The Turing Podcast

In an interview recorded last year, Jo & Ed are joined by Dr Omar A Guerrero, an Economist & Computational Social Scientist at The Alan Turing Institute & UCL Department of Economics, whose research focusses on economic behaviour and institutions from an interdisciplinary angle. The episode focusses on Policy Priority Inference (PPI); a technology developed in collaboration with the United Nations Development Programme. PPI is intended to be used to optimise government policy to meet sustainable development goals and identify the policy priorities that governments need to set if they are to adopt a specific development strategy. Read more about the research discussed in this episode here: https://www.turing.ac.uk/research/research-projects/policy-priority-inference

This week on the podcast, the hosts are joined by Sören Mindermann & Mrinank Sharma who are PhD students from Oxford University. Mrinank works as part of Oxford's Future of Humanity Institute, whilst Sören is a member of Oxford Applied and Theoretical Machine Learning Group and the episode focuses on the research they've recently had published on inferring the effectiveness of government interventions against Covid-19, during the first wave of the pandemic in 2020. You can find the research article for this work here: https://science.sciencemag.org/content/371/6531/eabd9338

In this episode the hosts were joined by Professor Sue Black to discuss her inspirational life story and career, as well as the initiatives she has set up to encourage more women into the tech sector and her hopes for the future. Sue Black is a Professor of Computer Science and Technology Evangelist at Durham University, has set up initiatives such BCS women and the social enterprise Tech mums, to encourage more women into computing and has received an OBE for ‘Service to technology’. She was also instrumental in the campaign to save Bletchley Park.

This week the hosts chat with Dr Dan Stowell, senior researcher at Queen Mary University of London and fellow of The Alan Turing Institute, about his work on addressing climate change via creating high-coverage open dataset of solar photovoltaic installations in the UK. It also happens to be research that podcast host Ed was involved in as you'll hear! You can check out the paper on this topic, published in Nature Scientific Data here: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41597-020-00739-0

On this episode of the podcast, we are joined by Lord Robert Winston to talk about engaging with the public about the science of combatting Covid-19. Professor of Science and Society and Emeritus Professor of Fertility Studies at Imperial College London, Robert has also had an incredible career in television, presenting the BBC’s The Secret Life of Twins, Child of Our Time and the BAFTA award-winning The Human Body.  Professor Winston runs a research programme at the Institute of Reproductive and Developmental Biology at Imperial College that aims to improve human transplantation. He has over 300 scientific publications about human reproduction and the early stages of pregnancy. He is also Chairman of the Genesis Research Trust – a charity which raised over £13 million to establish the Institute of Reproductive and Developmental Biology and which now funds high quality research into women’s health and babies.  

This week the hosts are joined by Professor Tim Hubbard, who is Head of the Department of Medical & Molecular Genetics at King’s College London, and Associate Director of Health Data Research UK in London, as well as being the Head of Genome Analysis at Genomics England. They discuss the recent success of Deep Mind's AlphaFold protein structure prediction software at the CASP14 competition and other developments from the worlds of health data science and genomics.

On the first episode of season 2, we are joined by Alexander Tokarev, a very recent PhD graduate from the University of Manchester. Alex does research in Organizational Psychology, Personality Psychology, and Psychometrics. With a strong mathematical and statistical background, he applies these to psychology. He is here to tell us a little bit about modelling personality traits, in particular the ones known as the dark core.    Sound effects courtesy of Brand Name Audio

Ever wondered what you were signing up to when you click the “Accept all cookies” button that seems to appear on every new website you visit? In the final episode of The Turing Podcast Series One, the hosts are joined by Dr Rebecca Rumbul to talk about The Privacy Collective, an organization that supports compensation claims arising out of the misuse of personal data on behalf of the general public, and how they're involved in with the largest data privacy case against GDPR breaches in history. To learn more, check out their website here: https://theprivacycollective.eu/en/

This week on The Turing Podcast, the hosts chat with James Walsh, a research assistant at The Alan Turing Institute, and Funmi Kesa, a PhD student at the University of Warwick, and hear about their work on “Project Odysseus”, one of The Alan Turing Institute’s key research projects in response to the COVID-19 Pandemic. By capturing activity in London to better understand 'busyness', the research aims to aid effective policy-making strategies for exiting lockdowns.

The ability to reproduce the research that other scientists have done to see whether the same results are obtained (or the same conclusions are reached) is an integral part of the scientific process, but are we doing it right and how difficult is it to do? This week, Ed is joined by Dr Kirstie Whittaker and Dr Sarah Gibson for a discussion about the reproducibility of scientific research, why this is such an important topic and what The Alan Turing Institute is doing to promote best practices in reproducible data science. Kirstie is the Programme Lead for Tools, Practices and Systems at The Alan Turing Institute and Sarah is a Research Software Engineer at the Institute who is also a fellow of the Software Sustainability Institute. Check out some of the projects mentioned in the interview such as The Turing Way at https://the-turing-way.netlify.app/ and Binder at https://mybinder.org/