With the emergence of touchscreen smartphones, tablets and watches, so much of our lives is spent on our devices that in many ways we are what appears on screen. This “mediatization,” as Byron Reeves , a professor of communication at Stanford University, puts it, sparked a remarkable and unprecedented study of the way we live today. In a series of field studies, Reeves has recorded screen time of his subjects one frame every five seconds for days on end — with promises of absolute privacy, of co...
Aug 15, 2020•28 min•Ep 122•Transcript available on Metacast There was a time when all great cities were built near water. Whether for agriculture, aesthetics, energy or just plain drinking, water was a life-affirming, life-sustaining resource. But with the advent of advanced engineering in the form of dams, pumps and pipes, cities like Los Angeles thrived in places with very little fresh water. Now, global climate change is leaving many of those cities in danger of running dry. But there is hope on the horizon, says Newsha Ajami , senior research enginee...
Aug 12, 2020•28 min•Ep 121•Transcript available on Metacast In recent years, biologists have learned that the vaginal microbiome — the make-up of the bacteria in the vagina — during pregnancy may be the best predictor of pre-term birth. It is a valuable finding that could reshape obstetrics. What is perhaps more revelatory about this emerging knowledge is that biologists have learned it from a surprising source: statistics. Stanford’s Susan Holmes is one such statistician in the rapidly evolving science of using statistics to understand biology. Holmes i...
Aug 03, 2020•28 min•Ep 120•Transcript available on Metacast Mechanical engineer Sheri Sheppard got her start in engineering working on the Corvette for General Motors and later worked for both Ford and Chrysler. Back then, she was among a handful of women engineers in the auto industry, where she learned firsthand the risks a monolithic culture presents. Today, Sheppard is a professor at Stanford University, where she works to encourage diversity in the student body, in the classroom and in the curriculum. She says that engineering needs to reach beyond ...
Jul 18, 2020•28 min•Ep 119•Transcript available on Metacast We’re all familiar with those algorithms on our favorite e-commerce and streaming services that recommend purchases, books or movies based on what “others like you” have enjoyed. In the industry, they are known as “recommender engines.” Medical doctor Jonathan Chen is an assistant professor of medicine at Stanford and an expert in bioinformatics who wondered if the medical profession might benefit from similar artificial intelligence. He now creates recommender engines for doctors that comb real...
Jul 06, 2020•28 min•Ep 118•Transcript available on Metacast Artificial intelligence can help us design safety-critical systems for aircraft and other vehicles that are more robust to the many sources of uncertainty in the real world, says aerospace professor Mykel Kochenderfer . Building systems that meet the exceptionally high level of safety expected of commercial air transport is challenging, but Kochenderfer says that the key is in modeling the likelihood of the full spectrum of outcomes and planning accordingly. Validating the safety of these system...
Jun 23, 2020•27 min•Ep 117•Transcript available on Metacast With a degree in photography with a concentration in mathematics and boasting high-profile jobs at two of the most influential visual outlets in the last century, National Geographic and Instagram, Pamela Chen knows a bit about the state of modern photography and the algorithms that shape popular tastes. Now, as the Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence and John S. Knight Journalism (HAI-JSK) Fellow at Stanford, she studies how artificial intelligence is shaping the role of photography in socie...
Jun 17, 2020•28 min•Ep 116•Transcript available on Metacast Stanford engineering alumnus Michael O’Sullivan, now at the University of Auckland, likes to say his business is the “science of decision-making,” and that expertise paid off handsomely in his native New Zealand’s successful response to COVID-19. O’Sullivan pivoted his knowledge of computer modeling, usually reserved for optimizing business processes, to help predict how quickly the disease might have spread through the island nation’s 5 million inhabitants, and to gauge various national respons...
Jun 11, 2020•28 min•Ep 115•Transcript available on Metacast Megan Palmer , executive director of Biopolicy and Leadership Initiatives at Stanford, joins bioengineer Russ Altman for this episode of Stanford Engineering’s The Future of Everything podcast, to discuss how we can better prepare for future virus outbreaks and how the world could ultimately become a more secure, peaceful and prosperous place as a result of the lessons learned from COVID-19. The key to that future, she says, will be better coordination and communication among world leaders in sc...
May 12, 2020•28 min•Ep 114•Transcript available on Metacast As she tells it, the life of immunologist Catherine Blish has not changed all that much from what it was just a couple months ago. Her lab still studies deadly infectious diseases, but instead of myriad killers like HIV, dengue fever, influenza and the like, her team is now focused solely on the SARS-CoV-2 virus that causes COVID-19. Only a select group of researchers in the world are qualified to work with such serious viruses, and fewer still are properly equipped with the protective gear and ...
Apr 27, 2020•28 min•Ep 113•Transcript available on Metacast Seema Yasmin is a rarity in public health: a medical doctor who is also a journalist. As such, she’s seen a lot, from Ebola in West Africa to SARS and MERS, and now COVID-19, the most serious pandemic in a century. Yasmin is currently director of research and education at the Stanford Center for Health Communication. From her years in the Epidemic Intelligence Service at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention — a group widely described as “the disease detectives” — and as a reporter...
Apr 16, 2020•28 min•Ep 111•Transcript available on Metacast Child psychiatrist Victor Carrion has dedicated his career to studying and helping people deal with trauma, especially kids. He says that it is understandable that everyone in the family is dealing with some degree of stress due to COVID-19, and that’s okay. The key is to recognize and acknowledge the stress and deal with it head on. In this episode of Stanford Engineering's The Future of Everything with host, bioengineer Russ Altman , Carrion explains that stress manifests differently at differ...
Apr 16, 2020•28 min•Ep 112•Transcript available on Metacast When humans roamed as hunters and gatherers, the ability to retain calories likely determined who lived and who died in times of famine. Today, that evolutionary advantage may make us prone to diabetes. Join host Russ Altman , professor of bioengineering, and guest Sanjay Basu , a foremost expert in disease prevention, for a broad-ranging discussion of what works, what doesn’t and what new approaches—including an emphasis on community gardens and healthier diets—are on the horizon as society bat...
Apr 13, 2020•28 min•Ep 32•Transcript available on Metacast Imagine being born with just half a heart. Alison Marsden does, pretty much every day. She is an associate professor of pediatrics specializing in cardiology and also of bioengineering. She works with children born with such dire defects. Fortunately for those kids, Marsden is also an expert in computational modeling of cardiovascular system and developer of SimVascular, software that helps surgeons simulate surgeries on the computer without risk to living patients. The software provides researc...
Apr 13, 2020•31 min•Ep 60•Transcript available on Metacast Jayodita Sanghvi is director of data science at Grand Rounds, a startup that connects members to high-quality health care. Grace Tang is a data scientist at LinkedIn. Both are alumnae of Stanford bioengineering. While the connection between big data and bioengineering may not be readily apparent, Sanghvi and Tang say that the connection couldn’t be more clear or timely than right now when big data is now firmly entrenched in big business. From applications that help diagnose and guide people to ...
Apr 13, 2020•25 min•Transcript available on Metacast Stanford materials engineer William Chueh got interested in battery design as way to battle climate change. He looked across the energy landscape and understood that a future filled with renewable solar and wind energy will require more and better batteries to even out the troughs when the sun is not shining or the wind is not blowing. Chueh says battery design has come a long way in the last 10 years. But sating the energy needs of a future filled with countless smartphones, laptops, electric c...
Apr 10, 2020•28 min•Ep 105•Transcript available on Metacast Days after COVID-19 broke out in the United States, Russ Altman and colleagues at Stanford's Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence (HAI) scrambled to organize a full-day online conference to replace the in-person meeting they were planning for spring 2020. Their topic: using AI to defeat the deadly new virus behind COVID-19 and, in particular, analyze how countries were responding; developing new ways of tracking and anticipating its spread; reshape the search for treatments and a...
Apr 09, 2020•28 min•Ep 110•Transcript available on Metacast The co-director of Stanford’s Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence discusses how AI can reach its potential to enhance human capabilities and enrich human lives.Connect With Us: Episode Transcripts >>> The Future of Everything Website Connect with Russ >>> Threads / Bluesky / Mastodon Connect with School of Engineering >>>Twitter/X / Instagram / LinkedIn / Facebook
Apr 08, 2020•29 min•Ep 108•Transcript available on Metacast An expert in bioinformatics describes how better information and modeling can help caregivers stay a step ahead of the new virus.Connect With Us: Episode Transcripts >>> The Future of Everything Website Connect with Russ >>> Threads / Bluesky / Mastodon Connect with School of Engineering >>>Twitter/X / Instagram / LinkedIn / Facebook
Apr 08, 2020•28 min•Ep 109•Transcript available on Metacast New research explores how physical pushing and pulling between cells helps them differentiate into the myriad cell types in the body. Have you ever pondered how the cells in your hand knew to become a hand and not, say, a foot or a heart or an ear? Alex Dunn is a chemical engineer who thinks about such things a lot. He has always marveled at the way — from brain to blood to bone — the many cells that make up our bodies derive from just a single cell created when sperm meets egg. He says that pro...
Apr 03, 2020•28 min•Ep 106•Transcript available on Metacast A marine scientist travels the world to understand whether and how the ocean will respond to climate change, overfishing and other challenges. Fiorenza “Fio” Micheli grew up on the Mediterranean Sea, where she fell in love with the ocean and made it the object of her scientific career. Now a marine ecologist and co-director of Stanford’s Center for Ocean Solutions, her research spans the spectrum of marine science. She has studied the overfishing of sharks and how their absence affects coral ree...
Mar 17, 2020•27 min•Ep 107•Transcript available on Metacast A civil engineer explains how new insights gleaned from the flight of birds may one day be applied to fields as far-ranging as autonomous cars and crowd control. Anyone who has ever observed a large flock of starlings in flight – darting and swirling as if the entire flock were one big beautiful being – cannot help but marvel and wonder at how all those birds keep from crashing into one another. Nick Ouellette is studying the in-flight behavior of birds to draw lessons he can apply to engineerin...
Mar 06, 2020•28 min•Ep 104•Transcript available on Metacast How a revealing father-daughter conversation led to a career dedicated to studying and treating severe trauma and stress-related disorders. Shaili Jain first got interested in studying post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) on an East Coast road trip listening to her father describe his experiences during the 1947 Partition of British India. As she listened to details of his trauma and losses, many revealed to her only for the first time, Jain realized she had a deep personal connection to trauma...
Feb 29, 2020•28 min•Ep 103•Transcript available on Metacast A rapidly shifting legal debate is raging in healthcare over patient data and privacy. One legal expert says that even though regulations have lagged, a reckoning is due. How much control should patients have over who sees their medical records? How readily should researchers share patient-level data from their clinical studies? In today’s world, should the answers to these questions depend on whether the data are “anonymized?” These are but a few of the ethical and legal conundrums that Michell...
Feb 24, 2020•28 min•Ep 102•Transcript available on Metacast An expert in infectious diseases says that vaccinations are more powerful than ever, but better communication by the medical community is needed to combat misinformation. Stanford professor Yvonne “Bonnie” Maldonado is a medical doctor and an expert in pediatric infectious diseases. She has been fighting and preventing disease her entire career. She says that vaccinations have made remarkable progress in recent years and yet, despite well-known programs that have virtually wiped out once-dreaded...
Feb 19, 2020•28 min•Transcript available on Metacast The geostationary satellites used for communication and weather forecasting today are very large and very expensive — and most are still functioning perfectly when they must be disposed of because they run out of fuel. In their place, Stanford astronautics professor Simone D’Amico imagines an new era of smaller, less expensive, more efficient satellites that work in tandem to accomplish things their bigger brethren never imagined. He calls it distributed space systems — formations or “swarms” of...
Feb 13, 2020•28 min•Ep 99•Transcript available on Metacast Photonics engineers are working toward a day when fast, energy efficient computers do their mathematics using photons — packets of light — instead of electrons. Experts estimate that computers gobble up as much as 10% of global electricity. They predict that that share will only grow as data centers expand and the internet of things brings scads of new computer-controlled devices to the world. Jelena Vuckovic is an electrical engineer who sees a light on the horizon — quite literally. She is bui...
Jan 24, 2020•28 min•Ep 98•Transcript available on Metacast Connect With Us: Episode Transcripts >>> The Future of Everything Website Connect with Russ >>> Threads / Bluesky / Mastodon Connect with School of Engineering >>> Twitter/X / Instagram / LinkedIn / Facebook...
Jan 21, 2020•28 min•Ep 95•Transcript available on Metacast Computer programs that purport to help humans learn have been around almost as long as there have been computer programs, but their track record for success has been less than impressive. Emma Brunskill, an expert on artificial intelligence and machine learning, thinks that less-than-stellar record is about to change and has dedicated her career to finding new and better ways to teach computers to teach humans. Her research creates innovative "reinforcement learning" algorithms in which computer...
Jan 10, 2020•28 min•Ep 94•Transcript available on Metacast A biomechanical engineer explains how new diagnostics and improved understanding of human movement are yielding great leaps forward in the treatment of motor dysfunction. Engineer Scott Delp first got interested in the details of human movement when he was injured in a skiing accident and spent five years trying to recover. Back then, today’s powerful diagnostic tools, like MRI, weren’t generally available, and Delp experienced many roadblocks and false starts in his recovery. Delp turned that c...
Dec 13, 2019•28 min•Ep 97•Transcript available on Metacast 
