Computing Up

Ben Kuipers, emeritus professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the University of Michigan ( 🔗 , 🔗 , 🔗 ), joins Michael and Dave in a nerdly yet accessible conversation on topics ranging from Good Old-Fashioned AI, to how we understand space and time, to ethics and trust in society, to teaching Dave how to LISP properly in the 1970s. [Episode cover based on image used courtesy...

Moshe Vardi ( 🔗 , 🔗 , 🔗 ), the Karen Ostrum George Distinguished Service Professor in Computational Engineering at Rice University, and a multi-award-winning force in theoretical computer science, joins Michael and Dave in a wide-ranging conversation about robustness and resilience in computer science, engineering, and society at large. Moshe's talk " Lessons from Texas, COVID-19, and the 737 M...

Dr. Joy Lisi Rankin ( 🔗 , 🔗 , 🔗 , 🔗 ), an author, historian, and academic, joins Michael and Dave in a fast conversation about the history of computing and its systemic biases from the '60s to the techbros of today, and much more.  [Cover based on an image used by permission of Joy Rankin ] Note: This conversation was recorded in April 2024 but is only becoming available now.  Computing Up reg...

Cognitive scientist and psychologist Professor Steve Sloman of Brown University ( 🔗 , 🔗 , 🔗 ) joins Michael and Dave in a fun romp through connectionism, collective cognition, the illusion of understanding, and much more. Also, Dave illustrates his illusion of understanding of a bicycle in a true back of the envelope sketch --  [Episode cover based on image used courtesy of Steven Sloman]

Manon Revel ( 🔗 , 🔗 , 🔗 ), an Employee Fellow at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University, joins Michael and Dave for a conversation about the past, present, and future of democracy, and ways to understand it in both computational and practical terms. [Thumbnail based on image provided courtesy of Manon Revel]

Martha White, associate professor of Computing Science at University of Alberta ( 🔗 , 🔗 ) joins Michael and Dave in a conversation about AI, system prediction and control, the power of sparse representations, and many aspects of machine learning from new mathematical theory to the absolutely practical control of a real water treatment plant. [Thumbnail based on image used courtesy of Martha Whit...

Computer scientist Rich Sutton, FRS ( 🔗 , 🔗 , 🔗 ), a quiet giant of machine learning, joins Michael and Dave in a sprawling conversation touching on reinforcement learning, a hopeful view of AI, the importance of ideas, and a host of other topics. [Thumbnail image used courtesy of Rich Sutton]

Michael interviews Dave about his recent video ( YouTube ) on a 'theory of everything'. The conversation begins with Michael praising Dave for finally doing some theory, and descends from there.

Oren Etzioni, founding CEO of the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence and Professor Emeritus of Computer Science at University of Washington, ( 🔗 , 🔗 , 🔗 ) joins Michael and Dave in a conversation that ranges all over, from AI hype and language models to alignment and existential risk and ethics and morality to information pollution and cryptography and politics and more. [Thumbnail bas...

Jonathan Frankle, the new Chief Scientist - Neural Networks at Databricks ( 🔗 , 🔗 , 🔗 ) , joins Michael and Dave in a fast conversation about topics ranging from AI risks and fairness to the problems of Computer Science education to the beautiful messiness of modern deep learning. [Thumbnail based on image courtesy of Jonathan Frankle]

Michael and Dave talk about their love and hate relationships with writing, in the context of Dave's foray into publishing "Companionate Caring" and Michael's upcoming MIT Press book "Code to Joy" .   (This conversation is Part 2 of Where The Hell Have Michael & Dave Been?)

Michael and Dave catch up on where the hell they've been for the last couple months. (Mostly it's about busy, but Dave wants to blame everything on AI.)

Michael Levin ( 🔗 , 🔗 , 🔗 ) is the director of the Allen Discovery Center at Tufts University, and Distinguished Professor of Biology and Vannevar Bush Chair, among several other roles. In this episode he talks with Michael and Dave about computing writ very large indeed, with topics ranging from the meaning of life and agency to the problems of computability theory to the ways Levin's TAME mod...

Cynthia Rudin, the Earl D. McLean, Jr. Professor of Computer Science, Electrical and Computer Engineering, Statistical Science, Mathematics,and Biostatistics & Bioinformatics at Duke University ( 🔗 , 🔗 , 🔗 ), joins Michael and Dave for a fast and feisty conversation about how to make machines we can understand and control, with high-stakes examples like predicting power failures in New York Cit...

Vukosi Marivate, Associate Professor of Computer Science and ABSA UP Chair of Data Science at the University of Pretoria ( 🔗 , 🔗 , 🔗 ), joins Michael and Dave for a discussion of AI and machine learning research across Africa and around the world, and the challenges of centralization and efficiency versus diversification at the edge, and what each can learn from the other. [Title card based on...

Andrew Davison is Professor of Robot Vision ( 🔗 ) at Imperial College London, and leads the Dyson Robotics Laboratory ( 🔗 ). Andrew invented the SLAM algorithm for robot mapping and navigation, and as this fast conversation makes clear, Dave and Michael are both big fans. [Thumbnail based on image courtesy of Andrew Davison]

Reclusive New York Times best-selling author John Twelve Hawks ( 🔗 , 🔗 ,  🔗 ) joins Michael and Dave to discuss problems of the world today and possibilities of the world tomorrow -- including AI risks, technological centralization, machines acting like people and people acting like machines, sex drives for sexbots, and the question of unintended consequences.

Peter Norvig 🔗 , who literally (co)wrote the book 🔗 on Artificial Intelligence in the 1990s, talks with Michael and Dave about how the field has changed over the years, AI fairness and ethics, what is a symbol, and much more. [Cover image based on "Peter Norvig in 2019 at the Interval"  🔗 , licensed CC BY-SA 4.0 by Christopher Michel (Cmichel67 🔗 on Wikipedia)]

Oriel FeldmanHall, Brown University assistant professor and director of the Social and Affective Neuroscience Lab ( 🔗 , 🔗 ), joins Michael and Dave in a wide-ranging discussion starting with what reinforcement learning does and doesn't mean -- and she turns the tables to ask what computer scientists do and don't get wrong about mind and brain and learning in general.

Michael and Dave tackle the big questions and settle two of them: Is Agency A Zero Sum Game? Why Do (Internet of) Things Suck? How Can We Turn Computation Away From Centralization? [Image of ancient Philips Hue Controller operating without internet access, used by permission of Dave the owner]

James Tompkin 🔗 , assistant Professor of Computer Science at Brown University 🔗 , joins Michael and Dave to talk about visual computing research writ large, with topics ranging from the relevance of traditional computer graphics in the era of machine learning, to differentiable rendering and neural radiance fields, to DALL-E 2 and remixing Hitchcock's "Rear Window" at the Museum of the Moving Im...

Ellie Pavlick, Assistant Professor of Computer Science at Brown University ( 🔗 ) and Research Scientist at Google AI ( 🔗 ), joins Michael and Dave in a quick discussion of the remarkable new large AI language models. Topics range from what is and isn't known about the models, and by them, to if or how scared should we be of them, to what 'traditional' sciences like linguistics bring to artificia...

Andrew Critch ( 🔗 ), a mathematician, AI researcher, organizer and activist (cofounder 🔗 , researcher 🔗 , cofounder 🔗 ),  joins Michael and Dave for a fast-moving fifty minutes about existential risks (and opportunities) of AI and other technologies, the limits of intelligence, and the importance of structure at all scales and having a good spirit.

Dave tries to explain why he thinks the best way to understand people and other living things is via computation and programming languages, via codebases and code transmissions. Michael tries to help Dave sound slightly sane. [Image based on still frame from "We Are Coders" ]

Fiery Cushman @fierycushman , professor of psychology at Harvard University 🔗 , joins Michael and Dave in a wonderful conversation about morality seen both cognitively and computationally, with topics ranging from trolley problems and fake guns to the wisdom of the ancestors and the hubris of science to what makes moral thinking special. [Title image courtesy of Fiery Cushman]