The Turing Podcast

Join Aoife and Sally as they chat to Dr Tamsin Edwards about how she uses AI to predict rising sea levels, following her Turing Lecture at the Royal Institution. Tamsin is a climate scientist, specialising in the uncertainties of climate model predictions, particularly for ice sheets and glaciers.  Within her research, she also uses information about past climates to improve predictions for the fu...

Join Aoife and Torty as they chat with Professor Sarah Sharples about the current state of technology and AI around driverless vehicles. Sarah (chief scientific advisor for the department for transport) recently did a Turing lecture at the Royal Institution, discussing the topic. In this podcast, she’ll be answering a range of different questions from the evening.

This week we are joined by Manchester United women's footballer Aoife Mannion, Author and CEO of Glitch Seyi Akiwowo and Turing Researcher Pica Johansson to discuss online abuse suffered by football players and other athletes online. The Turing recently partnered with OfCom, who comissioned a report in relation to its upcoming role as the UK’s Online Safety regulator tracking abuse on Twitter agai...

In this episode, hosts Bea and Anneca are joined by Robert Blackwell, from CEFAS (Centre for Environment, Fisheries and Aquaculture Science), who tells us, among many other things, how an algorithm to detect different species of plankton developed in two weeks during a Turing DSG ended up being deployed six months later on a ship.

This week we welcome Dr Miguel Arana-Catania and Professor Rob Procter from the University of Warwick, along with Dr Felix-Anselm van Lier from Oxford University. The episode discusses their recent work in using machine learning to analyze large-scale peace dialogue transcripts from the war in Yemen, with the aim to assist conflict mediators.

This week the hosts are joined by David Beavan, a Senior Research Software Engineer and Dr Kasra Hosseini a Research Data Scientist, both of whom work in the Alan Turing Institute’s Research Engineering Group. The episode focusses on one of The Alan Turing Institute’s major research projects in the Digital Humanities known as “Living with machines”, which takes a fresh look at the history of the i...

In this episode Christina catches up with two of her former collaborators, Prithviraj Pramanik and Dr. Subhabrata Majumdar. The three of them worked as volunteers at Solve for Good (a platform to connect social good organizations with volunteer data scientists to solve socially beneficial challenges). The team discusses their work with UNICEF to build a post-pandemic global air pollution model to...

This week Ed and Rachel speak with Geoff Goodell, Senior Research Associate in the Financial Computing and Analytics group at University College London, and associate of UCL’s Centre for Blockchain Technologies and the LSE systemic risk centre. Geoff is an advocate for privacy as a human right in the digital world, in particular with regard to digital identity systems. Recorded in mid-2021, this e...

Ed & Rachel are joined by Dr Tim Hobson, Senior Research Software Engineer and resident Bitcoin enthusiast at The Alan Turing Institute! Tim offers his take on the phenomenon that is Bitcoin, the future of its adoption and how the underlying technology relates to his research interests.

The latest episode of the Turing Podcast features a special roundtable discussion with our strategic partner Accenture about career options in the data science sector. The latest episode of the Turing Podcast features a special roundtable discussion with our strategic partner Accenture about career options in the data science sector. Our hosts Jo Dungate and Bea Costa Gomes were joined by three in...

This week on The Turing Podcast, the hosts chat with Dr James Geddes, who is a Principial Research Data Scientist in the Research Engineering Group at the Alan Turing Institute. The discussion revolves around an all-important question: What actually is AI? James breaks down three categories of computer programs that could be considered AI: Simulations, Symbolic AI and Machine Learning, and the hos...

In this episode we talk to Dr Nira Chamberlain, president of The Institute of Mathematics and its Applications. We talk with Nira about Black History Month, mathematicians though history that have inspired him, and how mathematics can cross racial, geographical and cultural boundaries.

The hosts were joined by Dr. Nicol Turner Lee to discuss her research on public policy, designed to enable equitable access to technology and digital equity. We talk about themes in her recent book on the Digitally Invisible and the real-life consequences of the growing digital divide. Nicol Turner Lee is a speaker, author and technology innovator. As well as a senior fellow in Governance Studies...

We chat about all things science communication with two Turing colleagues: Ethics Research Fellow Mhairi Aitken and Science Writer James Lloyd. They discuss why we need science communicators in the first place, what makes for good communication, and what specific challenges are associated with communicating data science and AI research to the general public.

This week on the podcast, we bring you a conversation the hosts had last December with PhD candidate Elizabeth Seger. Elizabeth studies at The University of Cambridge and is a research assistant at the Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence. Talking about her work with The Alan Turing Institute, she explains how informed decision making in democracies is being impacted by modern technolo...

In this episode hosts Jo Dungate and Rachel Winstanley speak to Andrew Holding, a Senior Research Associate at Cancer Research UK's (CRUK) Cambridge Institute and Turing Fellow. Andrew discusses how his research is using machine learning to understand the biology that underlies breast cancer to help improve treatments.

The hosts chat with to Professor Robert Foley, who works on Human Evolution at the University of Cambridge and is a Fellow of The Alan Turing Institute. The conversation takes a broad view of how our understanding of human evolution has changed in recent decades and focusses in on the Turing institute’s Palaeoanalytics project, which involves applying data science and machine learning methods to n...

AI is widely lauded as a way of reducing the burden on human online content moderators. However, to understand whether AI could, and should, replace human moderators, we need to understand its strengths and limitations. In this episode our hosts speak to the researchers Paul Röttger and Bertie Vidgen to discuss how they are attempting to tackle online hate speech, in particular through their work...

In an interview recorded last year, Jo & Ed are joined by Dr Omar A Guerrero, an Economist & Computational Social Scientist at The Alan Turing Institute & UCL Department of Economics, whose research focusses on economic behaviour and institutions from an interdisciplinary angle. The episode focusses on Policy Priority Inference (PPI); a technology developed in collaboration with the United Nations...

This week on the podcast, the hosts are joined by Sören Mindermann & Mrinank Sharma who are PhD students from Oxford University. Mrinank works as part of Oxford's Future of Humanity Institute, whilst Sören is a member of Oxford Applied and Theoretical Machine Learning Group and the episode focuses on the research they've recently had published on inferring the effectiveness of government intervent...

In this episode the hosts were joined by Professor Sue Black to discuss her inspirational life story and career, as well as the initiatives she has set up to encourage more women into the tech sector and her hopes for the future. Sue Black is a Professor of Computer Science and Technology Evangelist at Durham University , has set up initiatives such BCS women and the social enterprise Tech mums, t...

This week the hosts chat with Dr Dan Stowell, senior researcher at Queen Mary University of London and fellow of The Alan Turing Institute, about his work on addressing climate change via creating high-coverage open dataset of solar photovoltaic installations in the UK. It also happens to be research that podcast host Ed was involved in as you'll hear! You can check out the paper on this topic, pu...

On this episode of the podcast, we are joined by Lord Robert Winston to talk about engaging with the public about the science of combatting Covid-19. Professor of Science and Society and Emeritus Professor of Fertility Studies at Imperial College London, Robert has also had an incredible career in television, presenting the BBC’s The Secret Life of Twins, Child of Our Time and the BAFTA award-winn...

This week the hosts are joined by Professor Tim Hubbard, who is Head of the Department of Medical & Molecular Genetics at King’s College London, and Associate Director of Health Data Research UK in London, as well as being the Head of Genome Analysis at Genomics England. They discuss the recent success of Deep Mind's AlphaFold protein structure prediction software at the CASP14 competition and oth...

On the first episode of season 2, we are joined by Alexander Tokarev, a very recent PhD graduate from the University of Manchester. Alex does research in Organizational Psychology, Personality Psychology, and Psychometrics. With a strong mathematical and statistical background, he applies these to psychology. He is here to tell us a little bit about modelling personality traits, in particular the...