The Transformative Ideas Podcast

The Transformative Ideas Podcast

By Manuel BrennerScienceNatural Sciences
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The Transformative Ideas Podcast episodes

  • #15: Intelligence, Games and AlphaGo

    Today's guest is Thore Graepel, research group leader at Google Deep Mind and Chair of Machine Learning at University College London. We talk about intelligence, Thore's interest in games and what makes them so important for AI research, game theory and social dilemmas, the importance of seeing intelligence from a multi-agent perspective, the spectacular story behind AlphaGo, how self learning AI has changed chess and Go, how human creativity can be inspired by artificial creativity, predicting personality from Facebook data, the risks of AI, Thore's favorite books, and much more. 

    The podcast is hosted by Manuel Brenner.

    1 hr 19 min
  • #14: Time Limitations & Criminal Law with Driek Deferme
    Driek Deferme is a law PhD student at KU Leuven, investigating the role of time limitations in civil and criminal law. We talk about the origins of the law, the importance of time limitations, the role of evidence, the recent abolishment of time limitations around sexual abuse of minors, the moral values of our societies, criminal law and civil law, and the different responsibilities of legislators and judges. We discuss the daily life of a law PhD student, the upsides and downsides of doing a PhD and research in general, and we close by discussing our favourite books.
    1 hr 34 min
  • #13: Business, Biases, And How To Shape A Career with Benjamin Bargetzi
    Today we are joined by Benjamin Bargetzi, Senior Account Manager at Google, psychologist, neuroscientist, and president and founder of ACIT.
    We talk about Ben's career, his decision to go into the business world despite his passion for academia, what lessons he has learned in his successful career, what the differences between business and academia are, and what the two might learn from each other.
    We then go into the overlap between business and psychology, what psychology can teach us about ourselves and our biases, how biases relate to the free-energy principle, and how the free-energy principle in turn might relate to dopamine.
    We talk about philosophy, the influence and potential pitfalls of Friedrich Nietzsche, and the usefulness of engaging both in philosophy and science.
    Finally, we talk about the history of ACIT, its vision, and ways to participate in ACIT. If you are interested in joining us, contact us through our website https://acit-science.com/ or reach out to us on LinkedIn.
    The podcast is hosted by Manuel Brenner.
    1 hr 28 min
  • #12: The Brain From Inside Out with Györgi Buzsaki

    In this episode, we are joined by Györgi Buzsaki, Biggs Professor of Neuroscience at NYU. Györgi Buzsaki is one of the most respected neuroscientists working today, and his influential work on memory, sleep, neural syntax, and many other things, has been cited over 100 000 times. 

    He has also authored two fascinating books called "Rhythms in the Brain" and "The Brain from Inside Out", both of which are aimed at a neuroscientific, but also more general audience.

    We talk about the inside-out perspective to the brain, brain rhythms, the importance of oscillations, what neurons see (and don't see), how everything in the brain scales logarithmically, neural diversity, the key features of potential artificial brains, how AI could be inspired by neuroscience, and many more things. 

    The podcast is hosted by Manuel Brenner.

    1 hr 9 min
  • #11: Education and the Challenges of the Pandemic with Will Millard
    In this episode, we are joined by Will Millard. Will has two Masters degrees in public policy and is now working on implementing several research projects for the London-based think-tank Centre for Education and Youth CFEY (https://cfey.org/). 
    We talk about Will's motivation, the importance of education in general, different educational philosophies and the political dimensions of how they shape public policy, systemic problems in the education system, the big challenges schools face during the pandemic, merits and downsides of remote learning, and a outlook on how schools in the future might look like.
    The podcast is hosted by Manuel Brenner.
    50 min
  • #10: Teaching Robots to Act in the Future with Corrado Pezzato
    In this episode, we are joined by Corrado Pezzato, Ph.D. candidate in self-adaptive robot architectures at TU Delft in the Netherlands.
    We talk about teaching robots to plan for the future, the uncertainty of the world, behavior trees, the free energy principle, connections between neuroscience and robotics, information seeking, habits, the future of robotics, the dangers of AI, exploration and exploitation, what it means to be a scientist, and many other things.
    The podcast is hosted by Manuel Brenner.
    1 hr 22 min
  • #9: Drug Prevention, Psychedelics and the MIND Foundation with Marvin Däumichen
    In this episode, we are talking with Marvin Däumichen, director of research and knowledge transfer for the MIND foundation, and Ph.D. candidate studying sociological implications of cannabis discourse on digital media.
    We begin by chatting about the role online spaces play in shaping discourse around cannabis, the way state actors and educators need to take this into account, and what role drugs play in the development of values like personal responsibility.
    This episode then connects to our previous episode on psychedelics with Moad ab del Hay and delves deeper into the current state of psychedelic science, with a focus on the work the MIND foundation is doing in advancing the scientific context for therapeutic use and the enculturation of psychedelics.
    You can find out more about the MIND foundation under
    https://mind-foundation.org/
    The podcast is hosted by Manuel Brenner.
    1 hr 10 min
  • #8.2: Challenges and Opportunities of Psychedelic Research with Moad Abd El Hay
    This is part 2 of our conversation with Moad Abd El Hay. Moad is a neuroscientist Ph.D. student at the Excellence Cluster CellNetworks in Heidelberg and founder of the UniMind network, a Europe wide initiative that organizes journal clubs on the scientific study of psychedelic substances at universities.
    The second part of our conversation is relatively self-contained, and serves as an introduction to the topic of scientific research into psychedelic substances, from its history and its challenges to its potential, some of which is realized in what has been coined the "psychedelic renaissance".
    The podcast is hosted by Manuel Brenner
    1 hr 7 min
  • #8.1: Can you Feel the Heat? - Temperature Perception and the Problems of Modern Science with Moad Abd El Hay
    This is part one of our conversation with Moad Abd El Hay, neuroscientist PhD student at the Excellence Cluster CellNetworks in Heidelberg and founder of the UniMind network, a Europe wide initiative that organizes journal clubs on the scientific study of psychedelic substances (psychedelic research will be adressed in part 2 of our conversation).
    We explore Moad's work on temperature perception from a biochemical perspective, talk about why it is important for neuroscientists to start by studying simple systems, how heat receptors work and why they makes chilli peppers taste hot and menthol taste cold.
    In the second half of the conversation we talk about some of the most pressing problems of modern science. We address the constant pressure to medicalize research, and how this interferes with foundational research. We talk about the problematic incentive structures in a broken publication system, power politics, and the lack of education in statistics, leading to p-hacking, small sample sizes and negligence of multiple comparisons.
    The podcast is hosted by Manuel Brenner.
    1 hr 16 min
  • #7: The Rise of Computational Propaganda with Marcel Schliebs
    In this episode of the ACIT Science Podcast, we are talking with Marcel Schliebs, who is currently pursuing his Ph.D. in Political Data Science at the Oxford Internet Institute, working in the context of the Computational Propaganda Project.
    We are discussing the influence of foreign actors in the 2016 and 2020 elections in the US and the spread of misinformation around the current Covid crisis. We talk about the rise of computational propaganda, which actors are involved, who is targeted (from the Western liberal democracies to the respective regime's political opponents), and what incentives bad actors might have for spreading fake news.
    We talk about how technologies have transformed the ease with which misinformation is sown, how deep fake media might exacerbate the problem in the near future, and what steps the big tech companies, intelligence agencies, and governments can take and are taking against this.
    We talk about the challenges of a data-driven approach to inferring causalities in the complex landscape of computational propaganda, and about
    Marcel's future research topics.
    The podcast is hosted by Manuel Brenner.
    1 hr 46 min

About The Transformative Ideas Podcast

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The Transformative Ideas Podcast (formerly the ACIT Science Podcast). This podcast is to provide a glimpse into the life of scientists: to learn about the ideas they are passionate about, to find out…