
In episode thirteen of The Robot Brains Podcast we meet Mary "Missy" Cummings, former US Airforce fighter pilot and Professor at the Duke University Pratt School of Engineering. Missy tells us her incredible story moving from the theatre of war to the laboratories of computer sciences and explains how she became one of the chief proponents in the movement to ensure AI-to-human (like autonomous vehicles) interactions have stricter safety controls. During her chat with our host Pieter Abbeel, Miss...
Jun 23, 2021•1 hr 26 min•Season 1Ep. 13
In episode twelve of The Robot Brains Podcast we are joined by Charles Isbell Jr, professor and Dean of the College of Computing at the Georgia Institute of Technology. After starting his career as an industrial researcher at the legendary Bell Labs, and a long research career in Interactive and Human-Centric AI, Charles has more recently turned his attention to the major issues of ethics, fairness and diversity that are becoming ever more important as AI is being deployed in the real world. Spe...
Jun 16, 2021•1 hr 23 min•Season 1Ep. 12
In episode eleven of The Robot Brains Podcast we are joined by Alison Gopnik, professor of psychology at UC Berkeley and author of the "Mind and Matter" science column for the Wall Street Journal. She has written numerous books about developmental psychology and researching the ways children learn. Her TED Talk: "What do babies think?" has been seen over 4.2 million times. During her conversation with our host, Pieter Abbeel, we discussed the similarities and differences between the way robots a...
Jun 09, 2021•1 hr 34 min•Season 1Ep. 11
Episode ten of The Robot Brains Podcast investigates how hedge funds are using AI to find competitive advantages for their investments. Joining us to explain how AI is starting to be used for pure profit is Mike Schuster Managing Director and Head of AI Core Team at the New York-based Financial Sciences firm: Two Sigma. With decades of experience working in AI (including Google where he pioneered the ML technology that became Google Translation), when Mike first joined Two Sigma he was described...
Jun 02, 2021•1 hr 24 min•Season 1Ep. 10
In the latest episode of The Robot Brains Podcast, we meet Graphcore's CTO, EVP of engineering and co-founder, Simon Knowles. Simon has had a long and illustrious career creating computer processors that have been used all over the world and in practically every industry. At Graphcore, he and his team have created the IPU, the world's first computer chip specifically designed to handle AI compute. In his chat with our host Pieter Abbeel, Simon discusses the history of AI compute, offers business...
May 26, 2021•55 min•Season 1Ep. 9
In episode seven of The Robot Brains Podcast, our guest is Covariant CEO and co-founder Peter Chen. Peter is one of Pieter Abbeel's closest collaborators for the past five years, with Peter having studied for his PhD in Pieter's lab in Berkley before then working together at OpenAI. Now they are co-founders of Covariant, which they started back in 2017 with Peter as the CEO. On this episode we explore the future of AI-powered robotics, looking at what happens when you teach industrial robots to ...
May 19, 2021•1 hr 5 min•Season 1Ep. 8
In episode seven of The Robot Brains Podcast, our guest is ABB's Marc Segura. Marc is the Managing Director of consumer segments and service robotics at ABB. Founded in 1988, ABB is one of the largest producers and installers of robots around the world and Marc has been leading the charge on many of the company's efforts for 20+ years. He has seen the introduction of game-changing robots in practically every major industry, from car manufacturing in Germany to restaurants in China. On this week'...
May 12, 2021•1 hr 4 min•Season 1Ep. 7
