The Future of Everything

The old maxim holds that a lie spreads much faster than a truth, but it has taken the global reach and lightning speed of social media to lay it bare before the world. One problem of the age of misinformation, says sociologist and former journalist Mutale Nkonde , a fellow at the Stanford Center on Philanthropy and Civil Society ( PACS ), is that the artificial intelligence algorithms used to prof...

Stanford’s Karen Liu is a computer scientist who works in robotics. She hopes that someday machines might take on caregiving roles, like helping medical patients get dressed and undressed each day. That quest has provided her a special insight into just what a monumental challenge such seemingly simple tasks are. After all, she points out, it takes a human child several years to learn to dress the...

It has been said that batteries hold the key to a sustainable future. But so-called “clean energy” does not come without environmental costs. For instance, says Stanford geoscientist Jef Caers , the batteries in a single Tesla contain some 4.5 kilograms — about 10 pounds — of cobalt, in addition to plenty of lithium and nickel, too.  With some 300 million cars in the U.S. right now, a full transit...

Evan Reed and a team of scientists recently identified a promising solid material that could replace highly flammable liquid electrolytes in lithium-ion batteries. The trick? Reed didn’t discover the material the old-fashioned way, using trial and error to narrow down a list of candidates. Instead, he used computers to do the legwork for him. He says that until recent advances in computer science,...

Renée DiResta is research manager at the Stanford Internet Observatory , a multi-disciplinary center that focuses on abuses of information technology, particularly social media. She’s an expert in the role technology platforms and their “curatorial” algorithms play in the rise and spread of misinformation and disinformation. Fresh off an intense period keeping watch over the 2020 U.S. elections fo...

Once the bathwater is drained, the toilet flushed or the laundry done, few give a passing thought to the wastewater that leaves our homes. But chemical engineer Will Tarpeh might change your mind, if you give him the chance. Tarpeh says that that water is a literal mine of valuable chemicals. Chemicals like nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium make great fertilizers. Lithium can be used in lithium i...

Bioengineer Kwabena Boahen builds highly efficient “neuromorphic” supercomputers modeled on the human brain. He hopes they will drive the artificial intelligence future. He uses an analogy when describing the goal of his work: “It’s LA versus Manhattan.”    Boahen means structurally. Today’s chips are two dimensional — flat and spread out, like LA. Tomorrow’s chips will be stacked, like the floors...

In a world where a drug takes years and billions of dollars to develop, just one in 20 candidates makes it to market. Daphne Koller is betting artificial intelligence can change that dynamic. Twenty years ago, when she first started using artificial intelligence to venture into medicine and biology, Koller was stymied by a lack of data. There wasn’t enough of it and what there was, was often not w...

When Stanford bioengineer Markus Covert first decided to create a computer model able to simulate the behavior of a single cell, he was held back by more than an incomplete understanding of how a cell functions, but also by a lack of computer power. His early models would take more than 10 hours to churn through a single simulation and that was when using a supercomputer capable of billions of cal...

COVID-19 is changing how many scientists, like Stanford sleep expert Rafael Pelayo , MD, view their field. First off, the shift to telemedicine is providing Pelayo, author of the new book How to Sleep , an unprecedented glimpse into the sleep environments of his patients. “I’m making house calls for the first time,” he says. Second, surprisingly, some of his patients, unburdened of long commutes,...

Marietje Schaake  was a Member of the European Parliament from 2009 to 2019 and now serves as the international policy director at Stanford University’s Cyber Policy Center and international policy fellow at Stanford’s Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence. As she has watched democracy evolve in the age of instantaneous global communication and hyperconnected social media, she has g...

Andrew Huberman is a Stanford neurobiologist and ophthalmologist keenly interested in the biology of stress and ways to manage stress. He’s developed and tested a number of stress-relieving techniques — from specific patterns of breathing to visual tools — and uses virtual reality to help humans control their stress in adaptive ways. He is also testing how people can access better sleep using stre...

Manu Prakash  was in France when COVID-19 took hold throughout the world. There, the Stanford bioengineer, famous for “frugal science” like his $1 field microscope made of paper, witnessed the challenges a relatively well-resourced nation experienced holding back the disease. His head was soon filled with visions of the nightmare awaiting developing nations, given that a COVID-19 test in developin...

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...

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...

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...

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 st...

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...

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 likelih...

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) Fel...

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...

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...

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...

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 Disea...

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 Everythi...