The Transformative Ideas Podcast

In this epsiode, we are joined by Letitia Parcalabescu, PhD candidate at Heidelberg University's Department of Computational Linguistics, to share her insights on the fascinating world of Multimodal Learning. As a researcher and science communicator, Letitia has been thinking about the intersection between vision and text, a frontier of machine learning that has seen immense growth in recent years...

In this episode, we are joined by Christoph Benner. Christoph Benner received his PhD from ETH Zurich, studying aging in model organism. We discuss the idea of treating aging as a disease, theories of aging, and some of its hallmarks. We cover the fascinating role mitochondria plays in aging and metabolism, and get into the weeds of the complex underlying biochemistry. We also discuss pragmatic to...

In this episode, we are joined by Priya Donti. Priya is the Co-founder and Executive Director of Climate Change AI (CCAI), a global non-profit initiative to catalyze impactful work at the intersection of climate change and machine learning, and an incoming assistant professor at MIT. We discuss the influential "Tackling Climate Change with Machine Learning" paper, opportunities, costs and risks of...

In this episode, we are joined by our first artificial guest: OpenAI's new large language model based ChatGPT. After discussing large language models in several of the latest episodes and OpenAI releasing ChatGPT two weeks ago, it felt like the perfect time for this experiment. I tried showcasing some of  ChatGPT different talents, from giving detailed essay-like scientific explanations to sp...

We are now the Transformative Ideas Podcast (formerly the ACIT Science Podcast)! In this episode, we are joined by Karsten Roth. Karsten is a PhD Student at the Explainable Machine Learning group in Tuebingen, supervised by Zeynep Akata & Oriol Vinyals (https://karroth.com/). His interests lie in most things Machine Learning and AI related. We discuss ideas surrounding AI for medical applications,...

In this episode, our host Manuel Brenner is joined by Alejandro Daniel Noel. Alejandro got his masters from TU Delft working with Acitive Inference and the Free Energy Principle, and is now a full time software engineer at Google in Zürich, specializing on machine learning engineering of language models for conversational AI. We discuss the free energy principle, active inference, the role of unce...

In this episode, host Manuel Brenner is joined by Leonard Bereska. Leonard Bereska is a PhD Candidate at University of Amsterdam, studying long term memory. We discuss a dynamical systems perspective on neuroscience, how machine learning comes into play, and how this is connected to memory and models of memory in machine learning, AI ethics, consciousness, the role of noise, the connections betwee...

Note: Audio quality will improve around the 12 minute mark. In this episode, Ingo Fiedler from the Blockchain Research Lab joins Manuel Brenner for a conversation about blockchains and cryptocurrencies. Ingo Fiedler is Affiliate Professor at Concordia University, Montreal,  and co-founder of the Blockchain Research Lab, a non-profit dedicated to Scientific Research on Blockchain Technology for the...

In this episode, host Manuel Brenner is joined by Jonathan Banks, international director the Global Super Pollutants program for the Clean Air Task Force. This is the final episode of a 4-part miniseries that ACIT is hosting together with the CATF. The Clean Air Task Force (CATF) is a global non-profit organization working to safeguard against the worst impacts of climate change by catalyzing the&...

In this episode, host Manuel Brenner is joined by Carlos Leipner, international director the Global Nuclear Energy Strategy for the Clean Air Task Force. This is the third episode of a 4-part miniseries that ACIT is hosting together with the CATF. The Clean Air Task Force (CATF) is a global non-profit organization working to safeguard against the worst impacts of climate change by catalyzing the&n...

In this episode, host Manuel Brenner is joined by Lee Beck, international director of global carbon capture strategies for the clean air task force. In this capacity she lead the carbon capture strategy, program, and team, which is by now represented in the US, Europe, and the Middle East, and has tripled in size in recent years. This is the second episode of a 3-part miniseries that ACIT is hosti...

In this episode, Manuel Brenner is joined by Armond Cohen. Armond Cohen is co-founder and Executive Director of the Clean Air Task Force, which he has led since its formation in 1996. The Clean Air Task Force (CATF) is a global non-profit organization working to safeguard against the worst impacts of climate change by catalyzing the  rapid global development and deployment of low-carbon energ...

In this episode, host Manuel Brenner talks to Mark Solms. Mark Solms is the Chair of Neuropsychology at the U niversity of Cape Town, President of the South African Psychoanalytical Association, and the author of 8 books and hundreds of scientific articles. His most well-known scientific contributions include discovering the brain mechanisms of dreaming, and combining psychoanalysis and neuropsych...

Dr. sc. hum. Henrik Jungaberle is the Director of the MIND Foundation and a CEO of OVID . He is a researcher, science entrepreneur, and author in public health, psychedelics, and psychotherapy. In this episode, Henrik Jungaberle speaks with host Manuel Brenner about augmenting psychotherapy with psychedelics, how psychedelic substances can and need to be combined with therapy in a clinical setting...

In this episode, Amal Ounali is joining our host Manuel Brenner for a discussion on international criminal law, European law, how national laws and international laws interact (and sometimes collide), human rights, discrimination, and many more topics. Amal is studying for her Master of Law at the University of Geneva and is currently doing am exchange in the University of Utrecht, focusing on cri...

In this episode, host Manuel Brenner is joined by Rim Jasmin Irscheid. Rim is a doctoral candidate in the Music Department at King's College London, working on experimental music and 'world music' festival culture in Europe. Her research sits at the boundary between ethnomusicology and sociology. We discuss the controversial history of the term "world music", the role music plays in narratives of...

In this episode, we are joined by Jasper Götting, PhD Candidate at the Institute of Virology of the Hannover Medical School, where his research focuses on the sequencing and monitoring of viruses. We discuss what a virus is, the differences between RNA and DNA viruses, how we are all infected by Herpes viruses, and why this matters for organ transplants. We delve into flu viruses and corona viruse...

In this episode, we are joined by Noah Weber, CTO and Head of Machine Learning at Celeris Therapeutics and lecturer at FH Technikum Vienna. We discuss the challenges of developing new drugs, protein degradation, the promises of AI in revolutionizing the field, the pipeline Celeris Therapeutics is developing, and how graph neural networks and geometric deep learning come in handy in modeling protei...

In this episode, host Manuel Brenner is joined by Julius Berner. Julius is a PhD Student at University of Vienna, where his research focuses on the mathematical analysis of deep learning at the intersection of approximation theory, statistical learning theory, and optimization. We begin by talking about deep learning and its relationship to machine learning and artificial intelligence. We then del...

In this episode, we are joined by Marcel Moosbrugger, computer science PhD Candidate at Vienna University of Technology. We talk about getting into coding and computer science, the advantages of being a researcher in computer science and implementing ideas quickly, the foundations of computing and mathematics, Gödel incompleteness, the halting problem and how it connects to free will and determini...

Today's guest is Thore Graepel, research group leader at Google Deep Mind and Chair of Machine Learning at University College London. We talk about intelligence, Thore's interest in games and what makes them so important for AI research, game theory and social dilemmas, the importance of seeing intelligence from a multi-agent perspective, the spectacular story behind AlphaGo, how self learning AI...

Driek Deferme is a law PhD student at KU Leuven, investigating the role of time limitations in civil and criminal law. We talk about the origins of the law, the importance of time limitations, the role of evidence, the recent abolishment of time limitations around sexual abuse of minors, the moral values of our societies, criminal law and civil law, and the different responsibilities of legislator...

Today we are joined by Benjamin Bargetzi, Senior Account Manager at Google, psychologist, neuroscientist, and president and founder of ACIT. We talk about Ben's career, his decision to go into the business world despite his passion for academia, what lessons he has learned in his successful career, what the differences between business and academia are, and what the two might learn from each other...

In this episode, we are joined by Györgi Buzsaki, Biggs Professor of Neuroscience at NYU. Györgi Buzsaki is one of the most respected neuroscientists working today, and his influential work on memory, sleep, neural syntax, and many other things, has been cited over 100 000 times.  He has also authored two fascinating books called "Rhythms in the Brain" and "The Brain from Inside Out", both of...

In this episode, we are joined by Will Millard. Will has two Masters degrees in public policy and is now working on implementing several research projects for the London-based think-tank Centre for Education and Youth CFEY (https://cfey.org/).  We talk about Will's motivation, the importance of education in general, different educational philosophies and the political dimensions of how they shape...