How do you win a fast-paced first-person shooter? Answer: it helps to have a good GPU, of course. How do you win one of the world’s most high profile robotics competitions? You guessed it, it helps to have a good GPU. Doug Morrison of the Australian Center for Robotic Vision helped lead the team that developed Cartman, a custom-built, cost-effective robotic system that picked and placed its way to victory in the 2017 Amazon Robotics Challenge global finals in Nagoya Japan last year.

We talk a lot about technology, and data, specifically, impacting all facets of modern life. In this episode we're going to look at data's role in addressing one of the biggest threats to life as we know it: cancer. We'll talk to Dr. Richard Wender, chief cancer control officer at the American Cancer Society about how technology is key to redefining how we look at, and fight, cancer.

One of the things that makes the weather so dangerous is that it's so hard to predict. Tornadoes, hail, high winds and flash floods cause billions of dollars worth of property damage, and injure or kill hundreds of people in the United States each year. Knowing when storms may strike can save lives, and property. Our guest is part of a team at the National Center for Atmospheric Research that's doing just that. We spoke with David John Gagne, a postdoctoral fellow at the National Center for Atmospheric Research about his work with deep learning at the GPU Technology Conference in Silicon Valley this week.

Accountants have spreadsheets. Novelists have word processors. Now, deep learning promises to help take some of the grunt out of legal grunt work. Here's how one startup is using deep learning to help lawyers get legal work done faster and more accurately.

Ever since the internet went mainstream people have been struggling with perhaps the ultimate question: what do I call my web site? What domain name do I register? But almost as quickly as that became a question in people's mind, a secondary question came up: what's my domain name going to be worth? Well thanks to AI we have a better answer to that than ever. Joining us for this episode: Jason Ansel, senior principal engineer with GoDaddy, which is using AI to help you better understand the value of your domain name.

Sarcasm? On the Internet? You're kidding. But sarcasm is no joke. Long before today's sentiment analysis systems struggled to accurately understand human communication, people struggled to understand one another's sarcasm. Now, thanks to the work of Dr. Pushpak Bhattacharyya and his team computers are beginning to understand one of humanity's most challenging, and amusing, modes of communication. Dr. Bhattacharyya, director of IIT Patna, and a professor at the Computer Science and Engineering Department at IIT Bombay has spent the past few years using GPU-powered deep learning to detect sarcasm.

AI is being used to enhance and improve life in varied and often incredible ways. But what if we could use AI to improve the end of our lives, too? Our guest today is Anand Avati, a graduate student in the Artificial Intelligence Lab at Stanford University's Computer Science Department. Anand is co-author of a research paper entitled "Improving Palliative Care with Deep Learning" which details his team's use of a deep learning system to predict patient mortality with the aim of improving access to palliative care for critically-ill patients.

Ken MacLeod, an award-winning science fiction author known for examining the interplay between humanity and technology, dives into fascinating themes in this conversation. He discusses his latest work, which features sentient robots and digital consciousness. The chat navigates the evolution of the internet and its impact on society, touching on the ethics of AI and capitalism. MacLeod shares insights from his writing journey, including a new novella set in an alternate Scotland, revealing his unique blend of speculative fiction and real-world influences.

Love. The search for love. The search even for someone you just kind of like. It's been the subject of poems, novels, songs, you name it. For as long as humans have been around, they've been looking for love. But what if you could use AI to automate the process? To help you with everything from finding your true match, to swiping through all those not quite true matches. Oscar Alsing, our guest on this episode, will talk about how he's used AI, and Tinder, to do just that.

Timnit Gebru, a postdoctoral researcher at Microsoft and a Stanford AI Lab PhD graduate, dives into the intriguing intersection of AI and voting behaviors. She discusses how Google Street View data can predict demographic trends by analyzing vehicle types in neighborhoods. With a focus on the challenges of fine-grained image recognition and the ethics of AI, she emphasizes the need for fairness and accountability in algorithms. Gebru also shares fascinating insights from her research, underscoring the biases that can influence societal outcomes.