In this episode of pplpod, we profile Dr. Fei-Fei Li, the Stanford computer scientist often recognized as the "Godmother of AI" for her pivotal role in the modern artificial intelligence revolution. We trace her remarkable journey from a teenage immigrant working weekends at her family’s dry-cleaning shop in New Jersey to becoming one of the most influential figures in technology.

Join us as we discuss:

• The ImageNet Breakthrough: How Li defied skepticism to build a massive visual database of over 14 million labeled images, a project that fundamentally solved the data bottleneck in computer vision and catalyzed the deep learning boom of the 2010s.
• Championing Human-Centered AI: Her tenure as Co-Director of Stanford’s Institute for Human-Centered AI and her work establishing AI4ALL, a nonprofit dedicated to increasing diversity and inclusion within the field.
• Big Tech & Ethics: Her time as Chief Scientist at Google Cloud, her principled stance against weaponizing AI during the Project Maven controversy, and her brief role on the board of Twitter.
• The Next Frontier: Her 2024 launch of World Labs, a billion-dollar startup focused on "spatial intelligence"—teaching AI to reason and act within the three-dimensional physical world.

Tune in to understand how a physics major from Princeton reshaped how machines see the world and why she continues to advocate for a scientific, benevolent approach to AI governance.

She was marketed by MGM as the "world's most beautiful woman," but Hedy Lamarr’s greatest legacy wasn't on the silver screen—it was hidden in a patent that helped pave the way for modern wireless communication.

In this episode of pplpod, we dive into the dual life of Hedwig Eva Maria Kiesler, the Vienna-born actress who fled a controlling marriage to an Austrian arms dealer with ties to Mussolini and Hitler to become a Hollywood legend,,. We trace her journey from the scandalous nudity of the 1933 film Ecstasy to her rise as a box-office sensation in hits like Algiers and the religious epic Samson and Delilah,,.

But while the public obsessed over her glamour, Lamarr was secretly bored by her "seductress" roles and spent her off-hours inventing,,. We discuss:

• The Escape: How she fled her castle prison (reportedly disguised as her maid) to convince Louis B. Mayer to sign her to MGM,.
• The Invention: Her collaboration with avant-garde composer George Antheil to create a "Secret Communication System" for Allied torpedoes. Using the concept of frequency hopping, they designed a way to prevent radio jamming by the Axis powers—a technology foundational to today's Wi-Fi and Bluetooth,.
• The Rejection: Why the U.S. Navy initially rejected her groundbreaking idea, suggesting she could better serve the war effort by selling war bonds and kissing sailors at rallies instead,.

Finally, we look at her tumultuous later years, marked by six divorces, seclusion, and shoplifting arrests, before her belated recognition as a pioneer in the National Inventors Hall of Fame,,, . Tune in to hear how a woman once dismissed as merely "a thing to be guarded" became the mind behind the technology that connects the modern world,.

In this episode, we profile Albert Bruce Sabin, the Polish-American medical researcher whose pioneering work played a decisive role in the near-eradication of polio. Born Abram Saperstejn in 1906, Sabin emigrated to the United States as a teenager, eventually switching his studies from dentistry to virology to pursue a career in infectious disease research.

While Jonas Salk is often remembered for the first polio vaccine, we dive into how Sabin’s approach differed fundamentally. We explain how Sabin developed an oral vaccine using live attenuated virus strains, which—unlike Salk’s "dead" injectable vaccine—multiplied in the intestines to block the virus from entering the bloodstream and successfully broke the chain of transmission.

Key topics covered in this episode include:

• The Cold War Connection: How Sabin bypassed American hesitation by working with Russian colleagues to test his vaccine on over 100 million people in the USSR and Eastern Europe between 1955 and 1961.
• A Spoonful of Sugar: The development of the iconic sugar cube delivery method, adopted to mask the vaccine's salty, bitter taste and facilitate mass immunization.
• Science Over Profit: Sabin’s refusal to patent his vaccine or profit from its commercial exploitation to ensure the treatment remained low-cost and widely available.

Join us for a look at the man who dedicated his life to alleviating pain and whose live-virus vaccine became the predominant tool for fighting polio in the United States for three decades.

Most people know him as the "Peanut Man," but did you know George Washington Carver never actually invented peanut butter? In this episode of pplpod, we dig into the soil of history to uncover the true legacy of the agricultural chemist Time magazine once dubbed the "Black Leonardo".

Born into slavery in Missouri and kidnapped by night raiders as an infant, Carver rose to become one of the most prominent scientists of the early 20th century. We follow his incredible journey from a wandering student in Kansas to becoming the first African American faculty member at Iowa State, and finally to his legendary 47-year tenure at the Tuskegee Institute.

Join us as we discuss:

• The Soil Savior: How Carver championed "chemurgy" and crop rotation, teaching farmers to replace soil-depleting cotton with nitrogen-fixing crops like peanuts, soybeans, and sweet potatoes.
• Tuskegee Tensions: The brilliance and administrative struggles within his complex relationship with Booker T. Washington.
• Myth vs. Reality: Debunking the peanut butter folklore while highlighting his true contributions, including practical bulletins that helped poor farmers achieve self-sufficiency.
• Fame and Faith: From his 1921 testimony before Congress that made him a national celebrity to his deep belief that science and God were one and the same.

Discover how this pioneer of environmentalism and organic movement left a legacy that went far beyond the laboratory, donating his life savings to ensure his work would continue to uplift the world.

In this episode of pplpod, we dive into the life of Margaret Hamilton, the pioneering computer scientist who led the development of the on-board flight software for NASA’s Apollo program. We trace her journey from her early work at MIT—where her programming contributed to the foundations of chaos theory—to her critical role as the Director of the Software Engineering Division at the MIT Instrumentation Laboratory,.

Listeners will learn how Hamilton’s innovative "priority display" system averted a mission abort during the Apollo 11 lunar descent, allowing the computer to manage overloaded tasks and giving astronauts the "go" signal to land despite unexpected alarms,. We also explore how she fought to legitimize her field by coining the term "software engineering" and her later success founding businesses like Hamilton Technologies,. Join us to celebrate the recipient of the Presidential Medal of Freedom whose code took humanity to the stars.

In this episode of pplpod, we explore the life and legacy of Ken Thompson, an American pioneer of computer science whose work at Bell Labs fundamentally shaped modern computing. We trace his journey from playing the video game Space Travel—which motivated him to rewrite the game on an old PDP-7 and inadvertently invent the Unix operating system—to his modern-day contributions at Google,.

Join us as we discuss Thompson's prolific partnership with Dennis Ritchie, his creation of the B programming language (the predecessor to C), and his critical role in defining the UTF-8 encoding scheme that dominates the World Wide Web today,. We also examine his fascinating work outside of operating systems, including his creation of "perfect" chess endgame tablebases and the world champion chess computer, Belle.

Topics Discussed:

• The Origins of Unix: How a project on a PDP-7 at Bell Labs evolved into the hierarchical file system and command-line interpreter we know today.
• Reflections on Trusting Trust: A look at Thompson's 1983 Turing Award acceptance speech, where he unveiled the "Thompson hack"—a compiler backdoor attack that remains a seminal concept in computer security,.
• Regular Expressions: How Thompson's work on the QED and ed text editors made regular expressions a pervasive tool in text processing.
• The Move to Google: Thompson’s transition to Google, where he co-developed the Go programming language alongside Rob Pike to avoid the "extraneous garbage" of C++,.
• Personal Insights: From his fascination with binary logic in grade school to his switch from Apple products to Raspberry Pi OS,.

In this episode of pplpod, we explore the career of Canadian computer scientist Brian Kernighan, a pivotal figure who worked alongside Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie at Bell Labs during the golden age of computing.

We discuss Brian’s role as the co-author of the definitive book The C Programming Language (K&R) and his humble insistence that he had no part in the actual design of C. Brian also shares the history behind the tools and terms that defined a generation of programming, including:

• The birth of Unix: How Brian coined the term "Unix" and helped popularize its philosophy.
• Iconic Tools: His co-creation of the AWK and AMPL programming languages, as well as utilities like ditroff and pic,.
• "Hello, World": The origin story of the most famous example in coding history, which Brian first documented in a 1972 B language tutorial,.

From his sarcastic "What You See Is All You Get" (WYSIAYG) maxim to his time teaching CS50 at Harvard and his current professorship at Princeton University, we cover the life of a tech pioneer who is still actively maintaining the code he wrote decades ago,,,.

In this episode of pplpod, we profile Barbara Liskov, an Institute Professor at MIT and a titan of computer science who fundamentally changed how we write software. We explore her journey from being denied admission to Princeton’s graduate math program due to her gender to becoming one of the first women in the United States to earn a Ph.D. in computer science.

Join us as we break down Liskov’s groundbreaking technical achievements, including:

• The Liskov Substitution Principle: We discuss this crucial concept in object-oriented programming regarding subtyping and inheritance, which she developed with Jeannette Wing.
• Abstract Data Types: How Liskov pioneered the principle of data abstraction, allowing for more reliable and reusable programs.
• Language Design: A look at her creation of CLU and Argus, languages that influenced modern giants like Java, C++, C#, and Ada.
• Distributed Computing: Her work on the Venus operating system, the Thor object-oriented database, and Byzantine fault tolerance.

We also cover her 2008 Turing Award win—making her only the second woman to receive the "Nobel Prize of computing"—and her early artificial intelligence work on chess endgames and the "killer heuristic" under John McCarthy. Whether you are a software engineer or a history buff, this episode illuminates the life of a pioneer who was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame for her contributions to programming methodology.

In this episode of pplpod, we explore the fascinating life of John Backus, the American computer scientist who revolutionized computing by leading the team that invented Fortran, the first widely used high-level programming language. We discuss his tumultuous early years, which included being expelled from the University of Virginia for poor attendance and dropping out of medical school after finding it uninteresting. Listeners will learn about his resilience, from serving as an anti-aircraft battery commander in WWII to surviving a cranial bone tumor, for which he eventually designed his own replacement skull plate.

We also dive into his massive technical contributions at IBM, where he developed Speedcoding and the Backus–Naur form (BNF), a standard notation for defining the syntax of formal languages. Finally, we examine his later career shift toward function-level programming and his influential 1977 Turing Award lecture, "Can Programming Be Liberated from the von Neumann Style?". Join us to learn how a man who struggled in the classroom ended up making computers accessible to scientists worldwide.

In this episode of pplpod, we reflect on the life and legacy of Niklaus Wirth (1934–2024), the Swiss computer science pioneer who championed structure and simplicity in an increasingly complex digital world,. A 1984 Turing Award winner, Wirth is best known as the chief designer of the programming language Pascal, which served as the foundation for software engineering education for decades,.

Join us as we break down Wirth’s profound impact on computing, including:

• The Language Designer: Wirth's creation of influential languages including Euler, ALGOL W, Pascal, Modula-2, and Oberon.
• Wirth’s Law: His famous 1995 adage warning that "software is getting slower more rapidly than hardware becomes faster," and his lifelong plea for "lean software".
• Foundational Texts: A look at his classic book Algorithms + Data Structures = Programs and his seminal paper on "Stepwise Refinement," which formally outlined top-down program design,.
• A Global Career: From his studies at UC Berkeley to his tenure at ETH Zurich and sabbaticals at the legendary Xerox PARC,.

Whether you learned to code in Pascal or simply struggle with bloated software today, this episode explores the work of a man who believed the true art of engineering lay in simplicity.