The Robot Brains Podcast

In Ep.16 of The Robot Brains Podcast, Pieter Abbeel sits down with AMP Robotics CEO and founder, Matanya Horowitz. Matanya is the founder and CEO of AMP Robotics, an industrial AI robotics company using automation to modernize recycling. An estimated $200bn worth of recyclable materials go un-recycled by municipal waste centres around the world. AMP’s incredible "waste sorting robots" recover this...

On Episode 15 of The Robot Brains Podcast, Pieter Abbeel is joined by Anca Dragan. Anca is a professor at UC Berkeley, where she is the director of the Interact Lab where she is working on the goal of enabling robots to work with, around, and in support of people. Because of her success in the field, Forbes magazine dubbed Anca: "the woman teaching AI about human values". Alongside her academic re...

In episode 14 of The Robot Brains Podcast we sit down and chat with Mike Volpi of Index Ventures. Index is one of the largest and best known VC firms in Silicon Valley. Mike joined Index Ventures in 2009, helping to establish the firm's San Francisco office which has become one of the largest parts of their business today. Mike invests primarily in infrastructure, open-source, and artificial...

In episode thirteen of The Robot Brains Podcast we meet Mary "Missy" Cummings, former US Airforce fighter pilot and Professor at the Duke University Pratt School of Engineering. Missy tells us her incredible story moving from the theatre of war to the laboratories of computer sciences and explains how she became one of the chief proponents in the movement to ensure AI-to-human (like autonomous veh...

In episode twelve of The Robot Brains Podcast we are joined by Charles Isbell Jr, professor and Dean of the College of Computing at the Georgia Institute of Technology. After starting his career as an industrial researcher at the legendary Bell Labs, and a long research career in Interactive and Human-Centric AI, Charles has more recently turned his attention to the major issues of ethics, fa...

In episode eleven of The Robot Brains Podcast we are joined by Alison Gopnik, professor of psychology at UC Berkeley and author of the "Mind and Matter" science column for the Wall Street Journal. She has written numerous books about developmental psychology and researching the ways children learn. Her TED Talk: "What do babies think?" has been seen over 4.2 million times. During her conversation...

Episode ten of The Robot Brains Podcast investigates how hedge funds are using AI to find competitive advantages for their investments. Joining us to explain how AI is starting to be used for pure profit is Mike Schuster Managing Director and Head of AI Core Team at the New York-based Financial Sciences firm: Two Sigma. With decades of experience working in AI (including Google where he pione...

In the latest episode of The Robot Brains Podcast, we meet Graphcore's CTO, EVP of engineering and co-founder, Simon Knowles. Simon has had a long and illustrious career creating computer processors that have been used all over the world and in practically every industry. At Graphcore, he and his team have created the IPU, the world's first computer chip specifically designed to handle AI compute....

In episode seven of The Robot Brains Podcast, our guest is Covariant CEO and co-founder Peter Chen. Peter is one of Pieter Abbeel's closest collaborators for the past five years, with Peter having studied for his PhD in Pieter's lab in Berkley before then working together at OpenAI. Now they are co-founders of Covariant, which they started back in 2017 with Peter as the CEO. On this episode we exp...

In episode seven of The Robot Brains Podcast, our guest is ABB's Marc Segura. Marc is the Managing Director of consumer segments and service robotics at ABB. Founded in 1988, ABB is one of the largest producers and installers of robots around the world and Marc has been leading the charge on many of the company's efforts for 20+ years. He has seen the introduction of game-changing robots in p...

In episode six of The Robot Brains Podcast, Pieter is joined by Keenan Wyrobek, co-founder and head of product and engineering at Zipline. Founded in 2014, Zipline is an on-demand drone delivery service using cutting-edge drone engineering and AI to deliver urgent medical products. In our chat Keenan talks about his youth tearing down his school's 3D printers, how U2's Bono joined his company's bo...

In episode five of The Robot Brains Podcast we are exploring AI robotics in healthcare. We chat with Andrea Thomaz, the co-founder and CEO of Diligent Robotics and Professor at UT Austin. In our interview, Andrea talks about her hospital helper AI-robot: Moxi, which is already being used to help frontline medical clinicians and care workers with their complex daily routines. Host: Pieter Abbeel Ex...

In episode four of The Robot Brains Podcast we meet Cade Metz, technology correspondent for the New York Times and the author Genius Makers: The Mavericks who brought AI to Google, Facebook and the world. In our interview, Cade and Pieter discusses the history of AI from the perspective of the brilliant academic and business minds who helped to invent it. Host: Pieter Abbeel Executive Producers: R...

On episode three of The Robot Brains Podcast we have deep learning pioneer: Yann LeCun. Yann is a winner of the Turing Award (often called the Nobel Prize of Computer Science) who in 2013 was handpicked by Mark Zuckerberg to bring AI to Facebook. Yann also offers his predictions for the future of artificial general intelligence, talks about his life straddling the worlds of academia and business a...

This week's guest is Princeton professor and co-founder of AI4All, Olga Russakovsky. Olga's research has focused on the societal biases in the data used to train machine learning AI. In our second episode, she talks about why we need more diversity in AI, problematic junk in, junk out data sets and what it was like being the only female researcher in early AI labs. Host: Pieter Abbeel Ex...

On the first ever episode of The Robot Brains podcast, our host Pieter Abbeel sits down with Andrej Karpathy, director of AI at Tesla. Andrej is a world-leading expert when it comes to machine learning and training neural nets. In this episode he talks about what it's like working with Elon Musk, training driverless cars with machine learning and the time he had to sleep on a yoga mat at Tesla HQ....

In each episode of The Robot Brains podcast (coming soon), renowned artificial intelligence researcher, professor and entrepreneur Pieter Abbeel meets the brilliant minds attempting to build robots with brains. Pieter is joined by leading experts in AI Robotics from all over the world as he explores how far humanity has come in its mission to create conscious computers, mindful machines and ration...