Alle afleveringen
221 afleveringen, van nieuw naar oud
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How Refrigeration Changed the World
8 augustus 2024 · 44 min
Refrigeration is an underrated technology. It completely transformed what billions of people eat every day. Lees meer
Today’s guest, Nicola Twilley, tells the story of refrigeration in her new book, Frostbite: How Refrigeration Changed Our Food, Our Planet, and Ourselves. Topics under discussion include: Why brewers were key drivers of refrigeration technology; the extraordinary technology inside a bag of lettuce; and why the technological frontier in food preservation may mean that we don't need to keep so much stuff so cold.
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Detecting Deepfakes With AI
1 augustus 2024 · 39 min
As generative AI tools improve, it is becoming easier to digitally manipulate content and harder to tell when it has been tampered with. Today we are talking to someone on the front lines of this battle. Ali Shahriyari is the co-founder and CTO of Reality Defender. Ali's problem is this: How do you build a set of models to distinguish between reality and AI-generated deepfakes? Lees meer
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Turning Old Cans Into Clean Energy
25 juli 2024 · 37 min
Aluminum is the most abundant metal in the Earth’s crust. It’s cheap, ubiquitous, and surprisingly energy dense. Peter Godart is the co-founder and CEO of Found Energy. Peter's problem is this: How can you use aluminum as a source of clean, renewable energy? Lees meer
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Moneyball, Soccer, and the Gap Between Analytics and the Real World
18 juli 2024 · 41 min
Sarah Rudd is the co-founder and CEO of the soccer analytics company src | ftbl (It’s pronounced “Source Football.”) Sarah’s problem is this: How do you model a sport as fluid and complex as soccer and translate the analytical insights from the model into meaningful changes on the pitch? Lees meer
This is the third and final episode of our series about people who are working at the frontiers of technology to help elite athletes perform better.
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Using Computer Vision to See What Coaches Can’t
11 juli 2024 · 42 min
Jimmy Buffi is the CEO and co-founder of Reboot Motion, which uses biomechanics to help athletes in Major League Baseball and the NBA. Jimmy's problem is this: How do you turn data about how professional athletes move into knowledge that helps them perform better? Lees meer
This is the second episode of our series about people who are working at the frontiers of technology to help elite athletes perform better.
Music: Let's Have Some Fruit (The Fruit Song) by J Buffi
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Scanning Every Muscle to Help Olympians Get Stronger
4 juli 2024 · 41 min
On the next few episodes of What's Your Problem, Jacob Goldstein is talking with people working at the frontiers of technology to help elite athletes perform better. Lees meer
Today’s guest is Silvia Blemker, a professor of biomedical engineering at the University of Virginia and the co-founder of Springbok Analytics.
Silvia's problem is this: How do you combine MRI scans and artificial intelligence to generate new insights that can help both elite athletes and people suffering from diseases that affect the muscles.
Springbok's sports clients include medical researchers, Olympic athletes, Major League Baseball and several professional basketball and soccer teams.
This summer, a bunch of Pushkin podcasts are coming out with Olympics-inspired shows. Revisionist History has a series about America's decision to participate in Hitler's Berlin Olympics in 1936. The Happiness Lab has an interview with a coach who coaches coaches. And Cautionary Tales tells the story of the family feud that gave us both Puma and Adidas.
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Making Blood Vessels in a Factory
27 juni 2024 · 42 min
Laura Niklason is the co-founder and CEO of Humacyte. Laura's problem is this: How can you use human cells to create blood vessels that surgeons can pull out of a bag and implant into patients? Although still awaiting FDA approval in the U.S., Humacyte's vessels have already been used to treat wounded soldiers in Ukraine. Lees meer
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Creating the Second Atomic Age
20 juni 2024 · 46 min
As demand for clean energy grows, engineers around the U.S. are working on a new generation of nuclear reactors. These designs reflect how nuclear energy could fit into the power grid – and our lives – in new ways. Yasir Arafat is the Chief Technology Officer at Aalo Atomics. Yasir’s problem is this: How do you mass produce nuclear reactors that are safe, scalable, and cheap? Lees meer
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Lifetime Terms, Lifetime Bans, and the Return of Roaring Kitty from Risky Business
13 juni 2024 · 44 min
This week on Risky Business, Nate and Maria discuss whether Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor should retire, the perils of sports betting among professional athletes, and what the return of Roaring Kitty means for traditional market analysis. Lees meer
Further Reading:
“Sonia Sotomayor Should Retire Now” from The Atlantic
“Should Sonia Sotomayor Retire?” from Slate
“MLB bans Padres’ Tucupita Marcano permanently for betting on baseball” from the NYT
“Lifetime bans and careers in tatters – recent sports betting scandals show how fringe players are vulnerable” from CBC
For more from Nate and Maria, subscribe to their newsletters:
“The Leap” from Maria Konnikova
“Silver Bulletin” from Nate Silver
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When the Robots Take Over… from Cautionary Tales
6 juni 2024 · 40 min
Tim Harford is joined by Jacob Goldstein to answer your questions. Does winning the lottery make you unhappy? Is Bitcoin bad for the economy? When does correlation imply causation? And what will Tim and Jacob do when the robot overlords come for their jobs? Enjoy this episode from Cautionary Tales, another Pushkin podcast. Lees meer
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Making Palm Oil Without Palm Trees
30 mei 2024 · 45 min
Palm oil is a cheap and remarkably versatile vegetable oil. It’s in a ton of products, from food to cosmetics, detergent, and chewing gum. But producing so much palm oil is really bad for the planet. Shara Ticku is the co-founder and CEO of C16 Biosciences. Shara's problem is this: Can you get yeast to make an oil that is just as useful as palm oil – without clearing land to grow palm trees? Lees meer
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Fighting Cancer with CRISPR
23 mei 2024 · 35 min
Last year, the FDA approved a treatment for sickle cell disease using a revolutionary new gene editing technology called CRISPR. Rachel Haurwitz conducted pioneering research on CRISPR as a graduate student. Now she’s the co-founder and CEO of Caribou Biosciences. Rachel's problem is this: How can you improve CRISPR and use it to engineer human immune cells to fight cancer? Lees meer
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How to Start 40 Companies (and Counting)
16 mei 2024 · 29 min
Robert Langer has co-founded dozens of companies, holds over a thousand patents, and is a pioneering figure in drug delivery and tissue engineering. Robert has solved a lot of problems, and is working on many more with his lab at MIT. But there is one big problem that has stuck with Robert his whole career: How do you get discoveries out of the lab and into the world? Lees meer
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The Cutting Edge of Energy Storage: Rust
9 mei 2024 · 36 min
Mateo Jaramillo is the co-founder and CEO of Form Energy. Mateo’s problem is this: How do you build batteries that can provide affordable backup power to the grid for days at a time? As it turns out, the basic technology was developed – and then mostly ignored – over 50 years ago. Lees meer
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The First Pig to Human Kidney Transplant
2 mei 2024 · 36 min
This March, doctors successfully transplanted a pig kidney into a person for the first time in history. Mike Curtis is the CEO of eGenesis, the company that raised the pig whose kidney was used for the procedure. Mike's problem is this: How do you genetically engineer pigs to provide organs – kidneys, hearts, livers – for people? Lees meer
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Designing a Drone That Delivers
25 april 2024 · 38 min
Imagine picking up your phone and ordering something from Walmart. Fifteen minutes later, a drone hovers over your yard, lowers your order down to you, and zips away. Adam Woodworth wants this to be so boring you don't even notice. He’s the CEO of Wing, a drone delivery company. His problem is this: How do you turn a flashy idea like a delivery drone into something as ubiquitous as a shopping cart? Lees meer
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How Do Psychedelics Work?
18 april 2024 · 32 min
Psychedelics are going mainstream. The FDA has approved ketamine for certain patients with depression, and may soon approve MDMA for post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). But a fundamental question remains unclear: How do psychedelics work? Lees meer
Gul Dolen is a professor of psychology and neuroscience at UC Berkeley. In a series of experiments, Gul has found evidence of a common mechanism that a wide range of psychedelics use to affect the brain. If Gul is correct, these drugs may be useful not only for people suffering from mental illness, but also for people dealing with neurological problems like strokes.
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Building Boundary-Breaking Balloons
11 april 2024 · 35 min
Kai Marshland is the co-founder and chief product officer at WindBorne Systems. Kai's problem is this: How do you build weather balloons that can stay in the air for months at a time, and pair the data gathered by the balloons with AI to make weather forecasts that are way better than anything we have today? Lees meer
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Building a Robot That Can Walk the Walk
4 april 2024 · 39 min
Jonathan Hurst is a professor at Oregon State University, and co-founder and chief robot officer at Agility Robotics. Jonathan's problem is this: How do you design a robot that can walk and do useful tasks that companies will pay for? The solution begins with trying to understand how birds walk. Lees meer
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Can Your Phone Tell When You're Getting Sick?
14 maart 2024 · 36 min
What does sickness sound like? Sometimes it’s obvious, like a cough, sniffle, or stuffy nose. But some conditions cause subtle changes that only a trained ear – or AI – can detect. Dr. Yael Bensoussan is a professor of otolaryngology and the director of the Health Voice Center at the University of South Florida. Her problem is this: How do you build a giant, public database of thousands of voice recordings, and use it to train AI tools that can hear when people are getting sick? Lees meer
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The High-Stakes Quest to Reinvent Cement
7 maart 2024 · 33 min
Cement is, almost literally, everywhere. It is extraordinarily useful, which is why humanity makes 4 billion metric tons of it every year. But cement is also extremely carbon intensive to produce. Leah Ellis is the co-founder and CEO of Sublime Systems. Her problem is this: How can you make cement, at scale, without emitting carbon dioxide? Lees meer
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How a Battery-Powered Stove Could Electrify America
29 februari 2024 · 35 min
Sam D'Amico is the founder and CEO of Impulse Labs, a company that makes induction stoves, with a clever twist. Sam’s problem is this: How do you build an electric cooktop that works just as well as gas, and can be installed without having to rewire the house? The solution that Sam found could eventually help transform not only kitchens, but the way homes draw power from the electrical grid. Lees meer
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3D Printing a Better Rocket
22 februari 2024 · 36 min
Tim Ellis is the co-founder and CEO of Relativity Space, a company with a unique approach to manufacturing rockets. Tim’s problem is this: How can you use 3D printing to make rockets more efficiently? Eventually, Tim wants to send a rocket – and printer – to Mars to build the first Martian industrial base. Lees meer
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Using AI to Help Doctors Save Lives
15 februari 2024 · 40 min
Every year in the U.S., tens of thousands of hospital patients die of preventable causes. For many of these patients, warning signs are subtle and easy for doctors to miss. Suchi Saria is the founder and CEO of Bayesian Health, and a professor at Johns Hopkins where she runs a lab focused on machine learning and healthcare. Suchi’s problem is this: How can you use AI to detect when hospital patients are at risk of potentially deadly complications – and how can you get doctors to listen? Lees meer
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Making Dam Good Hydropower
8 februari 2024 · 26 min
Gia Schneider is the co-founder and CEO of Natel Energy, a company that is trying to transform the way hydroelectric power works. Gia’s problem is this: how do you draw hydropower from rivers without damaging the ecosystem? As it turns out, we have a lot to learn from nature’s furriest engineers – beavers. Lees meer
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Using AI to Build Better Robots
1 februari 2024 · 35 min
Peter Chen is the co-founder and CEO of Covariant. Peter’s problem is this: How do you take the AI breakthroughs of the past decade or so, and make them work in robots? Peter was one of the first employees at OpenAI, the maker of ChatGPT. On the show, he talks about how AI has evolved, and why it's so difficult to teach a robot to fold a towel. Lees meer
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Teaching Computers to See
25 januari 2024 · 29 min
Fei-Fei Li is a Stanford computer scientist and the former chief scientist of artificial intelligence/machine learning at Google Cloud. When Li entered the field of AI in the 2000s, researchers were making slow progress, optimizing algorithms to incrementally improve outcomes. Li saw that the problem wasn’t the algorithm, but the size of the datasets being used. So she built a massive database of images called ImageNet. It was a huge breakthrough, and helped lead the emergence of modern AI. Lees meer
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Using Oil-Industry Tech to Create Clean Energy
18 januari 2024 · 32 min
Tim Latimer is the CEO and co-founder of Fervo Energy, a company that is using a new approach to produce carbon-free geothermal energy. Tim and his company are drawing on innovations from the oil and gas industry to expand geothermal energy production to new places like the Utah desert, and maybe one day, to Mars. Lees meer
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Understanding Obesity and Alzheimer’s via Epigenomics
28 december 2023 · 24 min
Manolis Kellis is a professor of Computer Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He works in computational biology, taking giant datasets relating to genetics and health outcomes and tries to understand what’s going on. Lees meer
Manolis’ research focuses on genomics, and a related field called epigenomics. Manolis’ problem is this: What are the cellular mechanisms of a disease? And how can we intervene to keep people healthy?
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Reinventing the Restaurant
21 december 2023 · 24 min
After working as a chef for decades, Anthony Strong’s dream came true: He opened his own restaurant. His problem was a classic one: Restaurants are bad businesses. So he set out to open a new kind of restaurant, with a new business model. In this episode, he tells us about how he accomplished that with his latest venture, Pasta Supply Co. in San Francisco. Lees meer
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The Giant Torch That May Help Save the World
14 december 2023 · 25 min
Selling hydrogen to make fertilizer is a huge business. It also drives tons of carbon emissions. Rob Hanson, the co-founder and CEO of a company called Monolith is trying to create hydrogen without emissions -- and to do it at scale, at a competitive price. A key tool he’s using: The biggest plasma torch ever built. Lees meer
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Fixing Uber’s Broken Culture
7 december 2023 · 25 min
Frances Frei and Anne Morriss are the co-founders of a training and consulting company called The Leadership Consortium. Together they specialize in helping leaders build trust within their companies. They also co-host a podcast called Fixable, which is a TED show produced by Pushkin Industries. Also, Frances is a professor at Harvard Business School. Lees meer
In today’s show, Frances and Anne share the story of their work with Uber. It started back in 2017, when a Harvard Business School alum who was working at Uber came to Frances and said the company needed her help.
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Murder Brokers from Hot Money: The New Narcos
5 december 2023 · 30 min
When a Dutch crime reporter makes an unbelievable discovery, a small-town murder case begins to look like an international assassination plot. Enjoy this episode from Hot Money: The New Narcos, a podcast from Pushkin Industries and the Financial Times. Lees meer
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Using AI for Creative Work
30 november 2023 · 35 min
A few weeks ago, Jacob Goldstein sat down with a writer and a composer on a stage in Chicago to talk about artificial intelligence. The conversation, which was part of the Chicago Humanities Festival, aimed to answer a big question: will AI kill creativity? Lees meer
The writer, Stephen Marche, is the author of several nonfiction books and novels. Earlier this year he tried something new: he used AI to help him write a novel called Death of an Author. (That book was published in audio form by Pushkin Industries.)
The composer, Lucas Cantor, has won two Emmys for his work scoring the Olympics for NBC and co-produced a Lorde song that was in one of the Hunger Games movies. And he used AI to help him write an end to Schubert’s unfinished symphony.
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The Little-Known Office With $400 Billion to Fight Climate Change
23 november 2023 · 24 min
Jigar Shah is the director of the Loan Programs Office at the U.S. Department of Energy. Last year, as part of the Inflation Reduction Act, Congress allocated hundreds of billions of dollars for Jigar’s office to lend out. Lees meer
The loans are supposed to go to companies that are helping the U.S. economy move away from fossil fuels. That can mean everything from building new nuclear plants to creating a giant hydrogen battery in an underground salt cavern.
Jigar’s problem is this: What’s the best way to lend out all that money – and do it fast enough for the U.S. to meet its climate goals.
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How AI Solved a Biological Mystery
16 november 2023 · 22 min
Pushmeet Kohli is vice president of research at DeepMind, an AI research group that is part of Google. Lees meer
Every protein has a unique shape. And understanding a protein’s shape is key to understanding how proteins work to keep us healthy, and what goes wrong when we get sick. But, for decades, figuring out the shape of a protein was a hard problem that could take years of work.
Then Pushmeet and his colleagues built an AI model called AlphaFold that could accurately predict the shape of hundreds of millions of proteins. It’s one of the most impressive real-world AI success stories that we’ve seen so far. And it turns out that the lessons of AlphaFold also hold broader lessons for solving problems with AI.
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Making Oxygen on Mars
9 november 2023 · 33 min
Forrest Meyen is the co-founder and Chief Strategy Officer of Lunar Outpost, a company that builds machines that go to places like Mars and, if everything goes according to plan, the moon. The company is betting that the private space boom of the past decade will soon go beyond Earth’s orbit to the moon and beyond. Lees meer
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The sold-out chips at the heart of AI
19 oktober 2023 · 23 min
Brannin McBee is the co-founder and Chief Strategy Officer at CoreWeave. Lees meer
A few years ago, he and a few friends started buying hardware to mine cryptocurrency. It turns out, the same hardware -- chips known as GPUs -- is essential for running state-of-the-art AI models. Today, Brannin and his friends have turned their hobby into a company that’s competing against some of the biggest companies in the world to provide the hardware and computing power to run AI.
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Special Episode: The Trial of Sam Bankman-Fried
12 oktober 2023 · 17 min
Sam Bankman-Fried, the former crypto mogul, is on trial for fraud. On today’s show, we talk to Lidia Jean Kott, who is covering the trial for another Pushkin show, about a dramatic day in court. Caroline Ellison, former co-CEO of Alameda Research and Sam Bankman-Fried’s ex-girlfriend, took the stand. She recently pleaded guilty to fraud, and is cooperating with the prosecution. Lees meer
Hear Against the Rules with Michael Lewis: The Trial of Sam Bankman-Fried wherever you get your podcasts.
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Getting Yeast to Make Medicine
5 oktober 2023 · 24 min
Christina Smolke is the co-founder and CEO of Antheia. Antheia is a synthetic biology company -- they’re in the business of genetically engineering microorganisms to produce commercial products. Lees meer
Christina’s problem is this: How do you turn yeast cells into tiny factories to create the active ingredients in generic drugs. If Christina and her team solve this problem, they won’t solve the drug shortage problem entirely. But they might help make it better.
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Could a Robot Make Your Salad?
28 september 2023 · 22 min
Stephen Klein is the co-founder and CEO of Hyphen, a company that is developing an automated make line. Stephen's problem is this: How do you make restaurant food from fresh ingredients... cheaper? Lees meer
Chipotle invested in Hyphen, whose automated system could soon be preparing online orders at thousands of Chipotle outlets.
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What the Industrial Revolution Teaches Us About the AI Revolution
21 september 2023 · 35 min
Simon Johnson is an MIT economist and the co-author of a new book called “Power and Progress: Our Thousand-Year Struggle over Technology and Prosperity”. Lees meer
Simon’s problem is this: How do you create the conditions for technological change to benefit many people, rather than just a powerful few?
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Can AI Tutors Help Kids Learn? Khan Academy Thinks So
14 september 2023 · 32 min
Sal Khan is the founder and CEO of Khan Academy. Sal’s problem is this: How do you design an AI that can give students the kind of benefits they’d get from working with a human tutor? Lees meer
Earlier this year, Khan Academy launched Khanmigo, an AI tutor built on top of GPT4. The idea is to use AI to give more kids access to one-on-one tutoring, and help human teachers with their work as well.
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Smallpox: Gone but Not Forgotten from Incubation
11 september 2023 · 27 min
What can we learn from the centuries-long quest to eradicate smallpox, once the scourge of humanity? And how did it set the stage for all vaccines to come? First we meet Edward Jenner, a doctor in 18th century Britain who learned about the folk practice of “variolation” and found a safer way to inoculate people against smallpox. Then, Donald Hopkins of the Carter Center takes us back to the 1960s in Sierra Leone, where he discovered that successfully eradicating smallpox could be a feasible goal worldwide. Enjoy this episode from Incubation, another Pushkin podcast. Lees meer
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Going to the Doctor Sucks. Can AI Make it Better?
7 september 2023 · 27 min
Allon Bloch is the co-founder and CEO of K Health. Allon’s problem is this: Can you use AI to make seeing a doctor easier and more helpful? Lees meer
Today, thousands of patients a month are treated through K Health. The company has an AI-based patient interface and it employs about 150 doctors. And K Health has plans to expand beyond primary care -- and they just raised another 50 million dollars to help them get there.
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Spotting Wildfires with AI
31 augustus 2023 · 24 min
Sonia Kastner is the founder and CEO of Pano. Sonia’s problem is this: How do you use data and machine learning to mitigate the damage caused by climate change? Lees meer
Pano mounts cameras on remote mountaintop towers, then sends images from the cameras to an AI model trained to spot wildfire smoke. The goal is to alert fire crews early, before the fire spreads.
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Is the Era of Free Returns Over?
24 augustus 2023 · 24 min
Amit Sharma is the founder and CEO of Narvar. Narvar works with companies such as Sephora, Lululemon and Home Depot to manage the post-purchase phase of online shopping — tracking, alerts and returns. Around 10 percent of online purchases are returned and every return cuts into retailers’ profits. Lees meer
Amit’s problem is this: consumers have learned to love free returns, but can retailers afford them?
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Creative Technology at Pixar
17 augustus 2023 · 36 min
Danielle Feinberg is a Visual Effects Supervisor at Pixar Animation Studios. Danielle’s problem is this: How do you optimize technology so that you can spend more time being creative? Lees meer
Danielle Feinberg has worked at Pixar for 26 years. Earlier in her career, she was the director of photography on movies like Coco and Wall-E. She talks about how new software shapes creative work.
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How To Make AI Safer & More Reliable
10 augustus 2023 · 29 min
Yaron Singer is the founder and CEO of Robust Intelligence. Yaron’s problem is this: How do you reduce AI’s security and reliability risks? Lees meer
Yaron was a computer science professor at Harvard and worked at Google before starting Robust Intelligence. The company’s software tests AI models and datasets for problems with performance and security.
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Quantum Computers Could Change Everything
3 augustus 2023 · 24 min
Chris Monroe is the co-founder and chief scientist of IonQ. Chris’s problem is this: How do you build a quantum computer that will actually work? Quantum computing has the potential to transform fields from drug development to clean energy to cybersecurity, but so far no one has been able to build a quantum computer that can reliably outperform existing computers. Lees meer
Monroe is also a physics professor at Duke University, and he talks Jacob through the principles that make quantum computing possible.
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