Music is universal. It transcends language. Melodies have the power to trigger strong emotions. In fact, our brains release dopamine - the “feel good” hormone - when we listen to music. Today’s guest, Spotify’s Chief R&D Officer Gustav Söderström, has been helping to bring the magic of music, personalized playlists, and more recently, podcasts to people around the world. He’s also led the platform to personalize individual content experiences with the help of artificial intelligence....

When you are skiing down a mountain, riding your bike along a forest trail, or surfing 6-footers, it is hard enough just to concentrate on what you are doing, let alone try to capture a video of the moment. But what if you could hire a professional videographer to follow you and capture every move? Well, now you can in the form of AI-powered drones from Skydio. While personal use is just one application, the company has found success across a multitude of use cases. In this episode, we’re...

Sports and artificial intelligence aren’t two areas that often intersect. That has begun to change as IoT and wearables have begun to be adopted by more professional sports teams. The data that’s produced can be used to identify areas of performance improvement, potential future injuries and insights about team structure on the field. Today’s guest, Param Hegde, former CTO of Catapult Sports joined the show to share how the company is using data-driven intelligence to help athletes reach...

Every business wants to be a data-driven business these days; basing decisions on tangible facts derived from historical precedents and clear-cut numbers. But that’s a lot easier said than done. This episode’s guest, Amit Prakash, is on a mission to change that. Based on his experience working on Microsoft’s Bing and then at Google working on Google Brain, he co-founded Thoughtspot to make querying data as easy as having a simple conversation. Thoughtspot provides artificial intelligence (AI)...

On Episode 15 of Season 2, we’re joined by Eric Horvitz, Microsoft’s first ever Chief Scientific Officer. His research spans theoretical and practical challenges with developing systems that perceive, learn, and reason. He’s the company’s top inventor since joining in 1993 with over 300 patents filed.   He has been elected Fellow of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI), Fellow of the National Academy of Engineering (NAE), Fellow of the American Academy of Arts...

The five senses...touch, sight, smell, taste, and hearing. They are critical to how we perceive the world around us. Without them, we are lost. And as we grow older, they tend to weaken particularly when it comes to sight and hearing. Today’s guest, Andrew Song, is the co-founder and CEO of Whisper AI, and he is on a mission to help give people great hearing regardless of their age. After graduating from the University of Waterloo with degrees in mathematics and computer science, Andrew went...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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....

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...

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...

*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...

While the world’s temperature rises, there are scores of scientists working around the globe to study causes and solutions. One scientist in particular, David Rolnick, has stood out as a pioneer of machine-learning in the fight against climate change. David successfully built a broader movement including others like Andrew Ng, Yoshua Bengio, Demis Hassabis, and Jennifer Chayes to champion the amazing possibilities that exist at the intersection of AI and the climate. He organized the...

In the second episode of Season Two of The Robot Brains, Pieter Abbeel interviews the Chief Technology Officer of Etsy, Mike Fisher. Etsy is a global online marketplace, where people come together to make, sell, buy, and collect unique items. It was founded in 2005 as an accessible listing site for DIY crafters and artists to sell their wares before blossoming into a widely-respected and mainstream online shopping site. It still maintains its whimsical brand balanced by its listing on the...

In Episode One of Season Two, Host Pieter Abbeel is joined by guest (and close collaborator) Sergey Levine, professor at UC Berkeley, EECS. Sergey discusses the early years of his career, how Andrew Ng influenced him to become interested in machine learning, his current projects, and his lab's recent accomplishments. The conversation concludes with Sergey's view on the dangers of machines not being intelligent enough and his advice for students seeking a career in robotic. | SUBSCRIBE TO THE...

Join host Pieter Abbeel on Season 2 of the The Robot Brains podcast as he explores how far humanity has come in its mission to create conscious computers, mindful machines, and rational robots. Episode 1 of Season Two will air on 1/5/22. Over the course of the season, you’ll learn about robots and AI that can drive you around a city, diagnose your health symptoms, and even keep your grandma safe from falls. Subscribe right now in Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you like to get your...

On the last episode (Ep.22) of Season One of The Robot Brains Podcast our guest is Ilya Sutskever. Ilya is the Co-Founder and Chief Scientist of OpenAI. As a PhD student at Toronto, Ilya was one of the authors on the 2012 AlexNet paper that completely changed the field of AI, resulting in the widespread adoption of deep learning, resulting in the avalanche of AI breakthroughs we’ve seen the past 10 years. After the AlexNet breakthrough in computer vision, at Google, among many other...

On the penultimate episode (Ep.21) of Season One of The Robot Brains Podcast our guest is Josh Lessing. Josh is the CTO of AppHarvest, one of the leading pioneers in Agricultural Technology (or AgTech). Farming is one of the world's oldest industries, but in many ways the technologies and techniques used by farmers hasn't progressed much in centuries. But with recent advances in AI and robotics, AgTech looks certain to transform the entire industry. At AppHarvest, Josh is helping to build...

On Ep.20 of The Robot Brains Podcast, Pieter Abbeel is joined by Fei-Fei Li. Her legendary status in the field of AI precedes her on our podcast because she's been discussed frequently by many of our previous guests - many of whom are her former students. She is the Sequoia Capital Professor of Computer Science at Stanford University, Co-Director of the Stanford Institute for Human-Centred Artificial Intelligence (Stanford HAI). She was also the leading scientist and instigator of ImageNet,...

Joining us for episode 19 of The Robot Brains Podcast is Boris Krumrey, Global VP of Automation Solutions at UI Path. We have all heard of physical robots, autonomous machines that help humans with tasks in the real world, but what about "software robots"? Digital helpers who can be built, trained and used to help increasingly digital workforces with their computer based tasks - from HR teams onboarding new hires to updating spreadsheets or presentation slides. UIPath is a market leader in...

In episode 18 of our host Pieter Abbeel meets Chris Urmson. Chris is one of the world-leading pioneers in self-driving. He led the Google self-driving project for several years - which later became Waymo. Then, in 2017, he co-founded his own self-driving company, Aurora where he is currently the CEO. In this episode, he discusses his involvement of the DARPA Grand Challenge, departure from Google, and his (and Aurora's) vision for the future of autonomous vehicles. | Visit therobotbrains.ai...