For Episode 13, we're joined by industry pioneer, Dean Ayanna Howard. She began working at NASA's JPL at 18-years old to help build the Mars Rover and never slowed down from there. She is a successful roboticist, entrepreneur, educator, and is the author of the recent book: Sex, Race, and Robots: How to be Human in the Age of AI.

Dr. Ayanna Howard is the current dean of The Ohio State University College of Engineering. Before joining Ohio State, she was Professor at Georgia Tech, where she was the founder and director of the Human-Automation Systems Lab (HumAnS). She led a range of projects including applying her knowledge of the Rover's SmartNav abilities to create robots that could explore remote areas of Antartica and Alaska to collect data for studying climate change. In addition to her leadership at Ohio State, she also started Zyrobotics, a non-profit dedicated to helping children that require extra development support.

The conversation spans Ayanna's childhood, her inspirations like the Bionic Woman, and her views on building a more equitable AI ecosystem for all individuals.

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If any company is at the top of most people’s minds when it comes to AI, it’s DeepMind. They have been at the forefront of many major breakthroughs including AlphaGo, the first AI to beat a human Go world champion and AlphaFold, which revolutionized protein structure prediction.

Our guest on this week’s episode, Shakir Mohamed, joined DeepMind in the early days and has been an instrumental part of their success ever since. Shakir is a Senior Staff Scientist at DeepMind, an Associate Fellow at the Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence, and a Honorary Professor of University College London. Shakir is also a founder and trustee of the Deep Learning Indaba, a grassroots organization aiming to build pan-African capacity and leadership in AI.

Pieter and Shakir discuss his career journey of coming to DeepMind, his professional accomplishments like using ML to solve the problem of nowcasting (short-term weather predictions), and his personal work of growing AI's global inclusion with orgs like Deep Learning Indaba.

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| Host: Pieter Abbeel | Executive Producers: Alice Patel & Henry Tobias Jones | Production: Fresh Air Production

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It doesn’t matter what country you live in, or what industry you build a career in, STEM skills are increasingly important - particularly for children and students who are yet to join the world of work. Introducing robotics to children at a young age in the same way that we enroll them in soccer or piano lessons should be a real consideration. However, the participation costs are often so prohibitive that it's out of the question for most schools and parents.

On Episode 11 of Season 2, we're joined by entrepreneur and philanthropist, Jared Schrieber. He envisions a world where there are as many elementary and high school robotics teams as there are basketball or football teams. He founded Revolution Robotics; a non-profit dedicated to making robotics hardware and software kits accessible to all communities, to make his vision into a reality.

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| Host: Pieter Abbeel | Executive Producers: Alice Patel & Henry Tobias Jones | Production: Fresh Air Production

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On Episode 10 of Season 2, Pieter is joined by the CEO of SafelyYou, George Netscher. Pieter and George first met at UC Berkeley's AI lab when George was pursuing a PhD with a clear picture in his mind of how he would use it. And seven years later, George has stayed true to his mission of building AI to help people with dementia live better.

SafelyYou’s AI is raising the profile of technology solutions in the fight against dementia. While still a young company, SafelyYou has successfully reduced falls by 40% and has successfully reduced ER visits resulting from falls by 80%. George shares the company's technological successes and his vision for the future of AI, robots, and healthcare.

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| Host: Pieter Abbeel | Executive Producers: Alice Patel & Henry Tobias Jones | Production: Fresh Air Production

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For Episode 9, we welcome an AI researcher and entrepreneur who has been on a remarkable journey, Flora Tasse. She grew up in Cameroon, where she completed her Bachelors in Mathematics at the University of Buea. She received a second Bachelors and a Masters in Computer Science at Rhodes and Cape Town in South Africa. She then went on to the UK, and earned her PhD in 3D computer vision at Cambridge, as well as interning at Microsoft and Google.

Rather than joining a tech giant, Flora decided instead to found her own company Selerio, pioneering the commercialization of Artificial Intelligence and Augmented Reality. Selerio got acquired by Streem. where she’s now leading the AI Research team. Streem offers AI and AR-powered communications, bringing AI to the frontlines of customer service.

Pieter and Flora also discuss her personal experience with the lack of diversity in AI and her work with organizations like Black in AI to improve inclusivity.

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| Host: Pieter Abbeel | Executive Producers: Alice Patel & Henry Tobias Jones | Production: Fresh Air Production

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For Episode 8, Pieter Abbeel interviews Alex Kendall, the co-founder and CEO of Wayve, the London-based company pioneering AI technology to enable autonomous vehicles to drive in complex, never-seen-before environments. Alex is a world expert in deep learning and computer vision. Before founding Wayve, Alex was a research fellow at Cambridge University where he earned his Ph.D. in Computer Vision and Robotics.

Wayve is building global momentum for the use of deep learning to solve self-driving. Alex and his team are building AV2.0—a next generation autonomous driving system that can quickly and safely adapt to new driving domains anywhere in the world.

The interview spans a range of topics including Wayve's technological approach, its metrics for success, and Wayve's latest milestones.

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| Host: Pieter Abbeel | Executive Producers: Alice Patel & Henry Tobias Jones | Production: Fresh Air Production

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One thing every AI researcher knows is that most foundational AI research is actually happening in open-source. Indeed, most AI researchers publish their research findings openly on arxiv, a freely accessible, open repository originally mostly used by physics researchers. And the code underlying many AI breakthroughs is often published on github, where it’s readily accessible to anyone.

Historically, these papers and codebases have originated from the leading universities and tech companies. But the open culture in the AI community means that aspiring researchers can study the latest AI breakthroughs and codebases, and in principle, start making their own contributions. It hasn't really been done before in a meaningful until Ross Wightman came along.

As an independent researcher, Ross Wightman has grown into one of the most prominent contributors to AI research and codebases. In a previous life, an engineer at a Canadian unicorn start-up, his current full-time occupation is building new AI models that are freely available for use by anyone and everyone. And he's essentially self-taught.

He chats with Pieter about his inspirations, his belief in open-source citing Kaggle, Hugging Face, Eleuther.AI, and his latest papers like ResNet Strike Back.

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| Host: Pieter Abbeel | Executive Producers: Alice Patel & Henry Tobias Jones | Production: Fresh Air Production

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Previous guests on our podcasts - from Tesla, Aurora, Waymo - are building the brains of the cars and trucks of our future. This episode's guest, Professor Cathy Wu, is building the roadways of our future. She is building machine-learning to predict the ideal infrastructure for the world's future mobility, the cost of building this infrastructure, and most importantly, what's the solution that eliminates traffic jams and gridlock forever.

Currently at MIT's Institute for Data, Systems, and Society (IDSS), Professor Cathy Wu (and previous student of Pieter Abbeel's) gives listeners an overview of the type of potential scenarios being modeled with machine-learning such as scenarios in which the road is filled with mixed-autonomy vehicles. What emergent behaviors might happen? Are there infrastructure solutions or software solutions that can help ensure smooth travel and safe roadways as our mode for transportation and delivery evolve? What are the policy considerations?

Throughout the talk, Wu cites building reinforcement learning for her work and why it's the right fit her research, "Reinforcement learning is essentially this paradigm at the intersection of machine learning and also control, and it is essentially about how agents learn from experience and in particular through trial and error." Her past and current research can be found here and you can watch her recent TedXMIT talk here.

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| Host: Pieter Abbeel | Executive Producers: Alice Patel & Henry Tobias Jones | Production: Fresh Air Production

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Analyzing a person’s blood (and the cells within it) is often used to diagnose many health conditions and illnesses, from infections to leukemia and bone marrow disorders. Generally it's a long and expensive process. You have to go to the doctor, have a sample taken, wait for a couple of days for a trained professional to analyze the blood, and finally get your diagnosis.

Athelas is using machine learning to dramatically improve the speed and efficiency of testing blood cells. From a simple finger prick’s worth of blood, Athelas devices can monitor and help healthcare professionals to remotely care for patients. To date over 40,000 people have used Athelas devices to monitor a range of conditions including hypertension and diabetes. With a recent valuation of $1.5B, the company is poised for major impact.

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| Host: Pieter Abbeel | Executive Producers: Alice Patel & Henry Tobias Jones | Audio Production: Kieron Matthew Banerji | Title Music: Alejandro Del Pozo

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*Warning* Explicit language used in the episode.

Benedict Evans, long-time technology analyst and occasional VC at firms such as Andreessen Horowitz, is well-known for his analysis of mobile, media and technology trends. He writes a popular weekly newsletter on the most important happenings in tech and he is also famous for his annual presentations that analyze macro and strategic trends in the tech industry.

He’s a voice of reason trying to sort out the technology issues of the day. In this episode of The Robot Brains, he sits down with Pieter to discuss his opinion on the label of "AI", areas of business that ML is adding real value, and his predictions for the future.

| SUBSCRIBE TO THE ROBOT BRAINS PODCAST TODAY | Visit therobotbrains.ai and follow us on YouTube TheRobotBrainsPodcast, Twitter @therobotbrains, and Instagram @therobotbrains.

| Host: Pieter Abbeel | Executive Producers: Alice Patel & Henry Tobias Jones | Audio Production: Kieron Matthew Banerji | Title Music: Alejandro Del Pozo

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