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The Robot Brains Podcast

Latest episodes

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Jan 19, 2022 • 33min

David Rolnick on how machine learning can help tackle climate change

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 first-ever ever AI event at the United Nations Climate Change Conference. He was named a top innovator by the MIT Technology Review -- all before the age of 30.He sits down with Pieter to discuss his landmark paper on the applications of ML to climate change looking at use cases like weather simulations, ecological monitoring, and predicting natural resource depletion.| 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 Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
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Jan 12, 2022 • 38min

Mike Fisher of Etsy talks AI and E-commerce

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 NASDAQ and in 2021, it generated an impressive $1.7B in revenue. The CEO recently shared with Forbes that he's determined to keep growing bigger. One of his strategies? Using AI and machine-learning to keep improving the 1:1 selling and buying experience its so well-known for.Mike sat down with Pieter to share the transformation the site has gone through starting with rebuilding its search engine capabilities all the way to designing more intelligent algorithms to provide better and more accurate recommendations. With the same number of items equivalent to 2500 grocery stores and inventory that changes every day, the site processes a lot of data!Mike shares how Etsy manages it all and continues to innovate in the e-commerce space.| 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 Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
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Jan 5, 2022 • 50min

Sergey Levine explains the challenges of real world robotics

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 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 Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
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Dec 26, 2021 • 2min

Season Two: Trailer

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 podcasts to be notified as soon as we publish each episode.In the meantime, visit our website - https://therobotbrains.ai - to sign up for our newsletter or follow us on Twitter, YouTube and LinkedIn to get alerts and updates from the team. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
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Aug 25, 2021 • 1h 3min

Ilya Sutskever explains the origins of deep learning

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 breakthroughs, Ilya showed that neural networks are unexpectedly great at machine translation, at least at the time it was unexpected, now it’s long become the norm to use neural nets for machine translation.  Late 2015 Ilya left Google to co-found OpenAI, where he is Chief Scientist. Some of his breakthroughs include GPT, CLIP, DallE, Codex. Ilya’s academic work, less than 10 years out of his PhD, has ben cited over 250,000 times, reflecting his absolutely mind-blowing influence on the field. | SUBSCRIBE TO THE ROBOT BRAINS PODCAST TODAY | Visit therobotbrains.ai and follow us on Twitter @therobotbrains, Instagram @therobotbrains and YouTube TheRobotBrainsPodcast | Host: Pieter Abbeel | Executive Producers: Ricardo Reyes & Henry Tobias Jones | Audio Production: Kieron Matthew Banerji | Title Music: Alejandro Del Pozo Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
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Aug 18, 2021 • 54min

Josh Lessing on AppHarvest and the future of robotic farming

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 some of America's largest and most technologically advanced greenhouses. AppHarvest’s flagship greenhouse is located in Morehead, Kentucky, and spans 60 acres. This modern greenhouse will use “90% less water than traditional open-field agriculture.” The company's greenhouse, which currently focuses on growing fruit, has a central US location that's within a day’s drive of 70% of the U.S. population, allowing AppHarvest to reduce the amount of fuel consumed in transportation by 80%. Inside the Greenhouse you’ll find conventional agriculture techniques combined with the most advanced AI and Robotics technologies to grow non-GMO, chemical-free produce. Josh joined AppHarvest through the acquisition of his own company Root-AI earlier this year. In his conversation with our host, Pieter Abbeel, Josh describes how AppHarvest's flagship tomato-picking robot actually works, what the future of AI farming looks like, and why Morehead, Kentucky is a great place to visit if you want to see robots in action. | SUBSCRIBE TO THE ROBOT BRAINS PODCAST TODAY | Visit therobotbrains.ai and follow us on Twitter @therobotbrains, Instagram @therobotbrains and YouTube TheRobotBrainsPodcast | Host: Pieter Abbeel | Executive Producers: Ricardo Reyes & Henry Tobias Jones | Audio Production: Kieron Matthew Banerji | Title Music: Alejandro Del Pozo Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
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Aug 11, 2021 • 1h 2min

Fei-Fei Li on revolutionizing AI for the real world

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, arguably the most momentous episode in the history of AI which allowed vision systems and neural nets to break out of academia and into real industries all over the world. On the show we talk to Fei-Fei about her illustrious career in academia, her involvement in the ImageNet and AlexNet breakthroughs, and her new, deeply personal reasons for focusing her latest work on transforming healthcare with AI. | SUBSCRIBE TO THE ROBOT BRAINS PODCAST TODAY | Visit therobotbrains.ai and follow us on Twitter @therobotbrains, Instagram @therobotbrains and YouTube TheRobotBrainsPodcast | Host: Pieter Abbeel | Executive Producers: Ricardo Reyes & Henry Tobias Jones | Audio Production: Kieron Matthew Banerji | Title Music: Alejandro Del Pozo Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
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Aug 4, 2021 • 1h

Boris Krumrey explains UiPath's dream of a robot for every office worker

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 this new and exciting field of "robotics", in particular “Robotic Process Automation” - or RPA. At UiPath, Boris leads the charge on the development of their RPA and UiPath’s ambition to “give every person a robot”. He has helped to bring UiPath “software robots” to companies all over the globe, including: Google, AutoDesk, General Electric, DHL, PwC, among others. UiPath recently IPO’ed (in April 2021) and it was one of the largest IPOs in history, with a 35.8BB market cap at close on its first trading day. In our conversation, Boris describes the new field of RPA and software robotics, as well as describing his vision for the future of AI-enhanced digital work. | SUBSCRIBE TO THE ROBOT BRAINS PODCAST TODAY | Visit therobotbrains.ai and follow us on Twitter @therobotbrains, Instagram @therobotbrains and YouTube TheRobotBrainsPodcast | Host: Pieter Abbeel | Executive Producers: Ricardo Reyes & Henry Tobias Jones | Audio Production: Kieron Matthew Banerji | Title Music: Alejandro Del Pozo Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
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Jul 28, 2021 • 45min

Chris Urmson on Aurora and the future of autonomous vehicles

In episode 18 of The Robot Brains Podcast 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 and follow us on Twitter @therobotbrains, Instagram @therobotbrains and YouTube TheRobotBrainsPodcast | Host: Pieter Abbeel | Executive Producers: Ricardo Reyes & Henry Tobias Jones | Audio Production: Kieron Matthew Banerji | Title Music: Alejandro Del Pozo Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
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Jul 21, 2021 • 1h 4min

Peter Puchwein explains KNAPP's robotics-enhanced vision for the future of the logistics industry

In episode 17 of our host Pieter Abbeel meets Peter Puchwein. Peter is the Vice President of Innovation at KNAPP, one of the world market leaders in warehouse logistics and automation. During their interview Pieter and Peter discuss the many ways that KNAPP has "innovation" in its DNA: from the company's forward-thinking founder Gunter Knapp back in 1952 to the multi-million investments made in hardware and software R&D today. Peter explains how the use of industrial robotics in particular are taking KNAPP to new heights, including towards their "Holy Grail" of fulfilling the "20 Minute Delivery" of anything to anywhere at any time. Host: Pieter Abbeel | Executive Producers: Ricardo Reyes & Henry Tobias Jones | Audio Production: Kieron Matthew Banerji | Title Music: Alejandro Del Pozo Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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