Playing With Reality

2023 has truly been the year of AI. No tech story has dominated the headlines to such an extent, and for good reason. Its effects are already world changing. Over the course of this season, we’ve followed the thrilling rise of AI in so many different fields - from health to music, and fraud prevention to coding. In this final episode of Playing with Reality Season 2, we’re doing a retrospective on these topics, and a speculative look forward, to see where we stand today, and what’s coming next in the world of Artificial Intelligence.

Today’s Guest

Nina Schick

Nina Schick is an author, entrepreneur and advisor specialising in Generative AI. One of the first GenAI experts, Nina analyses how this nascent field of artificial intelligence will change humanity. Among many other endeavours, Nina is the Founder of Tamang Ventures, an advisory and creative firm focused on Generative AI, and the creator of ‘The Era of Generative AI’ – a community featuring the weekly EGAI newsletter, as well as exclusive content and interviews.

Music has always been a creative act - something that expresses the deepest of human emotions in song. But now, digital technologies are stepping in to challenge humans. Today, with just a simple prompt in natural language, AI can create a fully formed song, or even copy the exact style of established artists. So what does this mean for the industry, and for the musicians themselves? Are we reaching a Napster style moment, where copyright is at risk? And is it all bad news? How are musicians utilising these new technologies to create things which are exciting and new? Find out this week on Playing with Reality.

Today’s Guest

Marcus du Sautoy

Marcus du Sautoy is a mathematician at the University of Oxford, where he is also the Simonyi Professor for the Public Understanding of Science. He is the author of a number of popular maths and science books, including The Creativity Code: How AI Is Learning to Write, Paint and Think, and Thinking Better: The Art of the Shortcut. He is one of the world’s leading thinkers about the intersection between science, creativity and digital technologies.

With the increasing prevalence of digital monetary transactions, fraud has become an ever-present threat to all of us online. And advancements in AI have also made it possible for fraudsters to use sophisticated techniques to perpetrate their crimes. From deepfakes to investment scams, AI has made it easier than ever for fraudsters to manipulate people and systems. But AI is also being used to fight back - identifying patterns of fraud, detect anomalies in transactions, and even using behavioural biometrics to spot fraudsters before they can commit the crime. But who is winning in the battle between fraudsters and those fighting them? Will AI be the saviour here, or something that makes the issue of fraud worse? Find out on this week's episode of Playing with Reality.

Today’s Guest

Daniel Holmes

Daniel is a highly experienced global Fraud Prevention Leader with a career working across multiple business sectors, including Banks and Fraud & Financial Crime technology providers. He focuses on how data, technology, analytics, process and education can help banks to succeed in protecting customers and reducing fraud losses. He works as the Fraud Prevention SME at Feedzai, a company whose RiskOps platform leverages machine learning and big data to prevent and detect financial crime for some of the world's largest banks.

https://www.linkedin.com/in/daniel-holmes-65911483/?originalSubdomain=uk

https://feedzai.com/

Sogeti work closely with clients and partners to take full advantage of the opportunities of technology. Find out more about us here: https://www.sogeti.com/

The release of OpenAI’s GPT-4 has sent shockwaves around the world of Artificial Intelligence. Its power to work across multiple modalities and increased precision in its answers has astounded many - but what about those in the coding community? Because AI has been used in the coding space for some time - from Codex, to Microsoft’s Power Platform, and more. But with new models of GPT able to turn natural language into code, what will this mean for the future of coding? Will it see developers out of a job as code becomes fully automated by AI? Or is the quality of its output not quite there yet? Today on Playing with Reality we ask: Just how much has GPT-4 changed the code?

Today’s Guests

Joakim Wahlqvist

Joakim has been at Sogeti for the past 6 years, where he recently became the CTO of Data and AI. He has a wealth of experience across the AI space and was once a developer himself. He now works to help clients implement AI technologies to bring about rapid innovation across the digital technology ecosystem.

https://www.linkedin.com/in/joakim-wahlqvist/

Sogeti work closely with clients and partners to take full advantage of the opportunities of technology. Find out more about us here: https://www.sogeti.com/

Generative models of Artificial Intelligence are being used across industries to huge and varied effects - and as we learnt in our first episode of season 2, sometimes with potentially sinister consequences. But there’s one realm where this kind of AI is broadly positive: healthcare. In medicine and drug discovery, AI is being used to scan huge data sets and even discover new drugs. It’s making the lives of doctors more efficient and even helped out in the fight against Covid. But will this new AI see doctors dependent on it for all diagnoses? Make hypochondriacs of us all? And where is it going next? Welcome to the remarkable world of AI-enabled Healthcare.

Today’s Guests

Deepa Mamtani

Deepa Mamtani leads Sogeti’s AI Centre of Excellence in the Netherlands, and together with her team develops AI solutions using deep neural networks, GANs and computer vision. With a multi-disciplinary consulting background in strategy, analytics and data science, she is passionate about analysing and leveraging data and translating them into strategic outcomes.

https://labs.sogeti.com/experts/deepa-mamtani/

Aaron Morris

Aaron Morris is the co-founder and CEO of PostEra, a company building an end-to-end medicinal chemistry platform to advance drug discovery. After working in the financial sector, Aaron saw the limiting nature of drug discovery in biotech companies and pharma, and so set up a company to come in at the early stage of drug discovery and improve efficiency, using AI to do so. 

https://www.linkedin.com/in/aaron-morris-9922277b/ 

Sogeti work closely with clients and partners to take full advantage of the opportunities of technology. Find out more about us here: https://www.sogeti.com/

The power of generative models of Artificial intelligence like ChatGPT and Dall-E dominate the headlines, for good, and of course for bad, these days. They bring promise, yes, but also a kind of fear. So could they be a Frankenstein’s monster of a technology? Or something that could save the planet? And where did it all come from, anyway? In this, our first episode of a new season of Playing with Reality focusing on Artificial Intelligence, we take a look at the fascinating history of AI to discover more about how it went from a niche theoretical field to the world defining technology it is today, exploring its possibilities and potential dangers.

Host Menno Van Doorn also introduces his new co-host Tijana Nikolic, a Sogeti AI expert, who will be joining him all season to comment on the interviews and discuss the fascinating themes.

Today’s Guests

Nell Watson

Eleanor ‘Nell’ Watson is a trailblazer in emerging technologies such as machine vision and A.I. ethics, and dedicates her work to protecting human rights and infusing ethics, safety, and values into technologies like Artificial Intelligence. She is the Chair & Vice-Chair of the IEEE’s ECPAIS Transparency Experts Focus Group, and P7001 Transparency of Autonomous Systems committee on A.I. Ethics & Safety, where she helps to safeguard algorithmic trust in AI. 

https://www.nellwatson.com/

David Weinberger

David Weinberger is an author, technologist, and speaker. Originally trained as a philosopher, David’s work focuses on how technology, particularly the internet and machine learning, is changing our ideas. Since 2004 he has been a Fellow at Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society. His books include Too Big to Know and Everyday Chaos: Technology, Complexity, and How We’re Thriving in a New World of Possibility.

https://www.linkedin.com/in/davidweinberger-writer/ 

Sogeti work closely with clients and partners to take full advantage of the opportunities of technology. Find out more about us here: https://www.sogeti.com/

Menno Van Doorn is back with a new series of Playing with Reality, to take you on another excursion into the world of technology - this time into the thrilling field of Artificial Intelligence. After a first season exploring the Metaverse, this time round we’ll be asking the biggest questions about AI, like what effect it will have on the creative sectors, and even whether there could ever be a general AI that transcends the boundaries of human intelligence. 

It’s a Pandora’s box of technology that has been thrown open, but will we ever be able to close it? And should we even want to? Join Menno and guests from across the world from March 1st to find out.

Sogeti work closely with clients and partners to take full advantage of the opportunities of technology. Find out more about us here: https://www.sogeti.com/

2022 has been an exciting and turbulent year for tech. From the explosion of the metaverse into the public consciousness, to the FTX crash and the emergence of AI in the creative space, the world’s top companies have led the way in innovating products that are truly changing the digital world. But what were the most surprising trends of the year? And what will next year hold? In this, the final episode of the first season of Playing with Reality, we focus on the most exciting developments in the metaverse and AI to create a full picture of the year in technology, before looking ahead to 2023.

Today’s Guests

Tijana Nikolic

TijanaNikolić is an AI specialist at Sogeti with a diverse background in biology, marketing, and IT. In 2020, she was part of the team behind the Artificial Data Amplifier, the winner of the Sogeti Innovation of the year. Her work covers privacy, quality, ethics, and sustainability, in the AI space.

https://www.linkedin.com/in/tijana-nikoli%C4%87-99b059110 

Mike Buob

Mike Buob is the Vice President of Sogeti, and has been part of the company for 17 years. Amongst many other things, he’s a Metaverse expert, and is really passionate about the power of immersive technologies, and positioning Sogeti as the leaders in thinking about the most exciting trends coming round the corner.

https://www.linkedin.com/in/mike-buob/ 

Earlier this year, Microsoft announced that they had bought the gaming company Activision Blizzard for a reported $67.1 billion. This was a watershed moment for the industry, and one which signalled a cultural shift as gaming became a truly mainstream entertainment medium. But how did we get here? How did gaming move from a niche industry dominated by teenagers, to one attracting thousands of fans to live esports events and millions streaming online? In this episode of Playing with Reality, we explore these questions and more, looking at what the future holds as other industries get more invested in the gaming world.

Today’s Guests

Joost Van Dreunen

Joost Van Dreunen is an academic, entrepreneur, investor and strategic advisor to start-ups and financial funds active in video games. He teaches courses on video games at the NYU Stern School of Business, and has written books, including “One Up: Creativity, Competition, and the Global Business of Video Games.” Prior to this, Joost was the co-founder and CEO of SuperData Research, a games market research firm acquired by Nielsen in 2018.

https://www.linkedin.com/in/joostvandreunen/

Koen Schobbers

Koen is a professional gamer specialising in the racing game Trackmania. He later became a host for ESPN, a board member and vice chair of the Athletes, Players & Community Commission of the Global Esports Federation and the founder of Parents of Play, a charity which seeks to restore and strengthen parents’ relationships with their gaming children. He is also the author of the book 'My Gaming Child', and has been a professional speaker since 2016, including at events like TEDx.

https://koenschobbers.nl/

Digital Twins are one of the most interesting technologies today attempting to recreate real life systems and processes in digital versions. These are mirror worlds which not only play with reality, they are trying to recreate it with true fidelity. But where did these technologies come from? Who were the early pioneers? And what does it mean to make a digital copy of something tangible and real? From automotive, to aerospace and even entertainment industries, Digital Twins are some of the most exciting and genuinely useful technologies to get widespread hype in recent years. In this episode of Playing with Reality, we look to discover more about their past, present and future.

Today’s Guests

Timoni West

Timoni West is the vice president of Product, Digital Twins and AI at Unity, a company whose cross-platform game engine Builds real-time 3D projects for various industries across games, animation, automotive, architecture. She’s been there for over 7 years, and over that time she has worked to lead advanced product development for spatial computing tools. Now she spends her time focusing on ensuring that the tools that Unity creates are available to all.

https://www.linkedin.com/in/timoni/ 

Karen Willcox

Karen Willcox is the Director of the Oden Institute for Computational Engineering and Sciences at UT Austin. Before this, she spent 17 years as a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Through her research, she produces scalable computational methods for the design of next-generation engineered systems, and she is currently working on projects for institutions as prestigious as the US Air Force Office of Scientific Research, Air Force Research Laboratory, amongst many others. Earlier this year, Karen was invited to give a TEDx talk on the potential of digital twin technology - watch here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AzfMLYw_-Ps. 

https://www.linkedin.com/in/karen-willcox-b6150b111/