The Embodied AI Podcast

Hi! I started a second podcast (the Brain Space Time Podcast), available here ! Listen to this episode to find about it! Timestamps: (00:00) - What is the Brain Space Time Podcast about? (01:39) - The podcast logo explained. (05:28) - Getting in touch. Links Henri Bergson's 1986 Matter and memory PDF (Cone figure on p. 61) Uri Hasson on temporal receptive windows paper Follow me For updates on...

Tony has a lab at Cold Spring Harbour, New York. Using rodents, his lab studies the neural circuits underlying auditory decisions. He is also developing new technologies for connectome sequencing and does some NeuroAI work. In the episode, after a detour on language and the Costa Rican singing mouse, we discuss his recent paper on 'The Embodied Turing Test' and Moravec's paradox; the idea that wha...

Alex is a professor and the director of the Institution for Language, Cognition and Computation at Edinburgh. She is interested in discourse coherence, gestures, complex games and interactive task learning. After we find out about Alex's background and geek out over Ludwig Wittgenstein, she tells us about Dynamic Semantics and Segmented Discourse Representation Theory (SDRT). SDRT considers discou...

Felix is a research scientist at DeepMind. He is interested in grounded language understanding and natural language processing (NLP). After finding out about Felix's background, we bring up compositionality and explore why natural language is NonCompositional (also, the name of Felix's blog). Then, Felix tells us a bit about his work in Cambridge on abstract vs concrete concepts and gives us a qui...

Beren is a postdoc in Oxford with a background in machine learning and computational neuroscience. He is interested in Active Inference (related to the Free Energy Principle) and how the cortex can perform long-term credit assignment as deep artificial neural networks do. We start off with some shorter questions on the Free Energy Principle and its background concepts. Next, we get onto the explor...

Mark is a philosopher of computation and cognitive science at Edinburgh. We start off the conversation exploring why we shouldn't attribute computation to stones and talk about instances of distributed cognition in classical antiquity. Then, we discuss the relationship between functionalism and extended cognition with the paradigmatic example of Otto's notebook and some implications for deep learn...

Barbara is a professor of Biorobotics at Edinburgh. We start with a quick philosophical exploration of robots using chairs, James Gibson's concept 'affordances', and whether insects have meaning. Next, we talk about how robots can be used to test hypotheses in biology. For most of the episode, we discuss the incredible things crickets, ants and the mushroom body can do. We explore some interesting...

In the first episode of the Embodied AI Podcast, Ron tells us about his journey from Stanford to machine learning and the people that inspired him to dig deeper on philosophical questions around embodiment. Ron lays out 4 dimensions to think about Embodied AI and situates its role in the history of AI - mainly the move away from Symbolic AI. We take a close look at his 2003 paper on Embodied Artif...

A short episode, where I discuss what the podcast is about.  My Twitter Email - lai24@bath.ac.uk Ludwig Wittgenstein: Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy overview Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus PDF Philosophical Investigations PDF Hubert Dreyfus: What Computers Still Can't Do: A Critique of Artificial Reason book Music Credit https://uppbeat.io/t/torus/progression License code: NT6SRVLHJCBXH1...