Stanford Radio

Professor Chris Lemons addresses how parents and teachers can support students with disabilities during the covid-19 pandemic.

Originally aired on SiriusXM on November 21, 2020.

The Future of Everything with Russ Altman:

E131 | Renee DiResta: How to beat bad information

Inadvertent misinformation and outright disinformation have become a scourge on American discourse, but those committed to the truth are keeping pace.

Renée DiResta is research manager at the Stanford Internet Observatory, a multi-disciplinary center that focuses on abuses of information technology, particularly social media. She’s an expert in the role technology platforms and their “curatorial” algorithms play in the rise and spread of misinformation and disinformation.

Fresh off an intense period keeping watch over the 2020 U.S. elections for disinformation as part of the Election Integrity Partnership, DiResta says the campaign became one of the most closely observed political dramas in American history.

She says that whether it comes from the top down or the bottom up, bad information can be spotted and beaten, but overcoming falsehoods in the future will require vigilance and a commitment to the truth. She explains more on Stanford Engineering’s The Future of Everything podcast, with host Russ Altman. Listen and subscribe here.

The Future of Everything with Russ Altman:

E130 | Will Tarpeh: How to take the waste out of wastewater

The very notion of wastewater, and what we choose to do with it, could change dramatically if this Stanford chemical engineer has his way.

Once the bathwater is drained, the toilet flushed or the laundry done, few give a passing thought to the wastewater that leaves our homes. But chemical engineer Will Tarpeh might change your mind, if you give him the chance.

Tarpeh says that that water is a literal mine of valuable chemicals. Chemicals like nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium make great fertilizers. Lithium can be used in lithium ion batteries. And even pharmaceuticals could be recovered and reused. In fact, Tarpeh points out that if we could harvest all the world’s urine, it could supplant 20–30% of our nitrogen needs — and in some places can be cheaper to do than existing production and transport methods.

Waste, Tarpeh says, is just a state of mind. His “pipe dream,” he says, is to develop next-generation treatment plants on the neighborhood or even household scale able to extract the valuable chemicals in water most would rather send down the drain. Tarpeh tells bioengineer Russ Altman all about it in this the latest episode of Stanford Engineering’s The Future of Everything podcast. Listen and subscribe here.

The Future of Everything with Russ Altman:

E129 | Kwabena Boahen: How to build a super-efficient super-computer

Could new-age computer chips, modeled on the how the human brain works, empower a watershed for artificial intelligence? At least one expert has staked his career on it.

Bioengineer Kwabena Boahen builds highly efficient “neuromorphic” supercomputers modeled on the human brain. He hopes they will drive the artificial intelligence future. He uses an analogy when describing the goal of his work: “It’s LA versus Manhattan.”

Boahen means structurally. Today’s chips are two dimensional — flat and spread out, like LA. Tomorrow’s chips will be stacked, like the floors of the skyscrapers on a New York block. In this analogy, the humans are the electrons shuffling data back and forth. The shorter distances they have to travel to work, and the more they can accomplish before traveling home, will drive profound leaps in energy efficiency. The consequences could not be greater. Boahen says that the lean chips he imagines could prove tens-of-thousands times less expensive to operate than today’s power hogs.

To learn how it works, listen in as Kwabena Boahen describes neuromorphic computing to fellow bioengineer Russ Altman in the latest episode of Stanford Engineering’s The Future of Everything podcast. Listen and subscribe here.

Stanford Professor Sam Wineburg helps teachers and students discern fact from fiction online.

Originally aired on SiriusXM on November 7, 2020.

Stanford alumnus Travis Bristol, professor at UC Berkeley, explains why it’s important to recruit and retain Black teachers.

Originally aired on SiriusXM on November 7, 2020.

The Future of Everything with Russ Altman:

E128 | Daphne Koller: How machine learning is transforming drug discovery

A veteran of the age of artificial intelligence explains why she left academia for a chance to change the pharmaceutical industry.

In a world where a drug takes years and billions of dollars to develop, just one in 20 candidates makes it to market. Daphne Koller is betting artificial intelligence can change that dynamic.

Twenty years ago, when she first started using artificial intelligence to venture into medicine and biology, Koller was stymied by a lack of data. There wasn’t enough of it and what there was, was often not well suited to the problems she wanted to solve. Fast-forward 20 years, however, and both the quantity and quality of data, and the tools for studying biology, have advanced so dramatically that the adjunct professor of computer science at Stanford founded a company, insitro, that uses machine learning (a subspecialty of ​artificial intelligence) to explore the causes and potential treatments for some very serious diseases.

She tells bioengineer Russ Altman about the lessons she’s learned along the way, and the challenges and rewards of getting diverse teams of experts from many fields to speak the same language. It’s all on this episode of Stanford Engineering’s The Future of Everything podcast. Listen here, and subscribe to the podcast here.

Jeff Orlowski, The Stanford alumnus behind the Netflix documentary The Social Dilemma wants you to stop scrolling for our collective benefit.

Describing himself as a technical optimist, film director Jeff Orlowski on implementing positive change for social media for the betterment of humanity.

President Trump has repeatedly refused to state clearly that he will accept the results of the November election. In so doing, he raises critical questions for American democracy—particularly if the election is close. In this episode of Stanford Legal, Pam Karlan, one of the nation’s leading experts on the law of democracy discusses critical issues in this important election for the next American president.

Originally aired on SiriusXM on October 24, 2020.

The Future of Everything with Russ Altman:

E127 | Markus Covert: How to build a computer model of a cell

A bioengineer sets out to create a computer simulation of a single living cell and comes to grips with the remarkable complexity that is life.

When Stanford bioengineer Markus Covert first decided to create a computer model able to simulate the behavior of a single cell, he was held back by more than an incomplete understanding of how a cell functions, but also by a lack of computer power. His early models would take more than 10 hours to churn through a single simulation and that was when using a supercomputer capable of billions of calculations per second.

Nevertheless, in his quest toward what had been deemed "a grand challenge of the 21st century," Covert pressed on and eventually published a paper announcing his success in building a model of just one microbe: E. coli, a popular subject in biological research. The model would allow researchers to run experiments not on living bacteria in a lab, but on a simulated cell on a computer.

After all was said and done, however, the greatest takeaway for Covert was that a cell is a very, very complex thing. There were fits and starts and at least one transcendent conceptual leap — which Covert has dubbed “deep curation” — needed to make it all happen, but he found a way. As Covert points out, no model is perfect, but some are useful. And that is how usefulness, not perfection, became the goal of his work, as he tells fellow bioengineer Russ Altman in this episode of Stanford Engineering’s The Future of Everything podcast. Listen here, and subscribe to the podcast here.