The Turing Podcast

Ever wondered what you were signing up to when you click the “Accept all cookies” button that seems to appear on every new website you visit? In the final episode of The Turing Podcast Series One, the hosts are joined by Dr Rebecca Rumbul to talk about The Privacy Collective, an organization that supports compensation claims arising out of the misuse of personal data on behalf of the general publi...

This week on The Turing Podcast, the hosts chat with James Walsh, a research assistant at The Alan Turing Institute, and Funmi Kesa, a PhD student at the University of Warwick, and hear about their work on “Project Odysseus”, one of The Alan Turing Institute’s key research projects in response to the COVID-19 Pandemic. By capturing activity in London to better understand 'busyness', the research a...

The ability to reproduce the research that other scientists have done to see whether the same results are obtained (or the same conclusions are reached) is an integral part of the scientific process, but are we doing it right and how difficult is it to do? This week, Ed is joined by Dr Kirstie Whittaker and Dr Sarah Gibson for a discussion about the reproducibility of scientific research, why this...

Today, September 16th, is International Identity Day! To mark the occasion, the hosts are joined by Carsten Maple, who is Professor at the University of Warwick and Fellow of The Alan Turing Institute, for a conversation about the trustworthiness of digital identity systems, some of the related work going on at the institute and other “open” initiatives in the digital identity research space. Iden...

This week on The Turing Podcast we're joined for a second time by Alan Turing Institute fellow Dr Peter Tennant of the Leeds Institute for Data Analytics, for a discussion about the scientific communities' response to the Covid19 pandemic. Peter is an expert not only in data science, but also Epidemiology and causal inference. The discussion took place in June when fewer of the UK’s lockdown restr...

This week The Turing Podcast welcomes our second external guest interviewee: Tom Chivers. Tom is a science writer and journalist who has previously worked for the Daily Telegraph and Buzzfeed UK, but now writes for the online publication UnHerd. His writing often focusses on topics such as rationalism and Artificial Intelligence and he has authored a popular science book titled: "The AI Does Not H...

On the podcast this week, the hosts chat with Dr Chris Hicks and Dr David Butler, who work as post-doctoral researchers in security and cryptography at The Alan Turing Institute. In an episode that focusses on one of the projects the institute has undertaken to help tackle the pandemic, they discuss how to build a privacy-preserving system for issuing and verifying Covid19 antibody certificates, a...

In the last couple of decades, we've all been witness to the huge advances in personal computing and the astonishing rise of consumer technology. We now live on a planet that's more connected than ever before, with over 3.5 billion smartphone users, many of whom use social media on a daily basis. But where is consumer technology headed and what exciting developments are there on the horizon? In th...

In this week's podcast, the hosts speak with Dr Eric Daub, a Principal Research Data Scientist at The Alan Turing Institute, about his involvement in measuring, monitoring, and analysing the performance of the world’s largest 3D printed metal structure: a 12 metre-long stainless steel bridge crossing one of Amsterdam's canals.

This week's episode takes us back the pre-covid19 era, when premier league football was still a thing! Dr Nick Barlow of The Alan Turing Institute's Research Engineering Group chats to the podcast hosts about his side project "AIrsenal", a machine learning manager for Fantasy Premier League. You can find out more about the project and even contribute to the code via these links: - https://www.turi...

Viruses like SARS-CoV-2, which causes Covid-19, aren't the only problem we face globally when it comes to infectious disease. Bacterial pathogens are constantly evolving, presenting a challenge for the worlds healthcare systems as more of the antibiotics we rely on to kill bacteria fail on those that have evolved antimicrobial resistance. In this episode, we chat with Victoria Carr, a PhD student...

Image recognition and classification is a hot topic in AI research, and these tools are increasingly being utilised by biologists with the aim to classify and distinguish diseases. In this episode, Bea Costa Gomes, a PhD candidate and Turing enrichment student at The University of Manchester talks about her research into developing software that spots shape differences in the images of diseased br...

Remember back at school when you were taught that correlation doesn’t mean causation, that increased ice cream sales are correlated with sunnier weather but don’t cause the clouds to part? Peter Tennant, a fellow of the Alan Turing Institute based at Leeds Institute for Data Analytics explains why it’s important for scientists to become more confident in talking about causation, how "causal infere...

Large datasets and modern machine learning techniques are fast changing the field of Astrophysics and our understanding of the universe. In this episode, we chat with PhD candidates Tarek Allam and Gordon Yip, whose respective research at University College London’s Department of Physics and Astronomy focuses on the classification of supernova light curves to help constrain theories of Dark Energy...

How can groups of people be empowered to share sensitive personal data such as medical records, with transparency about how they will be used? This is a question of particular relevance during the Covid-19 pandemic, when scientific research into the disease can greatly benefit from data collection at scale. In this episode, we're talking to Sylvie Delacroix, Turing Fellow and Professor in Law and...

How can data science support us in tackling the Covid-19 pandemic? Our Researcher at Large, Jon Crowcroft, speaks about how smartphones can be mobilised to track the Covid-19 pandemic. He also discusses how data science and AI research is playing a crucial role in finding solutions during the crisis.  

Recorded a few months ago, in our first episode we speak to Dr Radka Jersakova, Research Data Scientist at The Institute about her project that applies AI to air traffic control simulators.  Join us as we discuss how advances in AI may go some way paving the way towards putting more planes (safely) in the sky.