The Future of Everything

Jayodita Sanghvi is director of data science at Grand Rounds, a startup that connects members to high-quality health care. Grace Tang is a data scientist at LinkedIn. Both are alumnae of Stanford bioengineering.While the connection between big data and bioengineering may not be readily apparent, Sanghvi and Tang say that the connection couldn’t be more clear or timely than right now when big data is now firmly entrenched in big business.From applications that help diagnose and guide people to relevant care to programs that suss out bad actors on social media, the challenges of harnessing big data and the consequences of incorrect or improper use are raising important questions for those charged with making big data work. The challenges range from finding correct answers in messy or missing data to the deep ethical and privacy dilemmas inherent in the breadth and quantity of information available today.Join host Russ Altman and big data experts Jayodita Sanghvi and Grace Tang for a deeper look into the challenges arising when big data meets big business.You can listen to the Future of Everything on iTunes, Google Podcasts, SoundCloud, Spotify, Stitcher or via Stanford Engineering Magazine. Connect With Us:Episode Transcripts >>> The Future of Everything WebsiteConnect with Russ >>> Threads / Bluesky / MastodonConnect with School of Engineering >>>Twitter/X / Instagram / LinkedIn / Facebook

Stanford materials engineer William Chueh got interested in battery design as way to battle climate change. He looked across the energy landscape and understood that a future filled with renewable solar and wind energy will require more and better batteries to even out the troughs when the sun is not shining or the wind is not blowing.Chueh says battery design has come a long way in the last 10 years. But sating the energy needs of a future filled with countless smartphones, laptops, electric cars and wearable devices will drive a profound transition in the battery industry. Today’s $50 billion battery market will blossom to a trillion dollars in the next 15 years, he predicts.Chueh says the grid of the future will be a network of diverse smaller-scale energy-storage options that guarantees a steady supply of electricity with no single point of failure — a model that takes its inspiration from the way the internet delivers information without fail. The result will be a more efficient and resilient grid for all, Chueh says. Connect With Us:Episode Transcripts >>> The Future of Everything WebsiteConnect with Russ >>> Threads / Bluesky / MastodonConnect with School of Engineering >>>Twitter/X / Instagram / LinkedIn / Facebook

Days after COVID-19 broke out in the United States, Russ Altman and colleagues at Stanford's Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence (HAI) scrambled to organize a full-day online conference to replace the in-person meeting they were planning for spring 2020. Their topic: using AI to defeat the deadly new virus behind COVID-19 and, in particular, analyze how countries were responding; developing new ways of tracking and anticipating its spread; reshape the search for treatments and a vaccine; and, last but not least, to battling “infodemics” — the tendency for information overload to hinder scientific progress. With thousands from around the world tuning in for the live event and 60,000-plus views of the recordings since, the conference illustrated in real terms how an entire field pivoted in a matter of weeks to address the pandemic in new and promising ways. In this episode of Stanford Engineering's The Future of Everything, guest host Howard Wolf turns the tables on Altman — a medical doctor, an expert in bioinformatics and the HAI associate director who helped lead the conference — and digs deep on AI’s response to COVID-19. Connect With Us:Episode Transcripts >>> The Future of Everything WebsiteConnect with Russ >>> Threads / Bluesky / MastodonConnect with School of Engineering >>>Twitter/X / Instagram / LinkedIn / Facebook

The co-director of Stanford’s Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence discusses how AI can reach its potential to enhance human capabilities and enrich human lives.Connect With Us: Episode Transcripts >>> The Future of Everything Website Connect with Russ >>> Threads / Bluesky / Mastodon Connect with School of Engineering >>>Twitter/X / Instagram / LinkedIn / Facebook

An expert in bioinformatics describes how better information and modeling can help caregivers stay a step ahead of the new virus.Connect With Us: Episode Transcripts >>> The Future of Everything Website Connect with Russ >>> Threads / Bluesky / Mastodon Connect with School of Engineering >>>Twitter/X / Instagram / LinkedIn / Facebook

New research explores how physical pushing and pulling between cells helps them differentiate into the myriad cell types in the body. Have you ever pondered how the cells in your hand knew to become a hand and not, say, a foot or a heart or an ear? Alex Dunn is a chemical engineer who thinks about such things a lot. He has always marveled at the way — from brain to blood to bone — the many cells that make up our bodies derive from just a single cell created when sperm meets egg. He says that process of differentiation comes down to far more than genetics or biochemistry can explain. Dunn counts himself as among an emerging field known as “mechanobiology” that is exploring how physical forces — the tugging and nudging that goes on between cells — play a very important part in how cells differentiate and self-organize into the complex systems that make up the human body. Dunn says there’s still a lot we don’t know about mechanobiology, but the process of observing and analyzing the behavior of invisible molecules inside a cell is not unlike trying to understand how a bakery works by peering in the window. For a glimpse inside the inner workings of human cells and the very latest science of cell differentiation, join chemical-engineer-turned-mechanobiologist Alex Dunn for the latest episode of The Future of Everything podcast from Sirius XM with bioengineer and host Russ Altman.Connect With Us: Episode Transcripts >>> The Future of Everything Website Connect with Russ >>> Threads / Bluesky / Mastodon Connect with School of Engineering >>>Twitter/X / Instagram / LinkedIn / Facebook

A marine scientist travels the world to understand whether and how the ocean will respond to climate change, overfishing and other challenges. Fiorenza “Fio” Micheli grew up on the Mediterranean Sea, where she fell in love with the ocean and made it the object of her scientific career. Now a marine ecologist and co-director of Stanford’s Center for Ocean Solutions, her research spans the spectrum of marine science. She has studied the overfishing of sharks and how their absence affects coral reef ecosystems; she has explored the influence of marine protected areas on biodiversity below the waves; she has studied the impacts of the many ways in which we use the ocean — through fishing to farming to recreation — on its ecosystems, and how to more sustainably support these crucial services. And, for lessons on how undersea life might respond to climate change, she traveled to Italy, her home country, to investigate life near undersea volcanic vents that jet carbon dioxide into the seawater like a Jacuzzi. In all of Micheli’s varied research, she returns to a constant theme: The ocean is a magical place, worthy of awe and wonder, but it is in trouble. It is time to act before it is too late. In the latest episode of Stanford Engineering’s The Future of Everything podcast, Micheli takes host and bioengineer Russ Altman — and listeners — on a deep dive into ocean science and global efforts to protect this valuable resource.Connect With Us: Episode Transcripts >>> The Future of Everything Website Connect with Russ >>> Threads / Bluesky / Mastodon Connect with School of Engineering >>>Twitter/X / Instagram / LinkedIn / Facebook

A civil engineer explains how new insights gleaned from the flight of birds may one day be applied to fields as far-ranging as autonomous cars and crowd control. Anyone who has ever observed a large flock of starlings in flight – darting and swirling as if the entire flock were one big beautiful being – cannot help but marvel and wonder at how all those birds keep from crashing into one another. Nick Ouellette is studying the in-flight behavior of birds to draw lessons he can apply to engineering. He says that birds are not alone in their tightly coordinated patterns of movement; such behaviors can be observed at every scale of nature, from bacteria to bees to beluga whales. Ouellette is doing sophisticated video measurements of flocks in flight to understand just how it is that birds can pull off their beautiful balletics without total chaos. He says the secret is that nature favors decentralized, bottom-up control of groups versus the top-down, leader-follower approach favored by humans. Ouellette, a civil engineer and birdwatcher extraordinaire, discusses his research on the latest episode of Stanford Engineering’s The Future of Everything podcast with bioengineer and host Russ Altman.Connect With Us: Episode Transcripts >>> The Future of Everything Website Connect with Russ >>> Threads / Bluesky / Mastodon Connect with School of Engineering >>>Twitter/X / Instagram / LinkedIn / Facebook

How a revealing father-daughter conversation led to a career dedicated to studying and treating severe trauma and stress-related disorders. Shaili Jain first got interested in studying post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) on an East Coast road trip listening to her father describe his experiences during the 1947 Partition of British India. As she listened to details of his trauma and losses, many revealed to her only for the first time, Jain realized she had a deep personal connection to trauma survivors that had, until now, been hidden. This realization spurred a new career, committed to specializing in PTSD and advancing the science of traumatic stress. PTSD became Jain’s life’s work as a medical doctor and a researcher. She would eventually go on to pen a 2019 book, The Unspeakable Mind. Her book combines vividly recounted patient stories, cutting-edge neuroscience, interviews with some of the world ’s top trauma scientists and Jain’s professional expertise, and offers a textured portrait of a widely misunderstood condition. PTSD has historically been hidden in plain sight, she says, and it is typically tough to diagnose and often goes hand in hand with anxiety, mood and substance abuse disorders. But now, she says, researchers are making great strides at understanding trauma and treating PTSD effectively. In the latest episode of Stanford Engineering’s “The Future of Everything” podcast, Jain discusses the hopeful prognosis for traumatic stress disorders with host and bioengineer Russ Altman.Connect With Us: Episode Transcripts >>> The Future of Everything Website Connect with Russ >>> Threads / Bluesky / Mastodon Connect with School of Engineering >>>Twitter/X / Instagram / LinkedIn / Facebook

A rapidly shifting legal debate is raging in healthcare over patient data and privacy. One legal expert says that even though regulations have lagged, a reckoning is due. How much control should patients have over who sees their medical records? How readily should researchers share patient-level data from their clinical studies? In today’s world, should the answers to these questions depend on whether the data are “anonymized?” These are but a few of the ethical and legal conundrums that Michelle Mello, Stanford professor of law and of health research and policy, grapples with on a daily basis. She says that rapidly evolving ways to gather and share medical data are exposing the limitations of laws that protect patient privacy. Meanwhile, the value of sharing patient and clinical data is growing by the day. Data from multiple studies can be pooled to study subgroups or explore rare conditions that were once out of reach. It could help lower drug prices, too, or identify ways to treat patients with greater precision and efficiency. Mello says that reaping these benefits will require a national conversation about what patients are willing to trade off in terms of privacy and control over their personal health information. Join Michelle Mello and host Russ Altman for a wide-ranging discussion of the ethical and legal challenges in healthcare on Stanford Engineering’s The Future of Everything.Connect With Us: Episode Transcripts >>> The Future of Everything Website Connect with Russ >>> Threads / Bluesky / Mastodon Connect with School of Engineering >>>Twitter/X / Instagram / LinkedIn / Facebook