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With a PhD in cognitive psychology and being a researcher at the Florida Institute for Human and Machine Cognition, Dr. Peter Pirolli is at the cutting edge of the Bay Area human-machine interface arena. His current mission is to deliver AI based coaching for sustained behavior change. A great listen for the Neuralink and Elon Musk fans.

Transcript

Dr. Haroon Kazem: Hey, guys, thanks for joining us on another episode of the Body Clock podcast by Owaves. If you haven’t already, please remember to download the Free Owaves app on the Apple App Store. It’s the number one wellness app on the App Store. It’s fun. It’s easy to use and it will allow you to effectively plan your day. It works great as a visual planner. And please remember to tell your friends and family. Also if you’re enjoying the show, please do us a huge, huge favor and leave us a five star rating on your podcast app. As always, thanks for listening and hope you enjoy the show.

Dr. Sohaib Imitiaz: Hi, guys. Welcome to another episode of the Body Clock podcast by Owaves today. I’ve got a very intriguing guest, Peter Pirolli, who is just phenomenal in terms of what he’s achieved and done. And so, he is an expert in computational psychology and artificial intelligence research. He’s also working in human computer interaction and human and machine cognition at the Florida Institute.

He’s based in San Francisco. He studied at top universities such as the Carnegie Mellon University, where he did a PHD in cognitive psychology, as well as being an associate professor at UC Berkeley. And so there’s a whole wide range of topics of where psychology, cognition, and artificial intelligence meet, and Peter can tell us a little bit more about his background and what he’s doing currently. So, hey, Peter, thanks for coming on the podcast.

Dr. Peter Pirolli: Well, thank you for having me.

Dr. Sohaib Imitiaz: It’s a pleasure. So it’d be great if you could tell the listeners about a, what you’re up to now. Especially with, you know, working at the human and machine cognition, the Florida Institute. Because that sounds very exciting. And I think a lot of people would not any idea what’s happening and how you’ll pushing the boundaries. And then also going to a bit about your background. It will interested you in kind of behavior science as well as combining that with technology.

Dr. Peter Pirolli: Sure. So I am kind of a recent addition to the Florida Institute for Human and Machine Cognition, although I’ve known the folks there, in particular the director, Ken Ford, for a couple of decades now. And it’s a very interesting place, partly because it does such a variety of research. It started off being fairly focused in on studies of human cognition, human centered computation and understanding artificial intelligence.

And now it’s kind of broadened out to a number of other areas, including human health, resilience of performance and cyber security, looking at trying to understand autonomy and autonomous systems. And in a very big effort in robotics. So they have various successful robotics team.

That’s done very well in some of the DARPA robotics challenges.