The Turing Podcast

Ed & Rachel are joined by Dr Tim Hobson, Senior Research Software Engineer and resident Bitcoin enthusiast at The Alan Turing Institute! Tim offers his take on the phenomenon that is Bitcoin, the future of its adoption and how the underlying technology relates to his research interests.

The latest episode of the Turing Podcast features a special roundtable discussion with our strategic partner Accenture about career options in the data science sector. The latest episode of the Turing Podcast features a special roundtable discussion with our strategic partner Accenture about career options in the data science sector. Our hosts Jo Dungate and Bea Costa Gomes were joined by three influential figures in AI and data science - Henrietta Ridley (Data Science Manager at Accenture), Alice Aspinall (Senior Manager at Mudano), and Kirstie Whitaker (the Turing’s Director for the tools, practices and systems programme). Our guests brought their different experiences and perspectives to an insightful discussion on various aspects of the data science industry, from how they first got into their fields, their career motivations and lessons learned along the way. The episode concludes with each guest offering advice to anyone at the beginning of their career.

This week on The Turing Podcast, the hosts chat with Dr James Geddes, who is a Principial Research Data Scientist in the Research Engineering Group at the Alan Turing Institute. The discussion revolves around an all-important question: What actually is AI? James breaks down three categories of computer programs that could be considered AI: Simulations, Symbolic AI and Machine Learning, and the hosts debate which, if any of these, are really intelligent! This week the podcast is hosted by Ed Chalstrey and introduces Christina Last.

In this episode we talk to Dr Nira Chamberlain, president of The Institute of Mathematics and its Applications. We talk with Nira about Black History Month, mathematicians though history that have inspired him, and how mathematics can cross racial, geographical and cultural boundaries.

The hosts were joined by Dr. Nicol Turner Lee to discuss her research on public policy, designed to enable equitable access to technology and digital equity. We talk about themes in her recent book on the Digitally Invisible and the real-life consequences of the growing digital divide. Nicol Turner Lee is a speaker, author and technology innovator. As well as a senior fellow in Governance Studies and Director of the Centre for Technology Innovation at the Brookings Institution in Washington DC, where she also serves as Co-Editor in Chief of the blog, Tech-Tank.

We chat about all things science communication with two Turing colleagues: Ethics Research Fellow Mhairi Aitken and Science Writer James Lloyd. They discuss why we need science communicators in the first place, what makes for good communication, and what specific challenges are associated with communicating data science and AI research to the general public.

This week on the podcast, we bring you a conversation the hosts had last December with PhD candidate Elizabeth Seger. Elizabeth studies at The University of Cambridge and is a research assistant at the Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence. Talking about her work with The Alan Turing Institute, she explains how informed decision making in democracies is being impacted by modern technology, and in particular how online misinformation has affected the pandemic response. Find out more about the research here: https://www.turing.ac.uk/blog/infodemics-and-crisis-response?_cldee=ZWNoYWxzdHJleUB0dXJpbmcuYWMudWs%3d&recipientid=contact-9b098e61071be911a974002248014773-9d06c72d733d47418edbfd23c7e38bcb&esid=2e510c56-7d14-eb11-a813-0022483ed0bb

In this episode hosts Jo Dungate and Rachel Winstanley speak to Andrew Holding, a Senior Research Associate at Cancer Research UK's (CRUK) Cambridge Institute and Turing Fellow. Andrew discusses how his research is using machine learning to understand the biology that underlies breast cancer to help improve treatments.

The hosts chat with to Professor Robert Foley, who works on Human Evolution at the University of Cambridge and is a Fellow of The Alan Turing Institute. The conversation takes a broad view of how our understanding of human evolution has changed in recent decades and focusses in on the Turing institute’s Palaeoanalytics project, which involves applying data science and machine learning methods to non-genomic data. Find out more about this project here: https://www.turing.ac.uk/research/research-projects/palaeoanalytics

AI is widely lauded as a way of reducing the burden on human online content moderators. However, to understand whether AI could, and should, replace human moderators, we need to understand its strengths and limitations. In this episode our hosts speak to the researchers Paul Röttger and Bertie Vidgen to discuss how they are attempting to tackle online hate speech, in particular through their work on HateCheck - a suite of tests for hate speech detection models.