Episódios
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In this epsiode, we are joined by Letitia Parcalabescu, PhD candidate at Heidelberg University's Department of Computational Linguistics, to share her insights on the fascinating world of Multimodal Learning. As a researcher and science communicator, Letitia has been thinking about the intersection between vision and text, a frontier of machine learning that has seen immense growth in recent years, for several years.
We explore her journey from physics to machine learning, unpack the influence of large language models (LLMs) on our understanding of linguistics, and delve into the relevance of vision and language interplay in machine learning. We discuss the key developments in multimodal learning, including joint embeddings, diffusion models, and LLMs, and shares her perspective on how these advancements relate to Artificial General Intelligence (AGI).
Alongside her research, we discuss the value of benchmarks and performance metrics in machine learning, as well as her own research projects. Letitia offers a glimpse into a typical research day in her field, and shares her motivations and learnings from her successful YouTube channel, AI Coffee Break: https://youtube.com/@AICoffeeBreak -
In this episode, we are joined by Christoph Benner. Christoph Benner received his PhD from ETH Zurich, studying aging in model organism.
We discuss the idea of treating aging as a disease, theories of aging, and some of its hallmarks. We cover the fascinating role mitochondria plays in aging and metabolism, and get into the weeds of the complex underlying biochemistry.
We also discuss pragmatic tools and interventions, from most promising drugs to behavioral measures, such as intermittent, and how much of it boils down to common shared mechanism between many species. We close with discussions on the scientific process, the importance of philosophy for science.
For inquiries, reach out to [email protected]. -
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In this episode, we are joined by Priya Donti. Priya is the Co-founder and Executive Director of Climate Change AI (CCAI), a global non-profit initiative to catalyze impactful work at the intersection of climate change and machine learning, and an incoming assistant professor at MIT.
We discuss the influential "Tackling Climate Change with Machine Learning" paper, opportunities, costs and risks of AI for climate change, climate justice, Priya's research on power grid optimization, implicit layers, the work and funding of Climate Change AI, and many more topics.
For inquiries, write a mail to [email protected] or reach out on Linkedin. -
In this episode, we are joined by our first artificial guest: OpenAI's new large language model based ChatGPT. After discussing large language models in several of the latest episodes and OpenAI releasing ChatGPT two weeks ago, it felt like the perfect time for this experiment. I tried showcasing some of ChatGPT different talents, from giving detailed essay-like scientific explanations to speaking other languages to making puns and improvising rap battles. To make the episode more entertaining, I adjusted some of the prompts and cut some of the responses. However, all of the responses are 100% real. ChatGPT's text output was then transformed via Polly from AWS to spoken word, which was further edited to make it sound more realistic. The thumbnail portrait was also generated artificially, using a GAN based on StyleGAN2. The recent advances in AI remain simultaneously impressive and slightly disconcerting. For inquiries, reach out to [email protected]
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We are now the Transformative Ideas Podcast (formerly the ACIT Science Podcast)!
In this episode, we are joined by Karsten Roth. Karsten is a PhD Student at the Explainable Machine Learning group in Tuebingen, supervised by Zeynep Akata & Oriol Vinyals (https://karroth.com/).
His interests lie in most things Machine Learning and AI related.
We discuss ideas surrounding AI for medical applications, deep metric learning, generalization and representation learning, the surprising success of transformers, diffusion models, large language models and joint representations, generalization, inductive biases and neuroplasticity, AI research and bad incentives in the publishing culture, ML conferences, the interplay of industry and academia, advice for how to be a successful researchers, physics as a foundation for ML, and much more.
For inquiries, contact [email protected] or reach out to me on Linkedin (https://www.linkedin.com/in/manuel-brenner-772261191/). -
In this episode, our host Manuel Brenner is joined by Alejandro Daniel Noel. Alejandro got his masters from TU Delft working with Acitive Inference and the Free Energy Principle, and is now a full time software engineer at Google in Zürich, specializing on machine learning engineering of language models for conversational AI.
We discuss the free energy principle, active inference, the role of uncertainty, latent variable models, language and tokenization, causality, diffusion models, DALL-E, paths towards AGI, JEPA, language and consciousness, attention, self-attention, and many more topics.Stay tuned for more episodes: https://mailchi.mp/0346443b6ddf/acit-global-signup
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In this episode, host Manuel Brenner is joined by Leonard Bereska.
Leonard Bereska is a PhD Candidate at University of Amsterdam, studying long term memory.
We discuss a dynamical systems perspective on neuroscience, how machine learning comes into play, and how this is connected to memory and models of memory in machine learning, AI ethics, consciousness, the role of noise, the connections between Bayesian models, ensemble methods and regularizations, companies and states as superhuman intelligences, dopamine, and many more topics.
Find Leonard's recent publications:
https://arxiv.org/abs/2206.13336
https://arxiv.org/abs/2207.02542
Stay tuned for more episodes:
https://mailchi.mp/0346443b6ddf/acit-global-signup -
Note: Audio quality will improve around the 12 minute mark.
In this episode, Ingo Fiedler from the Blockchain Research Lab joins Manuel Brenner for a conversation about blockchains and cryptocurrencies.
Ingo Fiedler is Affiliate Professor at Concordia University, Montreal, and co-founder of the Blockchain Research Lab, a non-profit dedicated to Scientific Research on Blockchain Technology for the Benefit of Society.
We discuss blockchains, Bitcoin and Ethereum, proof of work and proof of stake, the current crash of Terra and Luna, key concepts behind algorithmic stablecoins, why the holy grail of a functioning stablecoin is so important, humanitarian aspects of cryptocurrencies and the increasing role they play in developing countries, central banking, fiat currencies and inflation, the work of the Blockchain Research Lab, NFTs, self-sovereign identities, the metaverse, energy consumption of cryptos, how cryptos could help fund renewable energy plants and many more topics.
The blockchain research lab:
https://www.blockchainresearchlab.org/
ACIT Global:
https://acit-science.com/ -
In this episode, host Manuel Brenner is joined by Jonathan Banks, international director the Global Super Pollutants program for the Clean Air Task Force.
This is the final episode of a 4-part miniseries that ACIT is hosting together with the CATF. The Clean Air Task Force (CATF) is a global non-profit organization working to safeguard against the worst impacts of climate change by catalyzing the rapid global development and deployment of low-carbon energy and other climate-protecting technologies through research, analysis, public advocacy leadership, and partnership with the private sector.
In this episode, we primarily discuss the super pollutant methane. We discuss where methane emissions primarily come from, its impact on the climate, and how reducing emissions could have significant effects on reducing global warming. We cover why incentives are surprisingly aligned around methane, the role the gas and oil industry plays, detecting leaks via cameras and satellites, an increasing awareness around methane emissions, and a strong increase in political action in recent years.
We end by discussing why methane is a source of hope for the climate sector since it promises short term impact with good incentives and without relying on uncertain technologies.Stay updated with future episodes and other events ACIT is hosting: https://mailchi.mp/0346443b6ddf/acit-global-signup
Find out more about the Clean Air Task Force: https://www.catf.us/about/
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In this episode, host Manuel Brenner is joined by Carlos Leipner, international director the Global Nuclear Energy Strategy for the Clean Air Task Force.
This is the third episode of a 4-part miniseries that ACIT is hosting together with the CATF. The Clean Air Task Force (CATF) is a global non-profit organization working to safeguard against the worst impacts of climate change by catalyzing the rapid global development and deployment of low-carbon energy and other climate-protecting technologies through research, analysis, public advocacy leadership, and partnership with the private sector.
In this episode, we discuss nuclear energy, recent technological developments and third and fourth generation reactors, the important role nuclear could play in developing a carbon free energy sector, scaling and streamlining production, nuclear for hydrogen production, Europe vs. Asia, the risks of nuclear and how to assess them in light of recent developments in Ukraine, how the Ukrainian war has changed uranium prizes and changed the landscape again, how nuclear waste factors in, how European is changing its attitude towards nuclear energy, and many more topics.
Stay updated with future episodes and other events ACIT is hosting: https://mailchi.mp/0346443b6ddf/acit-global-signup
Find out more about the Clean Air Task Force: https://www.catf.us/about/
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In this episode, host Manuel Brenner is joined by Lee Beck, international director of global carbon capture strategies for the clean air task force.
In this capacity she lead the carbon capture strategy, program, and team, which is by now represented in the US, Europe, and the Middle East, and has tripled in size in recent years.
This is the second episode of a 3-part miniseries that ACIT is hosting together with the CATF. The Clean Air Task Force (CATF) is a global non-profit organization working to safeguard against the worst impacts of climate change by catalyzing the rapid global development and deployment of low-carbon energy and other climate-protecting technologies through research, analysis, public advocacy leadership, and partnership with the private sector.
In this episode, we go in depth into carbon capture and storage, what the state of technology is, how policy shapes incentives in the carbon capture space, how carbon capture connects to more ambitious climate goals and negative emissions, how carbon pricing has changed the landscape, what pilot projects are being built, how the US and Europe differ in mentality and how they can be complimentary, optimism and optionality, and many more topics.
Find out more about the Clean Air Task Force: https://www.catf.us/about/
Stay updated with future episodes and other events ACIT is hosting: https://mailchi.mp/0346443b6ddf/acit-global-signup -
In this episode, Manuel Brenner is joined by Armond Cohen.
Armond Cohen is co-founder and Executive Director of the Clean Air Task Force, which he has led since its formation in 1996.
The Clean Air Task Force (CATF) is a global non-profit organization working to safeguard against the worst impacts of climate change by catalyzing the rapid global development and deployment of low-carbon energy and other climate-protecting technologies through research, analysis, public advocacy leadership, and partnership with the private sector.
This is the first episode of a 3-part miniseries that ACIT is hosting together with the CATF.
In this episode, we discuss what the CATF is and how it works, current paradigms in the climate movement, the importance of optionality, why wind and solar will probably not be exclusive solutions to the issue of climate change, how to advance a carbon-free energy sector in developing countries without falling back to neo-colonial policies, optimism vs. apocalyptic thinking in the climate movement, politics and partisanship in the US and internationally and how they interact with innovation in the energy sector, what changes the endorsement of the CATF by the effective altruism foundation have made possible in recent years, and much more.
Find out more about the Clean Air Task Force:
https://www.catf.us/about/
Stay updated with future episodes:
https://mailchi.mp/0346443b6ddf/acit-global-signup -
In this episode, host Manuel Brenner talks to Mark Solms.
Mark Solms is the Chair of Neuropsychology at the University of Cape Town, President of the South African Psychoanalytical Association, and the author of 8 books and hundreds of scientific articles. His most well-known scientific contributions include discovering the brain mechanisms of dreaming, and combining psychoanalysis and neuropsychology in an approach he coined "neuropsychoanalysis".
In this episode, we primarly discuss ideas from his newest book "The Hidden Spring", which delves into the relationships between affect, its source in the brainstem, Karl Friston's free energy principle, and how it all relates to a new theory for a "hidden spring" of consciousness.
We discuss Mark Solm's motivation for combining psychoanalysis and neuropsychology and historic reasons for why the subject has been long neglected in psychology. We move on the talking about affect and valence, what role they play in our experiental life, and how they might give us a new handle for approaching a scientific theory of consciuousness. We discuss how current cortical theories of consciousness interact with problems surrounding Chalmer's hard problem of consciousness, epistemology, and metacognition, and why the current neuroscientific evidence points away from the cortical towards an affective view of consciousness.We close by discussing the relationship of affective consciousness to Karl Friston's free energy principle and the theory that Mark Solms developed with Friston, and questions of responsibility around using this theory to build an artificial consciousness.
Click here to stay updated with new episodes.
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Dr. sc. hum. Henrik Jungaberle is the Director of the MIND Foundation and a CEO of OVID. He is a researcher, science entrepreneur, and author in public health, psychedelics, and psychotherapy.
In this episode, Henrik Jungaberle speaks with host Manuel Brenner about augmenting psychotherapy with psychedelics, how psychedelic substances can and need to be combined with therapy in a clinical setting, whether psychedelics work more strongly on the mind or on the brain, in what ways they could transform psychotherapy (and in which ways they probably won't), what role capitalism and enterpreneurship will play, how to factor in historical perspective, and many more topics.
Find out more about ACIT under acit-science.com -
In this episode, Amal Ounali is joining our host Manuel Brenner for a discussion on international criminal law, European law, how national laws and international laws interact (and sometimes collide), human rights, discrimination, and many more topics.
Amal is studying for her Master of Law at the University of Geneva and is currently doing am exchange in the University of Utrecht, focusing on criminal law in a European and transnational context.
Find out more about ACIT under https://acit-science.com/ -
In this episode, host Manuel Brenner is joined by Rim Jasmin Irscheid. Rim is a doctoral candidate in the Music Department at King's College London, working on experimental music and 'world music' festival culture in Europe. Her research sits at the boundary between ethnomusicology and sociology.
We discuss the controversial history of the term "world music", the role music plays in narratives of integration and in the way Germany is dealing with its past, the instrumentalisation of narratives of other cultures, hallmarks of experimental music, the role of experimental music in Germany and the Middle East, making money in the modern music scene, organizing music festivals and the importance of life music, the role of Spotify and Youtube in today's music industry, affective musicianship, and many more topics.
Find out more about ACIT: https://acit-science.com/ -
In this episode, we are joined by Jasper Götting, PhD Candidate at the Institute of Virology of the Hannover Medical School, where his research focuses on the sequencing and monitoring of viruses.
We discuss what a virus is, the differences between RNA and DNA viruses, how we are all infected by Herpes viruses, and why this matters for organ transplants. We delve into flu viruses and corona viruses and some of their elegant and dangerous features, monitoring in the context of pandemics, virological weather forecasts, pandemic risk, manmade pandemics vs. natural pandemics, the risks of gain-of-function research, and the early warning center in Berlin.
We talk about Jasper's engagement in the Effective Altruism community and how this has shaped his career choices, about wild animal suffering, meat production, 80 000 hours, and many more topics.
The podcast is hosted by Manuel Brenner. -
In this episode, we are joined by Noah Weber, CTO and Head of Machine Learning at Celeris Therapeutics and lecturer at FH Technikum Vienna.
We discuss the challenges of developing new drugs, protein degradation, the promises of AI in revolutionizing the field, the pipeline Celeris Therapeutics is developing, and how graph neural networks and geometric deep learning come in handy in modeling protein interactions.
We talk about AI transforming medicine at large, from genomic-based diagnostics to a completely new outlook on longevity.
We close by discussing general artificial intelligence, machine learning and statistics, reinforcement learning, AlphaGo, software development vs. fundamental research, and many more topics.
The podcast is hosted by Manuel Brenner.
Find out more about us on: https://acit-science.com/ -
In this episode, host Manuel Brenner is joined by Julius Berner. Julius is a PhD Student at University of Vienna, where his research focuses on the mathematical analysis of deep learning at the intersection of approximation theory, statistical learning theory, and optimization.
We begin by talking about deep learning and its relationship to machine learning and artificial intelligence. We then delve deeper into the mathematical theory behind deep learning, distinguishing between approximation, generalization and optimization, and discuss some of the most important results and insights of recent years.
We talk about scientific machine learning and how mathematics, computer science and physics can come together, Julius' research in partial differential equations, and how neural networks can help solve them.
We close by discussing a typical research day, the difference between working theoretically and practically, what motivates research on a daily basis, the importance of not knowing where things are going, how you come up with ideas through geometric intuition, and Julius' favorite books. -
In this episode, we are joined by Marcel Moosbrugger, computer science PhD Candidate at Vienna University of Technology.
We talk about getting into coding and computer science, the advantages of being a researcher in computer science and implementing ideas quickly, the foundations of computing and mathematics, Gödel incompleteness, the halting problem and how it connects to free will and determinism, Marcel's work on the halting of probabilistic programs and its relationship to debugging, how formal methods are becoming increasingly important in making industrial applications like the Amazon Web Services smart contracts more secure, and how industry in science are working closely together on the frontier of AI.
The podcast is hosted by Manuel Brenner. - Mostrar mais
