The Future of Everything

While many users remain blissfully unaware, a battle is raging for the future of the internet. On the one hand are the large phone and cable companies who want to promote their services and to charge more for video and other data. On the other are people, like guest Barbara van Schewick, a lawyer, who champions a more democratic approach known as net neutrality. Net neutrality guarantees unfettere...

Beatriz Magaloni is a lawyer and a professor of political science who studies the challenges at the intersection of governance, poverty, and police violence in Latin America. On this episode of Stanford Engineering’s The Future of Everything podcast, Magaloni tells host Russ Altman that the solution to these challenges begins with studying the root causes as explained by people living in the commu...

Guest Nicholas Bloom has studied telecommuting for 20 years. Prior to the pandemic, he says, just five percent of days were “worked from home,” but the number is now closer to one in three. It looks like the hybrid workplace is here to stay. What was once thought to be a boon to employee morale has also helped companies slash real estate budgets. But, it’s not all sunshine and roses, as Bloom tell...

On this episode of Stanford Engineering’s The Future of Everything podcast, guest Mac Schwager talks safety in multi-robot systems, like those controlling the autonomous vehicles that will soon fill our future. Some engineers are helping robots communicate better among themselves while others are working on “emotionally aware” algorithms able to pick up on subtle cues in how others are driving to...

Our guest on this episode of Stanford Engineering’s The Future of Everything podcast, Ilan Kroo , is an expert in aircraft design. But when Kroo talks of aircraft, he means a new generation of flying vehicles that could transform our very concept of transportation—like personal flying cars that take off and land vertically or commercial airliners fueled by clean-burning hydrogen. Kroo says the rap...

Helen Blau is a stem cell biologist and expert in why, as we age, our muscles weaken, even if we get exercise and try to stay fit. In an age when humans are living longer, our muscles are critical to living life to the fullest and Blau is helping them keep pace by recruiting stem cells to regenerate youthful muscle in older people. Join us on this episode of Stanford Engineering’s The Future of Ev...

This episode's guest on Stanford Engineering’s The Future of Everything podcast is Lawrence Wein , an expert in the science of catching criminals using DNA left behind years or even decades prior. All it takes is a snippet of the killer’s DNA and for a relative of the killer to have registered their DNA with one of the many genealogy websites in operation today. Armed with those few details, genet...

Natural sounds in the world around us are based on the principles of physics. Today’s guest on S tanford Engineering’s The Future of Everything podcast, Doug James , uses those same principles to create computer-generated sounds to match the imaginary computer-generated objects and creatures that inhabit almost every movie or game these days. His algorithms speed the animator’s work and make the f...

This episode's guest on Stanford Engineering’s The Future of Everything podcast, management science and engineering professor Melissa Valentine studies a workplace phenomenon known as the flash organization. These ad hoc groups of experts are assembled online and exist only long enough to solve a particular problem—perhaps a week or few months at a time. As soon as the problem is solved, the flash...

Our guest on this episode of Stanford Engineering's The Future of Everything podcast, Elaine Treharne , is an English professor and an authority on ancient manuscripts. She's using modern tools like machine learning to unlock the secrets hidden inside these aged pages. Despite frequent predictions of the demise of physical writing, she says, books will never go away. Physical writing, she believes...

On this episode of Stanford Engineering's The Future of Everything podcast, robotics expert Oussama Khatib takes us on a deep dive into the vagaries of creating robots that swim. His most recent project is OceanOneK, a 200-pound, humanoid robot with stereoscopic vision and opposable thumbs that can travel nearly a thousand meters below the surface. When the pressure was on, Khatib had to redesign...

On this episode of Stanford Engineering's The Future of Everything podcast, Stanford infectious disease expert Desiree LaBeaud talks trash, literally. She says carelessly discarded plastics can collect water, providing a perfect nursery to mosquitoes that then spread dengue, chikungunya, Zika, yellow fever and other killer diseases worldwide. Plastic trash has become a public health nightmare as L...

Civil and environmental engineer Alexandria Boehm joins Stanford Engineering’s The Future of Everything podcast to discuss how a new form of epidemiology is using the tools of engineering to test wastewater to track COVID-19’s true spread. The wastewater that enters a treatment facility is really just one big biological sample, Boehm says. Testing it is far more accurate than COVID-19 case data, a...

On this episode of Stanford Engineering's The Future of Everything podcast, Stanford bioengineer Jan Liphardt talks about the challenge of getting good medical recommendations and diagnoses while guaranteeing that a patient's health secrets remain private. Computing on encrypted data is the way, he says. Tune in as health data expert Liphardt and host Russ Altman discuss the future of health priva...

Stanford pediatrics professor Anisha Patel tells us how engaging a local community about their health concerns can lead to impactful discoveries and interventions. She recounts how a visit to a middle school helped her team realize that simple access to drinking water was a problem in schools across the nation. Patel also shares how similar interactions during the COVID pandemic created a system o...

To better understand the inner workings of glacier — which are often many kilometers in depth — researchers are using ice-penetrating radar, which sends radio waves through the ice, to create maps of what it looks like inside. In this episode of Stanford Engineering’s The Future of Everything, Stanford radio glaciologist Dustin (Dusty) Schroeder explains how this technique works and how the data i...

When we think of synchrony, we often think of positive things, like ice skaters gliding in tandem. But if there’s too much synchrony in the brain – when neurons fire simultaneously – it can be a problem. In fact, abnormal neural synchrony underlies many neurological conditions, including Parkinson’s disease, epilepsy, and dystonia. In this episode of Stanford Engineering’s The Future of Everything...

Primary care medicine represents 52% of all care delivered in the United States, but when it comes to AI innovation, it’s been largely left behind. In this episode of Stanford Engineering’s The Future of Everything, Stanford physician Steven Lin , explains how AI could improve healthcare logistics, optimize patient care, and significantly lower costs by reducing the clerical burdens that cost the...

Take a look around your neighborhood and you’ll see a few things you like -- and, most likely, a few you don’t. Maybe you need a crosswalk near the senior home. Or garbage keeps getting dumped on the sidewalk. Now imagine if you and others in your community could document what you saw, collect those data, identify and agree on issues to prioritize, and then find feasible solutions for them? In thi...

Algorithms inform the news you read, the TV shows you watch, and the advertisements that appear on your internet searches – and they also have a say in who gets a bank loan, what medical procedures are covered by insurance, and who gets selected for a job interview. As algorithms are used to make these decisions, how do we make sure they’re fair? And what does fairness even mean? In this episode o...

Unfortunately, not every medical procedure is 100% successful. Due to the complexity of breast cancer lumpectomies, for instance, 16–25% of surgeries fail to remove the entire tumor, requiring patients to repeat the procedure. But to improve surgery success rates, and their efficiency, physicians are now looking to technologies from a surprising source: the gaming industry. In this episode of Stan...

Since they were invented more than a century ago, airplanes have gone from carrying a single person to ferrying many hundreds of people and several tons of cargo. Despite the increase in size and capacity, commercial aircraft have actually become quieter over the past several decades, thanks to a few key design changes informed by fluid mechanics, a branch of physics that studies fluids in motion....

Data shows that greater gender diversity on company leadership groups leads to improved business outcomes, says Stanford cardiologist Hannah Valantine. Likewise, she says, in medical research, where diversity boosts the development of new technologies. In this episode of Stanford Engineering’s The Future of Everything , Valantine, the former inaugural chief officer for scientific workforce diversi...

In our deeply polarized society, the prospect of holding thoughtful discussions on policy issues seems impossible. But it doesn’t have to be. In this episode of Stanford Engineering’s The Future of Everything, James Fishkin , a professor of communication at Stanford, describes the deliberative polling model, a system of structured and moderated small group discussions that can help bring people to...

Many of the lies, distortions, and pieces of disinformation online are easy to spot. But as technology advances it will become harder to tell the difference between video and images that are true and accurate and those that are manipulated or outright made up. In this episode of Stanford Engineering’s The Future of Everything,  Jonathan Dotan , of Stanford’s Starling Lab for Data Integrity, and ho...