The Transformative Ideas Podcast

In this episode, we are joined by Corrado Pezzato, Ph. D. candidate in self-adaptive robot architectures at TU Delft in the Netherlands. We talk about teaching robots to plan for the future, the uncertainty of the world, behavior trees, the free energy principle, connections between neuroscience and robotics, information seeking, habits, the future of robotics, the dangers of AI, exploration and e...

In this episode, we are talking with Marvin Däumichen, director of research and knowledge transfer for the MIND foundation, and Ph. D. candidate studying sociological implications of cannabis discourse on digital media. We begin by chatting about the role online spaces play in shaping discourse around cannabis, the way state actors and educators need to take this into account, and what role drugs...

This is part 2 of our conversation with Moad Abd El Hay. Moad is a neuroscientist Ph. D. student at the Excellence Cluster CellNetworks in Heidelberg and founder of the UniMind network, a Europe wide initiative that organizes journal clubs on the scientific study of psychedelic substances at universities. The second part of our conversation is relatively self-contained, and serves as an introducti...

This is part one of our conversation with Moad Abd El Hay, neuroscientist PhD student at the Excellence Cluster CellNetworks in Heidelberg and founder of the UniMind network, a Europe wide initiative that organizes journal clubs on the scientific study of psychedelic substances (psychedelic research will be adressed in part 2 of our conversation). We explore Moad's work on temperature perception f...

In this episode of the ACIT Science Podcast, we are talking with Marcel Schliebs, who is currently pursuing his Ph. D. in Political Data Science at the Oxford Internet Institute, working in the context of the Computational Propaganda Project. We are discussing the influence of foreign actors in the 2016 and 2020 elections in the US and the spread of misinformation around the current Covid crisis....

In this episode, we are joined by Linguistics PhD candidate Sven Bloching from the University of Heidelberg. We talk about the psychological, philosophical and linguistic perspectives on taboos, how they relate to humor, why taboos and their respective breaking plays such a special role in our societies and subcultures, and how thinking about the importance of taboo breakings can help us understan...

In this episode, we are speaking with Charel van Hoof, former Senior Vice President and CIO at Philips and now PhD candidate in Artificial Intelligence & Robotics at the Delft Technical University, about the relationships between AI research and neuroscience. We talk about what intelligence is, getting into Karl Friston's free energy principle, discussing how it relates to brain function and h...

In this episode, we are talking to Ph. D. candidate Travis Greene from the Institute of Service Science in Taipei, Taiwan, about the philosophical, ethical, and judicial implications of modern data science, machine learning algorithms, and recommender systems. We talk about the ethical responsibilities of individual data scientists, a wider perspective on the role of behavioral big data in our soc...

In this episode, we are joined by Beatrice Ellerhoff, a Ph. D. student in  climate physics at the Institute for Environmental Physics in  Heidelberg. We talk about her work in analyzing long term climate variations going thousands of years back, the different time scales involved in the climate, and why it is so important to understand them in order to predict future variance of the clim...

For our second episode, we are joined by Cambridge-based biochemistry Ph. D. candidate Niklas Freund. We talk about the nuts and bolts of the genetic machinery at the heart of all living systems, about different layers of conceptualizing DNA, from the chemical to the biochemical to the biological, learn about the field of synthetic biology and the attempts to construct DNA with novel chemical ingr...

In this episode, we are joined by Ella Crane and Alexander Schuckert, both of who are currently pursuing their PhDs in the fields of quantum computing and quantum simulation. We get into the basics of quantum computing, the differences between quantum computers, quantum simulators, and classical computers, the potentially most useful applications of quantum simulators such as high-temperature supe...