Host Russ Altman, a professor of bioengineering, genetics, and medicine at Stanford, is your guide to the latest science and engineering breakthroughs. Join Russ and his guests as they explore cutting-edge advances that are shaping the future of everything from AI to health and renewable energy.
Along the way, “The Future of Everything” delves into ethical implications to give listeners a well-rounded understanding of how new technologies and discoveries will impact society. Whether you’re a researcher, a student, or simply curious about what’s on the horizon, tune in to stay up-to-date on the latest developments that are transforming our world.
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Physician Tina Stankovic is an ear, nose, and throat specialist and a lover of music whose seemingly disparate pursuits — medicine and music — have led her to a groundbreaking career in hearing research. She recently worked with music legend Paul Simon during his well-publicized battle with hearing loss and he has become a vocal advocate for hearing research. New understandings and new approaches like regenerative medicine have put the once-impossible dream of hearing restoration within reach, Stankovic tells host Russ Altman on this episode of Stanford Engineering’s The Future of Everything podcast.
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Chapters:
(00:00:00) Introduction
Russ Altman introduces guest Tina Stankovic, a professor of otolaryngology and neurosurgery at Stanford University.
(00:03:36) Why Hearing Loss
What inspired Tina’s lifelong journey into hearing science.
(00:04:17) Treating Hearing Loss
Limits of current options and lack of FDA-approved therapies.
(00:05:23) Causes of Hearing Loss
The two main categories of hearing loss: conductive vs. sensorineural.
(00:07:47) Inside the Inner Ear
The complexity of the inner ear, and why diagnosis is so difficult.
(00:09:22) Tinnitus & Hearing Loss
Why ear damage can cause phantom sounds in the brain.
(00:10:28) Emerging Technologies in Hearing Research
New technologies that are evolving treatment approaches.
(00:15:19) Recreating the Ear in the Lab
Challenges the inner ear’s unique composition pose to researchers.
(00:20:02) AI Applications in Hearing Diagnosis
The ways AI is transforming diagnosis and genetic analysis.
(00:21:31) Can Ears Regrow?
Why humans don’t regenerate ear cells—but mice might help.
(00:23:55) Emotional & Social Toll of Hearing Loss
How hearing loss can lead to isolation, stigma, and cognitive decline.
(00:26:06) Born Deaf vs. Later Hearing Loss
Experiential differences between those with early and late hearing loss.
(00:27:52) Paul Simon’s Role and Advocacy
How the artist got involved with Tina’s work and the initiative at Stanford.
(00:29:44) Protecting Your Hearing
Best practices for protecting your hearing.
(00:33:21) Conclusion
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Michael Rau is a professor, theater director, and tech innovator in one. He says that today’s technologies – AI, gaming, interactive storytelling, and even email – are reshaping what performers can do on stage and how audiences experience those performances. The best of the stage has always been about reflecting life, and technology is part of how we live today. It belongs on the stage, as Rau tells host Russ Altman on this episode of Stanford Engineering’s The Future of Everything podcast.
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Chapters:
(00:00:00) Introduction
Russ Altman introduces guest Michael Rau, a professor of theatre and performance studies at Stanford University.
(00:03:16) Why Theater Needs Technology
How AI and digital media are reshaping live performance.
(00:05:15) AI & Emerging Theater Tech
AI scripts, machine learning, AR, and interactive storytelling.
(00:07:28) Theater as Food
How both classic and experimental theatre styles can coexist.
(00:10:13) The Relationship Between Theater & Gaming
Theatrical storytelling and its deep connection to gaming.
(00:14:40) The Debate on Liveness
Whether live actors are necessary to theatre performances.
(00:20:2) Temping: A Play Without Actors
Rau’s theatrical piece where the audience becomes the protagonist.
(00:25:38) AI’s Role in Theater
AI-generated visuals and scripts reshape storytelling and performance.
(00:30:44) AI-Driven Improv
AI-driven improv requires new skills, blending structure with spontaneity.
(00:33:44) Should Audiences Know AI Is Involved?
How transparency increases audience engagement and appreciation
(00:35:30) Conclusion
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We've been thinking a lot about culture recently, and reflecting on how–whether or not we’re aware of it–culture is a force that’s always exerting influence on us. It’s typically only when we get outside of our daily routine, our city or even our country, and are confronted with new ways of doing things that we can clearly see the values, norms, and practices that make up the culture we live in. Today, we’re re-running a thought-provoking conversation we had with Michele Gelfand about notions of what she calls “tight” and “loose” cultures. It’s a conversation that helps illuminate some of the invisible forces of culture, and also sheds light on how understanding these forces helps us better navigate the world. We hope you’ll take another listen and enjoy.
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Chapters:
(00:00:00) Introduction
Russ Altman introduces Michele Gelfand, a professor of psychology and business studies at Stanford University.
(00:02:22) What is Culture?
Defining culture as a set of norms, values, and beliefs.
(00:03:36) The Tight-Loose Continuum
Tight versus loose cultures and their enforcement of social norms.
(00:06:20) Individual vs Societal Tight-Loose
The differences in tight-loose orientation across individuals and nations.
(00:08:25) Tight-Loose Across Societal Levels
How history, ecology, and mobility shape cultural tightness or looseness.
(00:11:25) Cultural Intelligence (CQ)
The role of cultural intelligence in negotiations and leadership.
(00:16:21) Tight-Loose in Personal & Professional Life
Negotiating cultural differences in relationships and organizations.
(00:19:53) Cultural Evolutionary Mismatch
Cultural responses to crises and the influence of perceived vs. real threats.
(00:23:45) Tight-Loose Differences in Business
Cultural differences in mergers, acquisitions, and financial performance.
(00:25:58) Improving Cultural Intelligence
Whether individuals can improve their CQ through practice and exposure.
(00:28:37) Tight-Loose in Politics
The growing tight-loose divide in political and social issues.
(00:31:09) Conclusion
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We are on the cusp of a materials revolution – in electronics, health care, and avionics – says guest engineer-scientist Eric Pop. For instance, silicon and copper have served electronics admirably for decades, he says, but at the nanoscale, better materials will be needed. Atomically thin two-dimensional semiconductors (like molybdenum disulfide) and topological semimetals (like niobium phosphide) are two candidates, but with AI tools to design new materials, the future is going to be really interesting, Pop tells host Russ Altman on this episode of Stanford Engineering’s The Future of Everything podcast.
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Chapters:
(00:00:00) Introduction
Russ introduces guest Eric Pop, a professor of electrical engineering and materials science at Stanford University
(00:02:59) The Status of Electronics Today
The stability of silicon and copper and the challenges with miniaturization.
(00:06:25) Limits of Current Materials
How miniaturization has increased speed but also created new bottlenecks.
(00:10:29) Universal Memory
The need for faster, non-volatile memory that integrates directly with the CPU.
(00:14:57) The Search for Next-Gen Materials
Exploring better materials for chips, from silicon to copper alternatives.
(00:17:54) Challenges of Copper at Nanoscale
Issues with copper at the nanoscale and the potential of niobium phosphate.
(00:24:46) Two-Dimensional Semiconductors
The potential of carbon nanotubes and 2D materials as replacements for silicon.
(00:29:47) Nanoelectronics and Manufacturing
The shift to 2D materials and the challenges in scaling up production
(00:32:34) AI in Material Discovery
AI’s potential in discovering and manufacturing new materials.
(00:34:56) Conclusion
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Physician Ash Alizadeh has seen the future of disease diagnosis and monitoring. It is coursing through every patient’s veins. Traditionally, biopsies have required invasively gathering tissue – from a lung, a liver, or a fetus. Now it’s possible to look for disease without surgery. The DNA is sitting there in the bloodstream, Alizadeh tells host Russ Altman, as they preview the age of liquid biopsies on this episode of Stanford Engineering’s The Future of Everything podcast.
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(00:00:00) Introduction
Russ Altman introduces guest Ash Alizadeh, a faculty member at Stanford University in Oncology and Medicine.
(00:03:39) What is a Liquid Biopsy?
Accessing tissues non-invasively using bodily fluids.
(00:04:31) Detecting Cancer with Liquid Biopsies
How localized cancers can be detected through blood samples.
(00:06:32) The Science Behind Cancer DNA Detection
The differences between normal and cancer DNA
(00:09:51) How Liquid Biopsy Technology Works
The technologies behind detecting cancer-related DNA differences.
(00:12:36) Advances in Liquid Biopsy
New detection approaches using non-mutant molecules and RNA.
(00:14:10) RNA as a Real-Time Tumor Marker
How RNA reveals active tumor processes and drug resistance.
(00:15:55) Tracking Cancer Reccurence
Using tumor-informed panels to monitor cancer recurrence.
(00:16:28) Adapting to Tumor Evolution
Why core mutations remain detectable despite cancer changes.
(00:17:57) Stability of DNA, RNA, and Methylation
Comparing durability and reliability of different biomarkers.
(00:20:49) Listener Question: Early Cancer Detection
Daniel Kim asks about pre-cancer detection and its potential impact.
(00:24:44) Liquid Biopsy in Immunotherapy
Using liquid biopsy to track and improve immune-based treatments.
(00:27:35) Monitoring CAR T-Cell Therapy
How liquid biopsy helps assess immune cell expansion.
(00:32:02) EPIC-Seq: Inferring RNA from DNA
Using DNA fragmentation to predict gene expression in tumors.
(00:34:49) Targeting Tumor Support Systems
Treatment strategies disrupting the tumor microenvironment.
(00:35:52) Conclusion
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February is American Heart Month, and in light of that, we’re bringing back an episode about a group here at Stanford Engineering that’s developing 3D printing methods for human tissues and organs, a process known as bioprinting. Motivated in part by the critical need for heart transplants, Mark Skylar-Scott and his team are specifically working to bioprint tissues of the human heart. It may sound like science fiction, but it’s actually just another example of the groundbreaking research we do here. We hope you’ll take another listen and be inspired by the possibilities.
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Chapters:
(00:00:00) Introduction
Russ Altman introduces guest, Mark Skylar-Scott, a professor of bioengineering at Stanford University.
(00:02:06) What is Bioprinting?
The role of cells and biopolymers in printing functional biological structures.
(00:03:31) Bioprinting a Heart
The potential of printing organs on demand, especially heart tissue.
(00:04:38) Obtaining Cells for Bioprinting
Using stem cells derived from the patient's own cells to create heart tissue.
(00:06:29) Creating Multiple Cell Types for the Heart
The challenge of printing eleven different heart cell types with precision.
(00:08:50) The Scaffold for 3D Printing
The support material used in 3D printing and how it’s later removed.
(00:10:10) Cell Migration and Organ Formation
How cells organize themselves to form functional heart tissue.
(00:12:08) Growing a Full-Sized Heart
Whether they’re printing full-sized hearts or starting with smaller organs.
(00:13:34) Avoiding Overgrowth Risks
The role of bioreactors in shaping the early stages of the organ.
(00:14:57) Scaling Up Cell Production
The need to generate massive numbers of cells for experimentation.
(00:18:32) The Challenge of Vascularization
Creating a blood vessel network to supply oxygen and nutrients.
(00:22:35) Ethical Considerations in Bioprinting
Consent, stem cell sourcing, and the broader ethical landscape.
(00:26:04) The Timeline for Bioprinted Organs
The long timeline for bioprinted organs to reach clinical use.
(00:27:24) The State of the Field & Collaboration
The collaborative, competitive biofabrication field and its rapid progress.
(00:28:20) Conclusion
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Welcome to Stanford Engineering's The Future of Everything, the podcast that delves into groundbreaking research and innovations that are shaping the world and inventing the future. The University has a long history of doing work to positively impact the world and it's a joy to share about the people who are doing this work, what motivates them, and how their work is creating a better future for everybody. Join us every Friday for new episodes featuring insightful conversations with Stanford faculty and to discover how Stanford's research is transforming tomorrow's world.
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Guest Kristy Red-Horse is a biologist who specializes in coronary artery development and disease. She says the latest advances in treatment of blockages could do away with invasive bypass surgeries in favor of growing new arteries using molecules like CXCL12, known to promote artery regrowth in mice. Red-Horse explains how leaps forward in medical imaging, expanding atlases of gene expressions, and new drug delivery mechanisms could someday lead to trials in humans. But, before that day can arrive, much work remains, as Red-Horse tells host Russ Altman in this episode of Stanford Engineering’s The Future of Everything podcast.
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Chapters:
(00:00:00) Introduction
Russ Altman introduces Kristy Red-Horse, a professor of biology at Stanford University.
(00:03:46) Replacing Open-Heart Surgery
Why bypass surgery is invasive, risky, and requires long recovery.
(00:05:09) Challenges in Artery Growth
The difficulty of targeting artery growth with medical interventions.
(00:07:32) The Role of Collateral Arteries
Definition and function of collateral arteries as natural bypass.
(00:09:37) Triggers for Natural Bypass Formation
Genetic factors that may influence the growth of these bypass arteries.
(00:10:49) Unique Properties of Coronary Arteries
Challenges of ensuring artificial growth replicates natural artery function.
(00:13:04) The Discovery of CXCL12
A key molecule that stimulates collateral artery formation.
(00:16:16) Precise Artery Growth Control
The results of targeted CXCL12 injections into mice hearts.
(00:17:32) CXCL12’s Overlooked Role
The molecule’s role in the immune system and stem cells.
(00:20:27) Guinea Pigs and Heart Attack Resistance
How guinea pigs naturally develop collaterals.
(00:23:19) Preventing Heart Disease
Using artery growth treatments to target early-stage coronary disease.
(00:25:25) Breakthroughs in Imaging Technology
New technology that enables identification of collateral growth pathways.
(00:27:07) How Collateral Arteries Form
The two mechanisms in which new arteries form.
(00:28:48) The Future of Medical Artery Growth
The possibility of eliminating bypass surgery with targeted artery growth.
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Materials scientist and physicist Guosong Hong is an expert in getting materials to do remarkable things. Recently, he and collaborators used a common food dye found in snack chips to turn living tissue transparent, allowing light to penetrate through skin and muscle. Hong is now working to realize a new age of medical imaging that lets doctors see deep into the body – without surgery. It’s a miracle of physics but it could change medicine, Hong tells host Russ Altman on this episode of Stanford Engineering’s The Future of Everything podcast.
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Chapters:
(00:00:00) Introduction
Russ Altman introduces Guosong Hong, an expert in physics, material science, and biology from Stanford University.
(00:02:52) Material Science Meets Neuroscience
How Guosong’s research blends nanomaterials and brain science.
(00:04:01) Why Tissue Isn’t Transparent
The challenge of light penetration in biological tissues.
(00:05:55) A New Approach to Tissue Clearing
The physics behind tissue transparency and refractive index manipulation.
(00:08:57) UV Light and Transparency
How manipulating UV absorption can align refractive indexes.
(00:11:17) First Experiments and Results
Initial tests that demonstrate successful tissue clearing.
(00:13:19) Applications in Medicine
The potential of transparent tissues in dermatology and medical imaging.
(00:15:36) Testing on Live Tissue
The results of testing transparency techniques on live mice.
(00:19:30) Transparency in Nature
How some species have naturally transparent tissue.
(00:20:52) Human Eye and Protein Transparency
The unique proteins that keep our lenses clear using similar physics.
(00:23:24) Wireless Light Inside the Body
The development of ultrasound-activated light sources for tissue imaging.
(00:26:56) Precision of Ultrasound Light
How precisely ultrasound can trigger tiny particles to emit light.
(00:29:14) Conclusion
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With the tremendous amount of information available to us today, the ability to discern what’s reliable from what’s not is crucial to combating the spread of misinformation. In 2023, we sat down with Jonathan Osborne, an expert in science education to talk about the tools our students (and really all of us!) need to critically evaluate science news and information. We hope you’ll tune into this episode again to hear about the three valuable skills Osborne says we should be teaching our students so they can debunk scientific misinformation.
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(00:00:00) Introduction
Russ Altman introduces Jonathan Osborne, a professor of education at Stanford University.
(00:01:50) State of Science Education
Current education's failure to prepare students for misinformation.
(00:03:46) Internet-Age Challenges
Why younger generations struggle with evaluating credibility online.
(00:05:07) Tools for Evaluating Claims
Three key questions to assess scientific credibility.
(00:08:10) Teaching Credibility
Using interactive challenges to teach critical thinking.
(00:10:46) Attitudes Toward Science
Flaws in the way science education is currently taught to youth.
(00:14:28) Barriers to Reform
Resistance to curriculum changes and systemic challenges.
(00:19:02) Scientific Argumentation
The importance of teaching reasoning behind scientific discoveries.
(00:24:03) Modes of Scientific Argumentation
Deductive, abductive, and inductive reasoning as key scientific methods.
(00:25:45) Inspiring Curiosity in Science
Framing science as imaginative, evidence-backed ideas to engage students.
(00:28:06) Adapting Science Standards
The need for flexible standards to address evolving education challenges.
(00:29:57) Conclusion
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Oceanographer Kristen Davis, an authority on ocean physics and climate sustainability, discusses the growing excitement around seaweed and kelp as tools to combat climate change. Like trees on land, these underwater plants use photosynthesis to absorb carbon dioxide and convert it into organic matter. When they die, some of that carbon may sink to the ocean depths. However, the science is still evolving and there’s a lot we don’t yet understand about how seaweed farming might impact carbon sequestration. Davis shares insights into the ongoing research and its promise on this episode of Stanford Engineering’s The Future of Everything podcast with host Russ Altman.
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(00:00:00) Introduction
Russ Altman introduces guest Kristen Davis, a professor of oceans at Stanford University.
(00:03:20) Understanding the CO2 Problem
The origins of the CO2 problem and its connection to ocean dynamics.
(00:06:11) Seaweed as a Solution
Seaweed's potential as a carbon sink and its comparison to terrestrial trees.
(00:09:02) Challenges in Seaweed Cultivation
Ecological impacts and practical challenges of scaling seaweed farming.
(00:12:00) How a Seaweed-Based Solution Works
Logistics for seaweed farming nearshore and in deep ocean settings.
(00:15:08) Genetic Advances in Seaweed Farming
Bioengineering seaweed for resilience and optimizing carbon capture.
(00:16:43) Seaweed Beyond Carbon Storage
Potential uses of seaweed for biofuel, food, and reducing methane.
(00:20:20) Internal Waves in Ocean Dynamics
Internal waves and their role in mixing and nutrient distribution.
(00:24:18) Currents vs. Internal Waves
The relationship between ocean currents and internal waves.
(00:26:47) Measurement Technologies
Innovations in fiber-optic sensors for mapping internal waves.
(00:30:22) A Global Wave Map
The vision for a comprehensive, global study of internal wave dynamics.
(00:31:22) Conclusion
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Nephrologist Manjula Tamura discusses the downsides of kidney dialysis, especially for old or frail patients. Her field has set its sights on offering alternatives, including supportive medical management without dialysis, dialysis in increments, wearable artificial kidneys, and transplanted kidneys from genetically modified pigs – in addition to advances in preventive care that can help humans avoid kidney failure in the first place. Dialysis can extend life, she says, but it is a lifestyle change. The goal is to ensure that every patient’s choice aligns with their values and life goals, Tamura tells host Russ Altman in this episode of Stanford Engineering’s The Future of Everything podcast.
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(00:00:00) Introduction
Russ Altman introduces guest, Manjula Tamura, a professor of medicine and nephrology at Stanford University Medical School.
(00:02:58) The Kidney’s Vital Role
The kidney’s role and why its failure is life-threatening.
(00:04:51) Causes of Kidney Failure
The leading causes of kidney failure in developed countries.
(00:07:58) Kidney Transplantation
The feasibility, barriers, and supply challenges of kidney transplantation.
(00:09:50) The Dialysis Process
How hemodialysis and peritoneal dialysis work and patient experiences.
(00:14:07) The Evolution of Dialysis Treatment
The history of dialysis and how Medicare’s expansion influenced its use.
(00:18:48) Study Design: Emulating Clinical Trials
Using VA electronic health records to simulate trials on dialysis.
(00:25:31) Findings: Survival vs. Time at Home
The trade-offs between extended survival and reduced time at home.
(00:27:02) Quality of Life and Dialysis
Measuring quality of life impacts through electronic health records.
(00:30:32) The Future of Kidney Treatments
Innovations like xenotransplantation and wearable artificial kidneys.
(00:33:04) Conclusion
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Guest Renee Zhao works at the cutting-edge of robotic surgery – literally. Emboldened by advances in 3D-printing and miniaturization, she builds “millibots,” magnet-controlled, millimeter-scale soft robots that navigate the bloodstream to remove blood clots and treat brain aneurysms. While the millibot’s promise is clear, much work remains before the devices are commonplace. Revolutionizing health care with surgical robots will require a delicate balance of design, buildability, and functionality, Zhao tells host Russ Altman on this episode of Stanford Engineering’s The Future of Everything podcast.
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(00:00:00) Introduction
Russ Altman introduces guest Renee Zhao, a professor of mechanical engineering at Stanford University.
(00:03:34) Robotic Surgery and Healthcare
Renee’s inspiration for soft robotics and its potential in healthcare applications.
(00:05:49) Current Status of Robotic Surgery
Current robotic surgery technologies and the push for more advanced solutions.
(00:09:32) Nature-Inspired Soft Robotics
How soft robotic systems are ideal for working within delicate human tissues.
(00:11:41) Millirobotic Systems
Recently developed millimeter-sized robots that swim and navigate blood vessels.
(00:14:46) Millirobot Control
The role of magnetic fields and imaging technology for robot navigation.
(00:17:18) Treating Blood Clots and Aneurysms
The multifunctional abilities of robots to deliver drugs and treat blood clots.
(00:19:46) Doctor’s Reaction to New Technology
Excitement for the new robotic advancements amongst the need for better tools.
(00:21:04) Trends in Robot Size and Functionality
The design challenges for creating small yet functional robots.
(00:25:52) AI and Machine Learning in Robotic Design
AI’s role in optimizing robot design for specific patients.
(00:28:59) Why Millimeter-Scale Robots
Why millirobots strike the right balance for performance and functionality.
(00:32:34) Conclusion
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Happy New Year! For many of us, a new year brings a renewed sense of motivation when it comes to health. Earlier this year, Russ sat down to speak with Jonathan Long, a Stanford biochemist who studies the chemicals produced during exercise. The conversation was one of our most popular during 2024 and today we’re re-sharing it. As many of us look to create healthy habits in 2025, we hope you’ll tune in to hear the exciting research Professor Long is doing to better understand the deep chemical connections between diet, exercise, and human health.
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(00:00:00) Introduction
Host Russ Altman introduces guest Johnathan Long, a professor of pathology at Stanford University.
(00:01:55) Effective Weight Loss Drugs
The history and development of GLP-1 receptor agonists.
(00:03:27) Understanding Metabolism and Exercise
The role of metabolic chemicals released during physical activity.
(00:05:02) Animal Models in Exercise Studies
The use of animal models in exercise studies and the discovery of Lac-Phe.
(00:06:40) Psychological Preparation for Exercise
The psychology of exercise preparation and the involvement of endocannabinoids.
(00:08:53) Lac-Phe's Role and Mechanism
Lac-Phe’s role in suppressing appetite and its production in the gut.
(00:11:46) Differences in Exercise Response
Exercise response between trained athletes and untrained individuals.
(00:12:50) Diabetes and Metabolic Diseases
The relationship between diabetes, exercise, and metabolic diseases.
(00:14:54) Lac-Phe as a Potential Therapeutic
Lac-Phe’s potential and parallels to the early stages of GLP-1 drug development.
(00:16:13) Importance of How Weight is Lost
The importance of losing fat while preserving lean muscle mass.
(00:19:04) Exercise as Medicine
The need to define physical activity at the same resolution as modern medicines.
(00:22:03) Metformin and Exercise Pathways
The unexpected connection between metformin and the Lac-Phe pathway.
(00:23:53) Prospects of an Exercise Pill
The future of an exercise pill, and challenges associated with its development.
(00:26:57) Conclusion
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Happy Holidays! However you’re celebrating, we hope you’re able to find time to connect with friends, family, and loved ones. To accompany you through the season, we’re re-running one of our most popular episodes from 2024, the future of skin longevity with Professor Zakia Rahman. As an expert in dermatology, Professor Rahman explains that our skin is our most photographed organ, and taking care of it is not about vanity but rather vitality. Tune in to hear our conversation about everything from laser therapies to sun protection.
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Chapters:
(00:00:00) Introduction
Host Russ Altman introduces guest Zakia Rahman, a professor of dermatology at Stanford University.
(00:02:05) The Impact of Digital Technologies
How digital technologies and image exposure affect dermatology and self-perception.
(00:03:20) Effects of Self-Image on Dermatology
Balancing vanity and vitality in modern skincare trends.
(00:04:46) The Role of Lasers in Dermatology
The use of laser technology in dermatology, including types and applications.
(00:08:25) Lasers in Skin Cancer Treatment
How laser technology aids in the treatment and prevention of skin cancer.
(00:09:52) Progress in Skin Cancer
Skin cancer prevention and the effectiveness of sun protection measures.
(00:13:10) Effectiveness of Physical Sun Protection
The protective benefits of everyday clothing versus specialized sun-protective gear.
(00:18:35) Ethnic Differences in Skin Health
The differences in skin health and sun exposure across various ethnic groups.
(00:23:24) Aesthetic and Cultural Implications in Skin Care
How cultural perceptions of beauty intersect with skincare and overall health.
(00:25:46) Therapeutic Effects of Light
The potential skincare benefits of red light therapy and its popularity.
(00:28:33) Conclusion
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Leanne Williams is an expert in depression. The first thing that she wants the world to know is that depression is not some sort of character flaw, but a real illness with symptoms that can impair one’s ability to function day to day. The past decade has seen remarkable advances, she says, as functional MRI has opened new avenues of understanding depression’s mechanisms and its treatments. These are hopeful times for the science of depression, Williams tells host Russ Altman on this episode of Stanford Engineering’s The Future of Everything podcast.
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(00:00:00) Introduction
Russ Altman introduces guest Leanne Williams, a professor of Psychiatry and Behavioral Science at Stanford University.
(00:02:13) What Is Depression?
Distinguishing clinical depression from everyday sadness.
(00:04:02) Current Depression Treatment Challenges
The trial-and-error of traditional depression treatments and their extended timelines.
(00:06:46) Brain Mapping and Circuit Dysfunctions
Advanced imaging techniques and their role in understanding depression.
(00:09:33) Diagnosing with Brain Imaging
How brain imaging can complement traditional diagnostic methods in psychiatry.
(00:10:52) Depression Biotypes
Identifying six distinct biotypes of depression through brain imaging
(00:14:41) Biotypes and Personalized Treatments
How biotypes allow for targeted therapies and improve treatment outcomes.
(00:19:33) AI in Depression Treatment
Using AI to refine biotypes and predict treatment outcomes with greater accuracy.
(00:22:45) Psychedelics in Depression Treatment
The potential for psychedelic drugs to target specific biotypes of depression.
(00:24:16) Expanding the Biotypes Framework
Integrating multimodal approaches into the biotype framework.
(00:27:59) Reducing Stigma in Depression
How showing patients their brain imaging results reduces self-blame and stigma.
(00:30:08) Conclusion
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Guest Michael Greicius is an authority on Alzheimer’s disease. He makes the case that while effective treatments have remained elusive, there are high hopes for new approaches that target tau proteins in the brain associated with the disease. In the meantime, to reduce Alzheimer’s risk stay active, eat well, and manage circulatory risks, but skip genetic testing for now until better treatments emerge, Greicius tells host Russ Altman on this episode of Stanford Engineering’s The Future of Everything podcast.
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(00:00:00) Introduction
Russ Altman introduces guest Michael Greicius, a professor of neurology and neurological sciences at Stanford University.
(00:02:12) Understanding Alzheimer's Disease
The roles of amyloid and tau proteins in Alzheimer's disease.
(00:04:53) Challenges in Developing Treatments
The multiple hurdles in creating Alzheimer's therapies.
(00:09:07) Current Alzheimer's Drugs
The controversies and limitations of recently approved drugs.
(00:10:23) Amyloid Plaques and Their Impact
Why removing amyloid plaques hasn’t improved patient outcomes.
(00:14:29) Problems with Alzheimer's Trials
The disconnect between amyloid removal and patient outcomes.
(00:18:03) Functional Unblinding and Trial Bias
How functional unblinding affects trial results and drug evaluations.
(00:23:51) The Potential of Targeting Tau
New breakthroughs in targeting tau protein for Alzheimer’s.
(00:26:35) The Future of Prevention
Potential preemptive treatments for Alzheimer's and their administration.
(00:29:19) Lifestyle and Risk Reduction
Recommendations for reducing risk of Alzheimer’s disease.
(00:31:43) Conclusion
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Two-time guest Nate Persily is a professor of law and policy who studies the intersection of artificial intelligence and democracy. AI is creeping into democracy, he says, and 2024 saw its share of deepfakes and synthetic media, but with surprisingly little impact. His bigger concern is the opposite – politicians claiming the truth to be fake. It breeds distrust and, for democracy, that’s more pernicious, Persily tells host Russ Altman on this episode of Stanford Engineering’s The Future of Everything podcast.
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(00:00:00) Introduction
Russ Altman introduces guest Nate Persily, a professor of law at Stanford University.
(00:02:49) How AI Impacts Democracy
AI's role in influencing elections and its implications for democratic systems.
(00:03:38) Deepfakes and the Election
The limited impact of deepfakes and emerging disinformation trends.
(00:04:37) Is Skepticism Beneficial?
The role of skepticism in navigating AI-driven disinformation.
(00:06:06) AI and Social Media
How AI powers social media and its implications for democratic dialogue.
(00:08:40) AI Monopoly and Democracy
Risks of concentrated AI power among tech giants.
(00:12:03) Risks of Open AI Models
Balancing innovation and misuse risks of open AI models.
(00:17:20) Regulating AI
Global efforts to regulate AI and lessons from the European AI Act.
(00:19:54) The Global AI Race
The international race to balance progress and safeguards with AI.
(00:23:35) Global South and AI
The digital divide and role of open models in under-resourced nations.
(00:25:05) AI in Legal Practice
Potential and challenges of AI in law, from drafting to adjudication.
(00:28:55) Conclusion
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The field of robotics has a long history at Stanford Engineering, and Professor Oussama Khatib has been a pioneering leader in that field, working on everything from human-interactive robots to underwater exploration, pushing the boundaries of what robots can do. Most recently, he’s led the opening of a new Robotics Center at Stanford. Today we’re bringing back the conversation we had with him about his work on OceanOneK — a humanoid robot who now has a new home in the Robotics Center. Join us as we talk about his journey, his vision for the future of robotics, and how his research is transforming the way humans interact with machines. We hope you enjoy the episode!
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Chapters:
(00:00:00) Introduction
Russ Altman introduces guest Oussama Khatib, a professor of engineering at Stanford University.
(00:01:54) Underwater Robotics Advancements
Innovations in underwater robotics, including breakthroughs for deeper exploration.
(00:05:35) New Flotation Materials
The discovery of lightweight, strong flotation materials for deep-sea robots.
(00:06:25) Robot Battery Challenges
The challenges of powering robots at extreme depths.
(00:09:09) Importance of Anthropomorphic Design
Why humanoid features are essential for performing delicate underwater tasks.
(00:14:20) Robotic Design Challenges
The design of lightweight robotic arms that can withstand underwater pressure.
(00:19:51) Ease of Use for Operators
How both novices and experts can quickly adapt to controlling these robots.
(00:22:37) Applications in Biology and Archaeology
Future applications in marine biology and underwater archaeology.
(00:26:12) Search and Rescue Potential
The potential for robots to assist in search and rescue missions.
(00:27:48) Future of Deep-Sea Exploration
The future of deep-sea exploration using robotics.
(00:29:40) Conclusion
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Guest James Landay is an expert in human-centered artificial intelligence, a field all about optimizing technology for human and societal good. Landay says one of the most promising intersections is in education and AI, where the technology excels as a coaching and tutoring tool. His Smart Primer and Acorn apps use augmented reality and AI to engage children in outdoor, hands-on environmental science, and his GPT Coach is an AI-powered fitness planning tool. When it comes to AI and education, things are wide open and only just getting started, Landay tells host Russ Altman on this episode of Stanford Engineering’s The Future of Everything podcast.
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(00:00:00) Introduction
Russ Altman introduces guest James Landay, a professor of computer science at Stanford University.
(00:02:04) Evolving AI Applications
How large language models can replicate personal coaching experiences.
(00:06:44) Role of Health Experts in AI
Integrating insights from medical professionals into AI coaching systems.
(00:10:21) Personalization in AI Coaching
How AI coaches can adapt personalities and avatars to cater to user preferences.
(00:12:51) Group Dynamics in AI Coaching
Pros and cons of adding social features and group support to AI coaching systems.
(00:14:08) Ambient Awareness in Technology
Ambient awareness and how it enhances user engagement without active attention.
(00:17:44) Using AI in Elementary Education
Narrative-driven tutoring systems to inspire kids' learning and creativity.
(00:22:59) Encouraging Student Writing with AI
Using LLMs to motivate students to write through personalized feedback.
(00:23:52) Scaling AI Educational Tools
The ACORN project and creating dynamic, scalable learning experiences.
(00:27:58) Human-Centered AI
The concept of human-centered AI and its focus on designing for society.
(00:30:34) Conclusion
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Climate change authority Noah Diffenbaugh says that the effects of climate change are no longer theoretical but apparent in everyday, tangible ways. Still, he says, it is not too late to better understand the effects of climate change, to mitigate them through reductions in greenhouse gas emissions and other measures, and to adapt how we live in the face of a warmer planet. Society is falling behind in its ability to deal with increasingly extreme climate events but solutions are not out of reach, Diffenbaugh tells host Russ Altman on this episode of Stanford Engineering’s The Future of Everything podcast.
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(00:00:00) Introduction
Russ Altman introduces guest Noah Diffenbaugh, a professor of Earth System Science at Stanford University.
(00:02:34) Global Impact of Climate Change
The major areas where climate change is having the greatest impact globally.
(00:03:27) Climate Phenomena and Humans
Connecting climate science with localized human impacts
(00:06:16) Understanding Climate Forcing
The concept of "climate forcing" and its significance in Noah’s research.
(00:10:00) Geoengineering and Climate Interventions
The potential and risks of intentional climate interventions.
(00:21:18) Adaptation to Climate Change
How humans are adapting to climate change and why we might be falling behind.
(00:25:19) Increase in Extreme Events
Why extreme climate events are becoming exponentially more frequent and severe.
(00:28:34) AI in Climate Research
How AI is revolutionizing climate research by enabling predictive capabilities.
(00:32:26) Conclusion
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Climate modeler Aditi Sheshadri says that while weather forecasting and climate projection are based on similar science, they are very different disciplines. Forecasting is about looking at next week, while projection is about looking at the next century. Sheshadri tells host Russ Altman how new data and techniques, like low-cost high-altitude balloons and AI, are reshaping the future of climate projection on this episode of Stanford Engineering’s The Future of Everything podcast.
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Chapters:
(00:00:00) Introduction
Russ Altman introduces guest Aditi Sheshadri, a professor of Earth systems science at Stanford University.
(00:02:58) Climate Projection vs. Weather Forecasting
The differences between climate projection and weather forecasting.
(00:04:58) The Window of Chaos
The concept of the "window of chaos" in climate modeling.
(00:06:11) Scale of Climate Models
The limitations and scale of climate model boxes.
(00:08:19) Computational Constraints
Computational limitations on grid size and time steps in climate modeling.
(00:10:56) Parameters in Climate Modeling
Essential parameters measured, such as density, temperature, and water vapor.
(00:12:18) Oceans in Climate Models
The role of oceans in climate modeling and their integration into projections.
(00:14:35) Atmospheric Gravity Waves
Atmospheric gravity waves and their impact on weather patterns.
(00:18:51) Polar Vortex and Cyclones
Research on the polar vortex and on tropical cyclone frequency.
(00:21:53) Climate Research and Public Awareness
Communicating climate model findings to relevant audiences.
(00:23:33) New Data Sources
How unexpected data from a Google project aids climate research,
(00:25:09) Geoengineering Considerations
Geoengineering and the need for thorough modeling before intervention.
(00:28:19) Conclusion
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Halloween may be behind us in the US but here at The Future of Everything we’re not quite done with spooky season. If you’re pairing your trick-or-treat haul with some scary movies, we invite you to revisit with us a conversation Russ had with Lawrence Wein a couple years ago about the work he’s doing in forensic genetic genealogy to crack cold cases. Professor Wein shares how he’s using math to catch criminals through traces of their DNA. It’s both haunting and hopeful, and we hope you’ll take another listen.
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(00:00:00) Introduction
Russ Altman introduces guest Lawrence Wein, professor of management science at Stanford University.
(00:02:18) Forensic Genealogy Explained
Forensic genetic genealogy and its impact on solving unsolved crimes.
(00:04:31) Third-Party Databases in Genealogy
Insight into databases that allow law enforcement to search for criminal suspects.
(00:08:23) Math Models in Genealogy
Using mathematical models to streamline genealogy work.
(00:11:31) Components of the Genealogy Algorithm
The algorithm's methods, including ascending and descending family trees.
(00:14:12) Algorithm Efficiency and Comparison
Comparing the new algorithm's effectiveness to traditional genealogy strategies.
(00:16:53) Algorithm in Practice
Role of human input alongside the mathematical algorithm in genealogy cases.
(00:20:42) Role of Genealogists
Genealogists’ insights on balancing human skill and mathematical algorithms.
(00:22:45) DNA Databases and Ethics
The ethical and privacy concerns related to using genetic data.
(00:27:01) Background and Interest in Forensic Genealogy
Lawrence’s journey from operations management to forensic genealogy.
(00:30:16) Conclusion
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Returning guest Marco Pavone is an expert in autonomous robotic systems, such as self-driving cars and autonomous space robots. He says that there have been major advances since his last appearance on the show seven years ago, mostly driven by leaps in artificial intelligence. He tells host Russ Altman all about the challenges and progress of autonomy on Earth and in space in this episode of Stanford Engineering’s The Future of Everything podcast.
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(00:00:00) Introduction
Russ Altman introduces guest Marco Pavone, a professor of aeronautics and astronautics at Stanford.
(00:02:37) Autonomous Systems in Everyday Life
Advancements in the real-world applications of autonomous systems.
(00:03:51) Evolution of Self-Driving Technologies
The shift from fully autonomous cars to advanced driver assistance systems.
(00:06:36) Public Perception of Autonomous Vehicles
How people react to and accept autonomous vehicles in everyday life.
(00:07:49) AI’s and Autonomous Driving
The impact of AI advancements on autonomous driving performance.
(00:09:52) Simulating Edge Cases for Safety
Using AI to simulate rare driving events to improve safety and training.
(00:12:04) Autonomous Vehicle Communication
Communication challenges between autonomous vehicles and infrastructure.
(00:15:24) Risk-Averse Planning in Autonomous Systems
How risk-averse planning ensures safety in autonomous vehicles.
(00:18:43) Autonomous Systems in Space
The role of autonomous robots in space exploration and lunar missions.
(00:22:47) Space Debris and Collision Avoidance
The challenges of space debris and collision avoidance with autonomous systems.
(00:24:39) Distributed Autonomous Systems for Space
Using distributed autonomous systems in space missions for better coordination.
(00:28:40) Conclusion
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Physicist Matthias Kling studies photons and the things science can do with ultrafast pulses of X-rays. These pulses last just attoseconds – a billionth of a billionth of a second, Kling says. He uses them to create slo-mo “movies” of electrons moving through materials like those used in batteries and solar cells. The gained knowledge could reshape fields like materials science, ultrafast and quantum computers, AI, and medical diagnostics, Kling tells host Russ Altman on this episode of Stanford Engineering’s The Future of Everything podcast.
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(00:00:00) Introduction
Russ Altman introduces guest Matthias Kling, a professor of photon science and applied physics at Stanford University.
(00:02:52) Ultrafast Electronics Overview
The technologies enabling ultrafast photonics and electronic advancements.
(00:05:32) Attosecond Science Applications
Capturing electron and molecular movements with attosecond pulses.
(00:09:31) Photoelectric Effect Insights
Attosecond science’s impact on understanding the photoelectric effect and quantum mechanics.
(00:13:27) Real-Time Molecular Measurements
Using light waves to capture images of molecules at room temperature.
(00:19:32) Future of Ultrafast Electronics
How attosecond light pulses could revolutionize computing with petahertz speed.
(00:23:28) Energy-Efficient Quantum Computing
Potential for room-temperature quantum computers using light wave electronics.
(00:26:33) AI and Machine Learning in Science
AI's role in optimizing research and data collection in ultrafast electronics.
(00:28:51) Real-Time AI Data Analysis
Machine learning enables real-time analysis of massive experimental data.
(00:32:15) Conclusion
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We’re just weeks away from a national election, and in our polarized society, we all know it can be difficult to find and create spaces for thoughtful policy discussions. A couple of years ago, James Fishkin, a professor of communication at Stanford, joined the podcast. He talked about a system called deliberative polling that can serve as a model for structuring small group discussions to help bring people together and bridge differences in conversations about some of the most politically fraught issues. It’s an opportune time to bring this conversation back for another listen and we hope our discussion helps as you go about your conversations through this political season and beyond.
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(00:00:00) Introduction
Russ Altman introduces guest James Fishkin, a professor of communication at Stanford.
(00:01:31) What is Deliberative Democracy?
The concept of deliberative democracy and how it addresses political divides.
(00:03:47) Managing Balance in Deliberation
The importance of balanced group discussions and strategies for avoiding conflict.
(00:04:55) Scaling Deliberation for Large Groups
The logistics and technology behind scaling to larger groups, both online and in person.
(00:06:54) Deciding Which Questions to Address
How tough issues are selected for deliberation in different locations.
(00:10:54) The Human Element in Deliberation
The surprising effectiveness of online platforms for fostering connection.
(00:13:13) Automated Moderators in Deliberation
The development and success of automated moderators in online deliberations.
(00:19:20) Applying Deliberative Democracy to the U.S.
Whether deliberative polling could help address political deadlock in the U.S.
(00:25:30) The Future of Deliberative Polling
The future possibilities of scaling deliberative polling to larger populations.
(00:27:23) Conclusion
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Astronautics professor Grace Gao is an authority on the Global Positioning System. GPS has long been key to navigation on Earth, she says, but science is now shifting its focus outward to the frontiers of space. Gao is working on a GPS-like system for the Moon. To keep costs low, this lunar positioning system will leverage Earth-based satellites complemented by a network of smaller satellites in lunar orbit. It could lead to autonomous vehicles on the moon and a new era of lunar exploration, Gao tells host Russ Altman on this episode of Stanford Engineering’s The Future of Everything podcast.
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(00:00:00) Introduction
Russ Altman introduces Grace Gao, a professor of aeronautics and astronautics at Stanford University.
(00:02:15) GNSS vs. GPS
The difference between GPS and GNSS, and the different global navigation systems.
(00:03:09) How Does GPS Work?
GPS operation, including the role of satellites, ground monitoring stations, and user receivers.
(00:04:07) GPS Signal and Satellites
How GPS uses multiple satellites and how the different global systems collaborate to improve accuracy.
(00:05:23) GPS Challenges in Cities
Issues with GPS in urban environments and the importance of reliability and safety.
(00:07:53) Improving GPS Accuracy
Multimodal sensor fusion helps enhance GPS accuracy in challenging environments.
(00:10:11) Collaboration Among Autonomous Vehicles
The potential for autonomous vehicles to share information for better navigation and safety.
(00:14:07) GPS Safety and Signal Jamming
GPS safety concerns and real-world signal disruption examples.
(00:18:56) GPS in Space Travel
How GNSS and Earth-based GPS systems can support space missions.
(00:25:05) Designing Lunar GPS
The cost and coverage challenges of creating a lunar navigation system.
(00:27:13) Autonomous Moon Rovers
NASA’s plans for collaborative autonomous rovers on the Moon.
(00:30:42) Conclusion
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Sports medicine physician Emily Kraus knows a lot about the health challenges of female athletes. Women face far more ACL tears and bone stress injuries than men, for instance, and excessive training or poor nutrition can also delay puberty and affect menstruation. These differences are vastly understudied, she says. To close the gap, Kraus initiated the “Female Athlete Voice Project” that asks female Olympic and Paralympic athletes about their health experiences. We need to tailor approaches specific to female athletes, Kraus tells host Russ Altman on this episode of Stanford Engineering’sThe Future of Everything podcast.
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(00:00:00) Introduction
Host Russ Altman introduces Emily Kraus, a professor of orthopedics at Stanford University and an expert on the issues of women's health.
(00:02:19) Health Challenges for Female Athletes
Prevalent injuries and health issues unique to female athletes.
(00:03:57) Hormonal Health and Puberty
The impact of hormonal health and menstrual cycles on young athletes’ performance.
(00:06:57) Body Composition and Mental Health
The challenges and psychological impact puberty has on young athletes.
(00:08:53) Female Athletes in Adulthood
The lack of research and resources available for female athletes during major life transitions.
(00:12:48) Nutrition, Fueling, and Recovery Science
How science has evolved in understanding nutrition, recovery, and strategic rest.
(00:15:54) Gender Differences in Fueling and Recovering
The differences between male and female athletes in nutrition and recovery.
(00:19:19) Survey of Olympic Athletes
Insights from female Olympians and Paralympians on the key gaps in sports science research.
(00:21:40) The WUSAI Human Performance Alliance
The WUSAI Human Performance Alliance’s focus on uncovering the principles of human performance.
(00:25:35) The Female Athlete Survey
The unexpected findings from the survey, highlighting the sexism and inequity in sports.
(00:27:26) Spreading Knowledge to Athletes and Clinicians
How Emily’s research is being received by the broader athletic and medical communities.
(00:30:00) Conclusion
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Today, we’re bringing you a best-of from our archive of over 250 episodes. We’re all aware that the consequences of climate change range from rising sea levels, to drought, wildfires, economic disruption and the displacement of populations. We’re seeing and living through many of these effects, but is there hope for managing additional risk? A couple years ago we sat down with environmental scientist Chris Field to ask this question. He shared that it’s still possible to pave the way to a sustainable future. Take another listen to this episode to hear more about how he thinks we can do this together.
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Chapters:
(00:00:00) Introduction
Host Russ Altman introduces guest Chris Field, a professor of earth systems science and biology at Stanford.
(00:01:59) The Status of Climate Change
The current status of global warming and the need for ongoing emissions reductions.
(00:03:17) Understanding CO2 and Temperature
The linear relationship between CO2 emissions and global warming.
(00:05:00) Is Zero Emissions Feasible?
The UN's climate goals and why both mitigation and adaptation are crucial.
(00:06:04) Global Collaboration for Climate Action
The role of both private sector innovations and global political collaboration in climate action.
(00:08:22) Mitigation and Adaptation Strategies
Progress made in strategies for mitigating climate change and adapting to its effects.
(00:11:25) Climate Impact on Disasters
How rising temperatures exacerbate coastal flooding and wildfire risks.
(00:14:07) Adaptation to Coastal Flooding
Insights into strategies such as improving infrastructure and planned relocation.
(00:16:47) Adaptation to Wildfires
Assessment of fire management policies and the challenges of wildfire risk in high-risk regions.
(00:19:03) Technological Innovations in Climate Change
The potential for future technological innovations to solve climate change.
(00:20:54) Ukraine Conflict and Climate Change
The surprising connection between the Ukraine conflict and global climate change.
(00:23:41) Individual Impact on Climate Change
How individuals can make contributions to combating climate change in their everyday lives.
(00:25:57) The Role of Young People in Climate Change
The role young people play in the fight against climate change.
(00:27:12) Conclusion
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Taken any selfies lately? Dermatologist Zakia Rahman studies both the science of healthy skin and the effects of the exponential increase in skin images on self-esteem. As a result, skin health is linked to mental health, she says. It’s not about vanity, it’s about vitality, Rahman tells host Russ Altman on this episode of Stanford Engineering’s The Future of Everything podcast.
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Chapters:
(00:00:00) Introduction
Host Russ Altman introduces guest Zakia Rahman, a professor of dermatology at Stanford University.
(00:02:24) The Impact of Digital Technologies
How digital technologies and frequent image exposure affect dermatology and self-perception.
(00:03:40) Effects of Self-Image on Dermatology
Balancing vanity and vitality in modern skincare trends.
(00:05:05) The Role of Lasers in Dermatology
The use of laser technology in dermatology, including types and applications.
(00:08:44) Lasers in Skin Cancer Treatment
How laser technology aids in the treatment and prevention of skin cancer.
(00:10:11) Progress in Skin Cancer
The effectiveness of sun protection measures and how we can better prevent skin cancer.
(00:13:29) Effectiveness of Physical Sun Protection
The protective benefits of everyday clothing versus specialized sun-protective gear.
(00:18:56) Ethnic Differences in Skin Health
The differences in skin health and sun exposure effects across various ethnic groups.
(00:23:43) Aesthetic and Cultural Implications in Skin Care
How cultural perceptions of beauty intersect with skincare and overall health.
(00:26:08) Therapeutic Effects of Light
The potential skincare benefits of red light therapy and its popularity.
(00:28:55) Conclusion
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Arvind Karunakaran studies the intersections of work, AI, and organizational behavior. He says AI can enhance speed and productivity in the short run, yet degrade skills over time. But it is in organizational power dynamics where AI has had its most marked impact, he says, telling host Russ Altman about situations in law firms where AI has fostered tension between paralegals and junior attorneys. It’s AI and the modern workplace on this episode of Stanford Engineering’s The Future of Everything Podcast.
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(00:00:00) Introduction
Host Russ Altman introduces guest Arvind Karunakaran, a professor of management science and engineering at Stanford University.
(00:02:47) Productivity vs. Skill Development
The broader impact of AI on workplace productivity and the potential skill loss among workers.
(00:04:39) New Skills for the AI Era
Whether new skill sets required by AI tools are emerging or if it's still too early to tell.
(00:06:17) AI and Power Dynamics
How AI is influencing authority and power dynamics in the workplace.
(00:09:16) Challenges of Role Re-Design with AI
The need for systemic changes in job roles and organizational structures to accommodate AI.
(00:11:02) Accountability and AI in Decision-Making
The complexities of accountability when AI is involved in decision-making processes.
(00:15:14) Platforms and Power Dynamics
The role of platforms as intermediaries and their impact on authority and power dynamics.
(00:20:28) AI Experimentation in the Workplace
How organizations are experimenting with AI and the importance of trust in these processes.
(00:23:29) Rethinking Training for AI Integration
The necessity of innovative training methods to effectively integrate AI in workplace settings.
(00:25:30) Management Strategies for AI Adoption
Ways managers can approach AI integration in their organizations to foster productivity and innovation
(00:28:12) AI in Gig Work Platforms
Challenges and opportunities AI presents within gig work platforms.
(00:32:20) Conclusion
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We want to wish our listeners in the states a happy Labor Day weekend. We hope, wherever you are, you’re taking some time to savor the last bit of summer. After a couple months full of travel and news about the airplane industry, we can’t help wondering — are there better ways to build airplanes? Our previous guest, Ilan Kroo, an expert in aeronautics, discusses how recent developments in fuels, engines, materials, and computer controls are leading to a new era of airplanes. We hope you’ll tune in and learn something new.
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(00:00:00) Introduction
Host Russ Altman introduces guest Ilan Kroo, a professor of aeronautics and astronautics at Stanford University.
(00:01:33) The Future of Airplane Design
The technological advancements that are enabling new types of aircraft designs.
(00:03:52) Designing Airplanes with Active Control
Active control systems and their impact on airplane safety and efficiency.
(00:05:03) Personal Flying Vehicles
eVTOL vehicles as a promising future technology for personalized and commercial travel.
(00:06:54) Scaling eVTOL and Air Traffic Control
How companies and regulatory bodies are preparing for the rise of eVTOL vehicles.
(00:10:21) Sustainable Aviation
New engine concepts, composite materials, and sustainable fuels in commercial aviation.
(00:16:42) Hydrogen-Powered Aircraft
Hydrogen's potential as a sustainable fuel source and its impact on airplane design.
(00:19:44) Climate Modelling in Airplane Design
The intersection of climate science and airplane design for a more sustainable future.
(00:22:04) Unconventional Airplane Designs
New designs that may become the future of aviation, with benefits in sustainability and performance.
(00:25:55) Conclusion
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Political scientist Kathryn Stoner is the Director of the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law (CDDRL) at Stanford and an authority on Russian/Ukrainian politics. She says views on the current war depend on which side someone is on: Many Russians and their leader Vladimir Putin say Ukrainians are Russians and have been since the 10th century. Ukrainians strongly disagree, likening the two nations to the U.S. and Great Britain. How the present conflict is resolved has important implications for other former Soviet states and the future of the European Union, as Stoner tells host Russ Altman on this episode of Stanford Engineering’s The Future of Everything podcast.
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(00:00:00) Introduction
Host Russ Altman introduces guest Kathryn Stoner, director of the Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law at Stanford University.
(00:02:09) Historical Context of the Russia-Ukraine Conflict
How historical narratives shape perspectives on the Russia-Ukraine conflict.
(00:05:38) U.S. and International Perspectives
The strategic implications of the Russia-Ukraine conflict for the United States and its historical agreements.
(00:08:49) The Domino Effect and Regional Risks
The potential risks to other former Soviet republics and the concept of the domino effect.
(00:12:43) Democracy in the Post-Soviet States
Analysis of the state of democracy in Ukraine, Georgia, and other former Soviet republics
(00:18:59) The Unexpected Stalemate
Why the Russia-Ukraine war has not gone as expected and the strategic missteps by Russia.
(00:22:39) Domestic Impact in Russia
The impact of the war on Russian public opinion and why Russians are not openly protesting against it.
(00:28:46) Hope for the Future
Potential sources of optimism for the future of Russia and its younger generation.
(00:31:40) Conclusion
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Dan Schwartz is a cognitive psychologist and dean of the Stanford Graduate School of Education. He says that artificial intelligence is a different beast, but he is optimistic about its future in education. “It’s going to change stuff. It’s really an exciting time,” he says. Schwartz imagines a world not where AI is the teacher, but where human students learn by teaching AI chatbots key concepts. It’s called the Protégé Effect, Schwartz says, providing host Russ Altman a glimpse of the future of education on this episode of Stanford Engineering’s The Future of Everything podcast.
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(00:00:00) Introduction
Host Russ Altman introduces guest Dan Schwartz, a professor of education and a dean of the School of Education at Stanford University.
(00:02:06) The Role of AI in Modern Education
The widespread reactions and implications of AI, particularly ChatGPT, in education.
(00:03:22) The Role of Technology in the Classroom
The historical and evolving relationship between technology and education.
(00:05:14) Engaging Students with AI
How AI can enhance student engagement through innovative teaching methods.
(00:08:08) Impact of AI on Student Learning
The balance between AI tools and maintaining educational standards.
(00:13:42) Industry's Role in Educational Technology
Challenges and opportunities in collaborating with educational technology companies.
(00:15:44) Teacher's Role in Adapting to AI
The critical role of teachers in effectively integrating AI into the classroom.
(00:18:39) Assessment and Grading with AI
The potential and concerns of using AI for educational assessment.
(00:22:34) Learning Strategies and Conceptual Understanding
The importance of understanding the underlying concepts rather than just using AI tools.
(00:25:08) Physical Activity and Learning
The connection between physical activity and improved learning outcomes.
(00:29:17) Conclusion
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Today, we’re re-running a fascinating conversation with Sara Singer, a Stanford professor of medicine, and an expert on integrated healthcare. Anyone who’s had to navigate the healthcare system knows it’s extremely complex, and care can often feel disjointed or inefficient. In this episode, Sara highlights new technologies that could improve integration within the healthcare system, ultimately enhancing a practitioners’ ability to care for patients. We hope you’ll take another listen and enjoy.
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(00:00:00) Introduction
Russ Altman introduces guest Sarah Singer, a professor of medicine and organizational behaviour at Stanford University
(00:02:25) Defining Integrated Care
The concept of integrated care and its significance in improving patient experience.
(00:03:37) Global Implementation of Integrated Care
The global challenges and successes in implementing integrated care.
(00:04:45) Cost Implications of Integrated Care
The potential cost-saving benefits of integrated care through efficient coordination.
(00:05:34) COVID-19’s Impact on Healthcare Integration
The pandemic's dual role in exposing challenges and providing opportunities for integrated care.
(00:07:45) The Role of AI in Healthcare's Future
AI’s potential in healthcare and the importance of user collaboration.
(00:09:38) Importance of Iterative Development
The need for continuous collaboration in healthcare technology development.
(00:12:16) Patient Perspectives in Tech Development
The value of integrating patient feedback into healthcare technology.
(00:13:20) Consumer Suggestions for Health Care
How patient feedback has influenced health care improvements.
(00:16:49) Iterative Development of Health Care Technologies
The iterative process of developing health care technologies with continuous input from end users.
(00:24:29) Advice for Healthcare Technologists
Advice for technologists on developing useful and accepted healthcare tools.
(00:27:22) Conclusion
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Psychologist Judy Fan is an expert in how physical objects facilitate learning. In the classroom, these include pencils, pens, paper, and whiteboards. But in any learning situation, the physical world provides tools for learning and communicating, often trumping the speed and reach of today’s digital technologies. These objects are cognitive tools – physical representations of human thought, she says. They help us think, solve problems, and communicate with others better and more effectively, as she tells host Russ Altman in this episode of Stanford Engineering’s The Future of Everything podcast.
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(00:00:00) Introduction
Host Russ Altman introduces guest Judy Fan, a professor of psychology at Stanford University.
(00:02:02) The Essence of Cognitive Tools
What cognitive tools are and their importance from ancient times to the present.
(00:03:37) Historical Context of Cognitive Tools
The historical evolution of cognitive tools and their role in education.
(00:06:57) Cross-Cultural Insights on Cognitive Tools
The universality of cognitive tools and cross-cultural variations.
(00:12:39) Developmental Trajectories in Visual Communication
How children develop the ability to visually communicate concepts and the differences between cultures.
(00:17:01) The Influence of Cultural Artifacts on Perception
How cultural exposure shapes our perception and depiction of the world.
(00:22:15) The Future of Learning Technologies
The impact of technological advancements on cognitive tools and potential directions for the future.
(00:24:29) Hands-On Learning and Interactive Tools
The importance of interactive learning activities that allow students to engage with scientific processes.
(00:27:44) Enhancing Creative Processes Through Technology
Ways technology can aid creative professionals and the development of tools for high-level experts.
(00:30:44) Bridging Novice and Expert Needs
The challenges of designing technology that serves both novices and experts.
(00:33:19) Conclusion
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From witchcraft to shamans to those with schizophrenia, voices and visions have always been part of human experience and they have always intrigued anthropologist Tanya Luhrmann. She now studies how various cultures understand these mysterious mental phenomena. Luhrmann has observed and talked to hundreds who’ve experienced voices and visions and learned there are “different pathways” to understand them, as she tells host Russ Altman on this episode of Stanford Engineering’s The Future of Everything podcast.
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(00:00:00) Introduction
Host Russ Altman introduces guest Tanya Luhrmann, a professor of anthropology at Stanford University.
(00:02:18) Origins of Interest
Tanya shares her background and how it influenced her studies on the human mind and its perceptions.
(00:05:53) Methodologies in Anthropological Research
The methods used to understand experiences like hearing voices and seeing visions.
(00:07:04) Cultural Variability in Human Experiences
How hearing voices varies across cultures, and their implications on mental health.
(00:13:42) The Clinical and Non-Clinical Spectrum
The clinical aspects of hearing voices, and how they are perceived and treated in different contexts.
(00:18:01) Non-Clinical Manifestations and Practice
The influence of practices and beliefs on non-clinical supernatural experiences.
(00:22:24) Characteristics of Leaders
Factors that make certain individuals leaders in perceptual practices.
(00:23:43) AI and Relationships with Chatbots
Parallels between relationships with imagined entities and modern AI chatbots.
(00:28:40) Conclusion
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Whether you’re taking a summer road trip, planning a long plane ride, or simply enjoying walks in the warm weather, we want to take a moment to recommend to you a few recent episodes of The Future of Everything to listen to along the way. You’ll find a list of these episodes in the show notes, but as a brief preview we’ve got conversations on robotics, brain science, cybersecurity, the universe, and exercise waiting for you. If you’re interested in any one of these topics, check out this summer playlist and be sure to download these episodes before you head out for summer fun.
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Alberto Salleo is an expert in the long, chain-like molecules known as polymers. The world relies on polymers and the most common are in plastics. Salleo is now working on a new generation of organic polymers made of Earth-abundant materials that could lead to flexible electronics that can biodegrade or be easily recycled. These polymers could be game-changers, Salleo tells host Russ Altman on this episode of Stanford Engineering’s The Future of Everything podcast.
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(00:00:00) Introduction
Host Russ Altman introduces guest Alberto Salleo, a professor of materials science and engineering at Stanford University.
(00:03:02) Defining Polymers
A fundamental definition of polymers, emphasizing their structure as long molecules composed of repeating subunits.
(00:04:43) Everyday Applications of Polymers
The commonplace polymers that people encounter daily and their broader impacts.
(00:05:42) Organic Polymers and Electronics
The unique properties of organic polymers, their applications in electronics and potential for biodegradability.
(00:07:52) Advanced Polymer Applications
The development of flexible electronics using organic polymers, including the challenges and current research status.
(00:11:27) Neuromorphic Computing
The role of polymers in neuromorphic computing, highlighting how their properties could mimic brain functions.
(00:14:42) Human-Brain Interface and Computing Applications
The dual potential of polymers in interfacing with human brains and creating new generations of computers.
(00:18:04) Emerging Research and Technologies
The integration of electron microscopy from biology to study polymers and their structures.
(00:22:22) Electron Microscopy and Cryo-EM Techniques
Advanced electron microscopy techniques, such as cryo-EM, to study polymers.
(00:26:19) Electrochemistry and Sustainable Batteries
The application of polymers in electrochemistry, particularly in creating high-density, recyclable batteries.
(00:29:26) Conclusion
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We have another best-of episode for you today. This one is a conversation with Irene Lo about the work she’s doing to study and leverage markets for social impact — think markets for public school assignments, or medical school residency matches. Irene reminds us that markets exist to help effectively allocate limited resources, and not all marketplaces are based in cash. We hope you’ll tune in again to this thought provoking conversation to hear Irene talk about the changing face of markets.
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(00:00:00) Introduction
Host Russ Altman introduces guest Irene Lo, a professor of management science and engineering at Stanford.
(00:03:23) Unique Challenges of Non-Financial Markets
The unique challenges in markets where monetary transactions are not feasible or ethical.
(00:04:21) School Choice and District Perspectives
The multifaceted decisions parents and school districts face in school choice.
(00:06:54) Collaboration with San Francisco School District
Connecting with the San Francisco School District to redesign their student assignment system.
(00:08:27) Algorithms and Testing of School Assignment Policies
The extensive simulations and community engagement involved in testing the new school assignment policies algorithm before implementation.
(00:11:18) Goals and Issues of the Old System
Why the old school assignment system failed to achieve its goals of predictability, proximity, and diversity.
(00:12:52) Algorithm Adaptation for Broader Use
The potential for adapting the San Francisco school assignment algorithms for use in other cities and districts.
(00:14:42) Applying Market Design to Medical Residency Matches
Adapting market design principles to medical residency placements, emphasizing multifactorial considerations.
(00:19:07) Market Design in the Developing World: Indonesian Palm Oil Market
Insights into the challenges and solutions in improving the supply chain for palm oil in Indonesia.
(00:24:08) Crowdsourcing Information
How crowdsourcing information can help improve market efficiency for palm oil farmers and the challenges involved.
(00:26:32) Market Manipulation and Algorithms
The future application of advanced algorithms to improve market dynamics once sufficient data is gathered.
(00:28:08) Conclusion
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Jonathan Long is a biochemist who studies the chemicals produced during exercise. In Long’s world, “you always start with molecules,” which offer “clean handles” to understanding complex processes. His lab has identified a chemical produced in the digestive tract during exercise that can make a person stop eating. Long now studies this “gut-brain axis” for ways to treat obesity, diabetes, and, perhaps, even age-related conditions like dementia, as he tells host Russ Altman on this episode of Stanford Engineering’s The Future of Everything podcast.
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(00:00:00) Introduction
Host Russ Altman introduces guest Jonathan Long, a professor of pathology at Stanford University
(00:02:30) Effective Weight Loss Drugs
The increase of effective weight loss drugs, and the history and development of these GLP-1 receptor agonists.
(00:04:03) Understanding Metabolism and Exercise
Outline of metabolic chemicals released during physical activity and their potential to combat obesity and diabetes.
(00:05:38) Animal Models in Exercise Studies
The use of animal models in exercise studies and the discovery of Lac-Phe.
(00:07:15) Psychological Preparation for Exercise
The psychological aspects of exercise and the involvement of endocannabinoids in exercise motivation.
(00:09:28) Lac-Phe's Role and Mechanism
The role of Lac-Phe and its production in the gut.
(00:12:21) Differences in Exercise Response
Differences in exercise response between trained athletes and untrained individuals.
(00:13:25) Diabetes and Metabolic Diseases
The relationship between diabetes, exercise, and metabolic diseases.
(00:15:29) Lac-Phe as a Potential Therapeutic
The potential of Lac-Phe as a weight loss drug, and parallels to GLP-1 drug development.
(00:16:48) Importance of How Weight is Lost
Whether the method of weight-loss matters, and the importance of preserving lean muscle mass.
(00:19:40) Exercise as Medicine
The concept of exercise as medicine, and defining physical activity at the same resolution as modern medicines.
(00:22:39) Metformin and Exercise Pathways
The unexpected connection between metformin and the Lac-Phe pathway.
(00:24:08) Prospects of an Exercise Pill
The future of an exercise pill, and the scientific challenges associated with its development.
(00:27:33) Conclusion
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We’re digging back into our archives with an episode with bioengineer Polly Fordyce. Polly studies the form and function of proteins. She refers to proteins as the “workhorses” that make things in the body happen, and her study of these molecules reveals a greater understanding of human life. We hope you’ll tune in to this conversation again, and enjoy.
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(00:00:00) Introduction
Host Russ Altman introduces guest Polly Fordyce, a professor of bioengineering and genetics at Stanford University.
(00:01:51) What are Proteins?
The basics of proteins and their crucial roles in the body.
(00:05:01) Protein Structure and Function
The relationship between protein structure and function.
(00:07:07) Innovations in Protein Research
The high-throughput technologies used in the lab to study protein functions.
(00:09:44) Mutant Proteins and Functional Variants
How mutations in proteins affect their function and structure, using the example of the protein PafA.
(00:14:24) The Impact of Protein Research on Medicine
Insight into how protein mutations can aid in developing targeted therapies.
(00:17:37) Proteins and DNA Interaction
The role of proteins in reading DNA and regulating gene expression.
(00:21:41) Transcription Factors and DNA Binding
The relationship between transcription factors and specific DNA sequences.
(00:25:36) Mechanisms of Transcription Activation
The process of transcription activation and the role of co-activators and RNA polymerase.
(00:28:15) Future Directions in Protein Research
The future of protein research, including making advanced research tools more accessible.
(00:30:36) Conclusion
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Chris Piech is a professor of computer science who studies how computers can help students learn. In comparing human- and computer-aided education, he says humans are great one-on-one, but AI is more consistent at grading and feedback. He and colleagues have created several generative AI grading apps to take advantage of these relative strengths, as he tells host Russ Altman on this episode of Stanford Engineering’s The Future of Everything podcast.
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(00:00:00) Introduction
Host Russ Altmans introduces guest Chris Piech, a professor of computer science at Stanford University.
(00:01:50) Defining Coding and Its Challenges
What coding entails for beginners and the challenges associated with learning to code.
(00:03:37) Enhancing Learning with Computers
How computers and AI can be used to make learning more enjoyable and effective.
(00:05:12) Human Connection in Education
The significance of teacher-student relationships and how recent learners can be effective teachers.
(00:07:02) AI and Coding Education
The impact of AI on professional coding and how it can enhance the learning experience for new coders.
(00:08:48) Joy of Programming
The creative joy of programming and how AI tools can elevate the creation process.
(00:11:57) Comparing Human and AI Tutors
Results from experiments comparing the effectiveness of human and AI tutors.
(00:14:43) Fair and Effective Assessment
Challenges and strategies for fair and effective computational assessment of students' work.
(00:16:42) Addressing Bias and Fairness in Grading
Demographic fairness in grading algorithms and the potential biases in different subjects.
(00:20:52) Interactive and Unstructured Feedback
Using AI to provide feedback on unstructured and interactive student work, like games and apps.
(00:25:30) Expanding Beyond Academic Tests
Application of AI in non-academic assessments, such as medical tests, to improve accuracy and efficiency.
(00:27:42) Generative Grading
Introduction to generative grading, where AI generates potential misconceptions to help with grading and feedback.
(00:31:37) Conclusion
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Guest Matt Abrahams is a master communicator who helps others overcome their fear of speaking — before live audiences, in small groups, or even one-on-one. His catchphrase, “Think Fast, Talk smart,” describes a mindset that, he says, is key to speaking well. Thinking fast is the ability to recognize and respond to patterns in order to talk smart — becoming more salient, relevant, and concise in the process. Abrahams coaches host Russ Altman on how to talk smart on this episode of Stanford Engineering’s The Future of Everything podcast.
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(00:00:00) Introduction
Host Russ Altman introduces Matt Abrahams, an expert on communication and lecturer at Stanford Graduate School of Business.
(00:02:04) The Power of Thinking Fast and Talking Smart
Matt explains the concept behind his catchphrase and podcast, "Think Fast, Talk Smart".
(00:06:22) Addressing Speaking Anxiety
The prevalence of speaking anxiety, its evolutionary roots, and how it has evolved with modern communication tools.
(00:08:46) Impact of AI on Communication
How LLMs like ChatGPT can aid in preparation for speaking engagements and assist non-native speakers with communication.
(00:11:33) Virtual vs. In-Person Communication
Differences between in-person and virtual communication and how individuals can adapt to virtual communication environments.
(00:13:59) Handling Difficult Questions
Strategies for responding to questions when you don't know the answer or can't legally or ethically provide one.
(00:17:18) Structuring Effective Communications
Methods for structuring communications to ensure clarity and impact.
(00:22:10) Cultural Influences on Communication
The impact of cultural differences on communication styles and the importance of sensitivity and adaptation.
(00:25:11) Reevaluating the Use of Presentation Tools
The appropriate use of PowerPoint and other visual aids in presentations, with tips for making visuals effective and audience-focused.
(00:29:21) Conclusion
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We’re bringing you a timely best-of episode, given the recent advances in generative AI tools like ChatGPT. A couple years ago we interviewed Jeff Hancock, a Stanford professor of communication whose research explores the psychological and interpersonal processes at play when people communicate with each other and with computers. At the time of this conversation, ChatGPT wasn’t yet available to the public, but today Jeff’s insights about how such technologies impact the ways we communicate seem more relevant than ever. We hope you’ll take another listen and enjoy.
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(00:00:00) Introduction
Host Russ Altman introduces guest Jeff Hancock, a professor of communications at Stanford University.
(00:03:04) Evolution of Communication
How social media and AI tools like spellcheck have changed the way we communicate.
(00:04:08) AI in Everyday Communication
The role of AI in daily communication tasks, like email responses, and whether this is beneficial or problematic.
(00:06:35) Authenticity and Bias in AI Communication
The potential biases in AI-generated language and its societal implications.
(00:08:42) Large Language Models and Their Capabilities
Overview of large language models like GPT-3 and their ability to generate human-like text.
(00:10:34) Practical Uses and Implications of AI-Generated Text
Practical applications of AI in generating text for marketing, education, and other fields.
(00:12:18) Tailoring AI Messages
The potential of AI to create personalized messages for different demographics.
(00:14:49) Ethical Considerations in AI-Assisted Writing
The ethical dilemmas in education regarding AI-assisted writing.
(00:17:15) AI and Disinformation
The risks associated with AI-generated disinformation and its impact on society.
(00:21:06) AI in Advertising and Marketing
AI's role in advertising and marketing, including the ethical considerations of using AI to create highly persuasive content.
(00:22:38) Building Resilience Against Disinformation
Tips for individuals to build resilience against disinformation.
(00:26:35) Conclusion
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Astrophysicist Risa Wechsler studies the evolution of the universe. She says that our understanding of how the universe formed and how it will change over time is changing as new technologies for seeing and measuring space come online, like a new high-resolution camera that can quickly map the full sky to see everything that moves, or new spectrographs that will map the cosmos in 3D and enable us to get new clues about the elusive dark matter. You can’t understand the universe or our presence in it until you understand dark matter, Wechsler tells host Russ Altman on this episode of Stanford Engineering’s The Future of Everything podcast.
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(00:00:00) Introduction
Russ Altman introduces guest Professor Risa Wechsler, professor of physics, particle physics, and astrophysics from Stanford University.
(00:01:46) Tools for Studying the Universe
Technologies and methods used to study galaxies and the universe, including the Rubin Observatory's Legacy Survey of Space and Time.
(00:04:37) Understanding Maps of the Universe
The concept of mapping the universe in two and three dimensions, the significance of redshifts, and the application of spectroscopy.
(00:08:56) The Structure and Scale of the Universe
The age, expansion, and overall structure of the universe, touching on its isotropic nature and clumpiness on different scales.
(00:12:23) Delving into Galaxy Formation and Evolution
An in-depth look at galaxy formation, the role of dark matter, and how galaxies have evolved over billions of years.
(00:14:49) The Diversity of Galaxies and Their Structures
The various types of galaxies, including satellite and dwarf galaxies, and how they form and evolve differently.
(00:18:56) Dark Matter and Dark Energy
The fundamental aspects of dark matter and dark energy, their role in the universe, and the challenges in studying them.
(00:22:32) Mapping the Universe with Modern Tools
How current technologies and methods contribute to our understanding of the universe’s expansion and structure
(00:24:57) Applying Cosmic Understanding
The SAGA Survey and its implications for understanding the Milky Way in a broader cosmic context.
(00:29:29) Conclusion
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Guest Jeannette Bohg is an expert in robotics who says there is a transformation happening in her field brought on by recent advances in large language models. The LLMs have a certain common sense baked in and robots are using it to plan and to reason as never before. But they still lack low-level sensorimotor control — like the fine skill it takes to turn a doorknob. New models that do for robotic control what LLMs did for language could soon make such skills a reality, Bohg tells host Russ Altman on this episode of Stanford Engineering’s The Future of Everything podcast.
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(00:00:00) Introduction
Russ introduces guest Professor Jeannette Bohg, an expert in robotics from Stanford University.
(00:01:58) AI's Impact on Robotics
How AI is transforming robotics and the use of AI in high-level planning and reasoning in robotics.
(00:04:26) Challenges of Applying Language Models in Robotics
The challenges and potential of using large language models for robotic task planning and interaction between humans and robots.
(00:07:06) Data Shortages in Robotics
The scarcity of training data in robotics compared to other AI fields and its impact on development.
(00:10:43) Human-Robot Interaction and Augmentation
The potential for robots to augment human capabilities rather than replace them and different approaches to autonomy in robotics.
(00:16:41) The Future of Robotic Hardware
The current state of robotic hardware, its limitations, and what the future might hold for robotic development.
(00:19:53) The Financial and Practical Realities of Robotic Research
Cost and maintenance challenges associated with robotic research platforms, as well as practical applications of robotics in everyday life.
(00:25:11) Humanoid Robots vs. Practical Robots
The practicality and implications of designing robots that mimic human appearance and capabilities.
(00:27:55) Future Outlook and Commercial Viability
The future outlook for robotic platforms and when they might become commercially available.
(00:29:08) Conclusion
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Guest Sergiu Pasca is a physician-scientist who turns skin cells into stem cells and then into brain tissues he calls “organoids” and “assembloids” in order to study psychiatric and neurological illness in a dish instead of in living human beings. With this knowledge, Pasca hopes to develop new treatments for conditions ranging from schizophrenia and autism spectrum disorders to chronic pain, he tells host Russ Altman in this episode of Stanford Engineering’s The Future of Everything podcast.
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(00:00:00) Introduction
Russ introduces guest, Sergiu Pasca, professor of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University.
(00:02:43) The Science of Growing Brain Tissue from Skin Cells
The process of developing brain organoids from skin cells and the potential medical applications of these models.
(00:03:59) Enhancing Neurological Research Tools
Advancing the complexity of brain models to include various brain structures and their applications in modeling diseases.
(00:07:20) Introduction of Assembloids
Introduction to assembloids, detailing how combining different organoids can mimic complex brain structures
(0015:58) Testing Therapeutics Using Humanized Models
The innovative approach of using humanized rat models to test neurological therapies and drugs.
(00:21:03) Complex Circuit Modelling for Disease Understanding
The current capabilities of modeling complex brain circuits and their relevance in understanding the neural pathways involved in diseases.
(00:23:36) The Future of Pain Modelling and Drug Testing
How assembled brain cells can model pain perception and response, leading to potential new treatments for chronic pain and psychiatric disorders
(00:27:46) Ethical Considerations and Public Engagement
Ethical concerns related to creating brain-like tissues and the importance of public engagement in scientific research.
(00:32:01) Future Directions and Global Collaboration
The future of brain organogenesis research and the potential impacts on treating neurological and psychiatric conditions.
(00:34:05) Conclusion
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With TikTok in the hands of 170 million Americans, cybersecurity expert Amy Zegart says it’s time to talk about consequences. Foreign access to all that data on so many Americans is a national security threat, she asserts. For those as concerned as she, Zegart has good news and bad. The government has gotten better at fighting cyberthreats, but artificial intelligence is making things very complicated, very fast. The US needs to adapt quickly to keep pace, Zegart tells host Russ Altman on this episode of Stanford Engineering’s The Future of Everything podcast.
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(00:00:00) Introduction
Host Russ Altman introduces guest Amy Zegart, a cybersecurity expert from Stanford University.
(00:02:37) Government and Cybersecurity Speeds
How AI has changed the pace at which both government and cyber attackers operate, and the evolving dynamics of cybersecurity efforts.
(00:04:12) Corporate Cybersecurity
The unexpected role of the SEC in regulating corporate cybersecurity efforts and how the cyber attack surface has expanded beyond traditional big industries
(00:07:30) Global Cyber Threats and Preparedness
Insights into the strategic use of cyber operations by other countries, and the multifaceted nature of international cyber relations.
(00:09:13) Cyber Dynamics in the Russia-Ukraine Conflict
The cyber aspects of the Russia-Ukraine conflict and its implications for global cybersecurity strategies.
(00:11:35) Misinformation and Disinformation Dynamics
The difference between misinformation and disinformation, their impacts on society and the challenges in combating them.
(00:15:04) TikTok and National Security
Risks associated with TikTok as a platform controlled by Chinese interests, discussing data privacy and potential for foreign influence.
(00:20:11) Corporate Power in AI and National Security
The role of corporations in national security through their control over AI, and the challenges this poses for regulation and innovation.
(00:22:47) Learning from Cybersecurity to Manage AI Risks
Lessons from cybersecurity that could help manage emerging AI risks, highlighting the need for developing independent AI research capacities.
(00:26:44) European Regulation and Global AI Safety
The European approach to AI regulation and data protection, advocating for international AI safety norms and collaborative efforts.
(00:29:21) AI's Role in Enhancing Intelligence
How AI can transform intelligence services, and advancements that could lead to significant efficiency gains in national security.
(00:31:23) Conclusion
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A best of episode where Russ interviews one of his bioengineering colleagues, Fan Yang, about some of the fascinating work she’s doing in the realm of tissue engineering. Hear more about the ways her lab is modeling human tissue to help develop a better understanding of how we might effectively replace damaged tissues and alleviate a number of health concerns.
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(00:00:00) Introduction
Host Russ Altman introduces guest Fan Yang, a bioengineer at Stanford.
(00:03:15) The Basics of Tissue Engineering
The purpose and significance of tissue engineering, emphasizing its role in addressing critical medical needs like late-stage arthritis.
(00:04:23) Challenges in Tissue Engineering
Technical hurdles in creating viable tissues for clinical use, such as integrating these tissues into the human body.
(00:07:00) 3D Printing and In Situ Polymerization
Technological advances in shaping tissues using 3D printing and the benefits of in situ polymerization to adapt to complex tissue shapes.
(00:09:15) Specific Challenges with Cartilage
The challenges specific to cartilage regeneration, explaining why it has been a difficult tissue to replicate and heal.
(00:13:56) Micro Ribbon Based Hydrogels
Explanation of micro ribbon based hydrogels, a new development aimed at improving tissue regeneration.
(00:19:16) Cancer Research and Tissue Engineering
How tissue engineering technologies are not only pivotal for therapeutic uses but also crucial for understanding diseases and aiding drug discovery.
(00:24:38) Regulatory Challenges and Commercialization
The regulatory and commercialization challenges facing new medical technologies, including the need for industry partnerships and the role of the FDA
(00:26:20) Conclusion
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A best of episode where Russ interviews computer scientist and electrical engineer, Dorsa Sadigh. They had a fantastic conversation about the work she’s doing to train robots to better understand humans, and as she shares, it turns out that one key to this work is better understanding human behavior. If you’re curious about how we’re going to make human-robot interaction work, this is a great episode to tune into again. Enjoy.
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(00:00:00) Introduction
Host Russ Altman introduces guest Professor Dorsa Sadigh, a computer scientist and electrical engineer at Stanford.
(00:02:24) Bridging Robotics and Human Psychology
The journey from focusing solely on robotics to incorporating human behavioural insights to enhance robot design and functionality.
(00:05:31) Blending Cognitive Science and Robotics
The integration of cognitive science with robotics to build better computational models of human behaviour.
(00:07:35) Addressing Suboptimal Human Decision Making
Exploring human decision-making biases and their impact on robot interaction, with focus on bounded rationality and prospect theory.
(00:10:39) Robot Adaptations to Human Imperfections
How robots can adapt to human imperfections in collaborative tasks, using theories from behavioural economics.
(00:14:57) Training Robots and Humans for Better Interaction
Strategies for teaching both humans and robots to improve their interactions, including active teaching and understanding each other’s capabilities.
(00:18:41) Partner Modelling in Robotics
Insights into partner modelling in robotics, demonstrated through a scalable model in an air hockey game setup.
(00:21:54) Complex Multi-Agent Interactions
Addressing the dynamics of multi-agent systems like traffic, where autonomous and human-driven vehicles interact.
(00:24:11) Robots in Healthcare
The role of robots in healthcare, particularly in assistive technologies, and the challenges and advancements in this area.
(00:26:26) Conclusion
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We’re bringing back an episode about trust and AI. In a world where the use of Artificial Intelligence is exploding, guest computer scientist Carlos Guestrin shares insights from the work he’s doing to support the development of trust between humans and machines. We originally recorded this episode in 2022, but the insights are just as if not more relevant today. We hope you’ll take another listen and enjoy.
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(00:00:00) Introduction
Russ Altman introduces the episode with guest Carlos Guestrin, a professor of computer science at Stanford, whose focus is bringing AI into broader use.
(00:02:58) Current Status of AI
The current capabilities of AI and machine learning and the widespread use and integration of these technologies.
(00:05:44) Deep Dive into Trust and AI
Three core components of trust in AI and how these factors influence the adoption and efficacy of AI systems.
(00:09:43) Technical Challenges in Implementing Trust
The challenges of translating the abstract concepts of trust into practical, implementable AI features.
(00:14:32) Enhancing AI Transparency and Generalization
Methods to improve AI’s generalisation capabilities and transparency.
(00:18:00) The Role of Open-Source in AI Development
The impact of open-source software on the AI field, highlighting the benefits of shared knowledge and collaborative advancements.
(00:22:34) AI in Healthcare
Healthcare and the use of AI in enhancing data-driven decisions in medical treatments.
(00:27:11) Conclusion
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Guest Anna Lembke is a psychiatrist and a specialist in the behavioral sciences who studies addiction. While there is tremendous variety in the things people can be addicted to, all forms are tied to dopamine, a biochemical that is key to human senses of pleasure, reward, and motivation. She says that new treatments are combining traditional abstinence with programs that help patients reenergize dopamine centers in the brain through physical exercise, which is a known producer of dopamine. If patients can reach 30 days of abstinence there is a good chance at recovery, Lembke tells host Russ Altman on this episode of Stanford Engineering’s The Future of Everything podcast.
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(00:00:00) Introduction
Host Russ Altman introduces guest Professor Anna Lembke, a professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Stanford University, and an expert on addiction.
(00:02:27) The Personal Nature of Addiction
Professor Lembke shares a personal story of addiction to romance novels, providing insight into how seemingly benign habits can become harmful addictions.
(00:06:02) The Brain Chemistry of Addiction
What happens in the brain during addiction, including dopamine's role in pleasure, reward, and the process of becoming addicted.
(00:11:10) Addressing Addiction in Healthcare
How the medical community has evolved in recognizing and treating addiction, partly due to the opioid epidemic.
(00:13:23) Strategies for Managing and Treating Addiction
Treatment approaches for addiction, including the concept of hormesis, and how engaging in challenging physical activities can help manage addictive behaviors.
(00:17:31) Treatment and Recovery from Addiction
Professor Lembke’s own experience with overcoming her addiction through self-intervention and “dopamine fasting”.
(00:22:05) The Addictive Personality and Genetic Vulnerabilities
The concept of an "addictive personality," genetic predispositions to addiction, and how these factors play into the challenge of treating and managing addiction.
(00:23:29) The Opioid Epidemic: Insights and Challenges
An update on the opioid epidemic, the rise of fentanyl, and the ongoing challenges in addressing opioid addiction.
(00:29:08) The Future of Addiction
The broader context of addiction in society, emphasizing the importance of addressing addiction to digital media and other non-substance-related addictions
(00:29:57) Conclusion
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Humans and computers making music together, it’s the best of both worlds.
Ge Wang is a professor of music, a computer scientist, and director of the Stanford Laptop Orchestra – an orchestra in which human musicians and computers collaborate to make music. “I once thought computer music was abstract and inaccessible, but it can be very playful, too,” he says. Humans and computers making music together, it’s the best of both worlds, Wang tells host Russ Altman on this episode of Stanford Engineering’s The Future of Everything podcast.
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(00:00:00) Introduction
Host Russ Altman introduces guest Professor Ge Wang and his work around the intersection of AI, computer science, and music.
(00:02:48) Early Inspirations and Merging Music with Technology
Ge Wang shares his early experiences with music and computers, leading to his unique career path combining both passions.
(00:07:42) Developing Musical Tools and Instruments
Significance of playfulness in merging music with computer science, illustrated by projects like the Ocarina app and the Stanford Laptop Orchestra.
(00:13:27) The Role and Impact of AI in Music
The evolution of AI in music, with deeper questions about AI's role and the value of human creativity.
(00:18:28) Music, AI, and Future Generations
The future of music and AI in the context of a parent, and the cultural dimensions and values that will shape the use of technology in art.
(00:20:19) Ethical and Cultural Concerns of AI in Music
Ethical dilemmas and cultural implications of using AI in music, copyright issues and the potential for generic AI-generated content.
(00:25:09) Rethinking the Role of AI in the Creative Process
AI’s role in creativity, the value of the creative process over the mere output, and the potential for AI to enrich rather than replace human creativity.
(00:29:32) The Concept of a Pi-Shaped Person
The "Pi-Shaped Person," with emphasis on the importance of disciplinary expertise, domain knowledge, and an aesthetic lens.
(00:33:52) Conclusion
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Laura Simons is a clinical psychologist and an authority on pain, particularly chronic pain in childhood, which is much more common than widely understood. Most people don't even think chronic pain happens in children, says Simons. The consequences, however, are serious, ranging from learning gaps from missed school to social isolation and even depression. Better treatment begins with a better understanding of the science of pain, as Simons tells host Russ Altman on this episode of Stanford Engineering’s The Future of Everything podcast.
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(00:00:00) Introduction
Host Russ Altman introduces guest Laura Simons and her research on chronic childhood pain.
(00:02:34) Understanding the Scope and Causes of Childhood Chronic Pain
Common forms of childhood pain, its underlying causes, and the impact of unrecognized chronic conditions.
(00:05:08) Diagnostic Challenges and Family Dynamics
The difficulties in diagnosing chronic pain in children and adolescents, and the role of family in recognizing and managing a child's chronic pain.
(00:07:38) The Impact of Chronic Pain on Children's Lives
How chronic pain affects children's daily lives, from school attendance and social interactions to the broader family impact.
(00:10:15) Transitioning from Adolescent to Adult Pain Management
The challenges young people face as they move from pediatric to adult pain management systems and the importance of tailored transitional programs.
(00:12:07) Treatment Approaches and Innovations
Treatment strategies for childhood chronic pain, emphasizing non-pharmacological approaches such as behavioral interventions and physical therapy.
(00:19:14) Empowered Relief Program and Its Adaptation for Teens
The Empowered Relief program, adapted for teens, focusing on pain science education and the development of coping strategies.
(00:23:48) Exploring Virtual Reality and Sensory Retraining Techniques
Advanced treatment methods, including the use of virtual reality to enhance physical therapy and sensory retraining techniques to manage pain sensitivity.
(00:28:57) Conclusion
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Guest Olivier Gevaert is an expert in multi-modal biomedical data modeling and recently developed new methods in the new science of “spatial transcriptomics” that are able to predict how cancer cells present spatially and will behave in the future.
Tumors are not monolithic, he says, but made up of various cell types. Spatial transcriptomics measures cells in the undisturbed organization of the tumor itself and enables a more detailed study of tumors. This new technology can be used to determine what type of cells are present spatially and how each cell influences neighboring cells. It paints a picture of tumor heterogeneity, Gevaert tells host Russ Altman on this episode of Stanford Engineering’s The Future of Everything podcast.
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(00:00:00) Introduction to Olivier Gavaert
His work in the advancement of spatial transcriptomics technologies.
(00:02:52) The Basics of Transcriptomics
Transcriptomics’ significance in identifying active genes in cancer cells and the technological advancements enabling this research.
(00:05:34) Heterogeneity and Cell interaction in Cancer
Heterogeneity within cancer cells and the importance of analyzing the interactions between various cell types to develop treatments.
(00:07:19) Advancements in Brain Cancer Research
Recent studies on brain cancer using spatial omics techniques to understand tumor cell types and their spatial organization for prognosis prediction.
(00:10:53) AI and Whole Slide Imaging in Oncology
How AI and machine learning are combined with whole slide imaging to enhance data resolution and interpret spatial transcriptomic data.
(00:14:49) Enhancing Pathology with AI
Integrating AI with pathology to improve cancer diagnosis and treatment by analyzing whole slide images and predicting cell types.
(00:18:40) Multimodal Data Fusion in Cancer Treatment
Importance of combining different data modalities to create comprehensive models for personalized cancer treatment.
(00:24:49) The Future of Synthetic Data and Digital Twins
Synthetic data and digital twins in oncology, and how these technologies can simulate treatment outcomes and support personalized medicine.
(00:29:16) Conclusion
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Rebecca Silverman is an expert in how humans learn to read. It’s a complex process, she says. First we must connect letters and sounds to decode words in texts. Researchers know a lot about the decoding process and how to teach it. But, beyond that, we must also comprehend what the words in texts are conveying. Comprehension is complex, and researchers know much less about the comprehension process and how to teach it, Silverman tells host Russ Altman on this episode of Stanford Engineering’s The Future of Everything podcast.
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(00:00:00) Introduction to Reading Challenges
Host Russ Altman introduces guest Rebecca Sliverman and her research into the complexities of reading.
(00:03:53) Decoding vs. Comprehension
The breakdown of reading into decoding and comprehension, the challenges associated with each, and the lifelong process of improving these skills.
(00:07:18) Variability in Learning to Read
How children learn to read, including the impacts of linguistic comprehension, memory and socio-emotional contexts.
(00:09:55) Cross-Cultural Differences in Reading
The variability of reading acquisition across languages and cultures, highlighting the components of reading that vary in their developmental trajectory.
(00:11:35) Research Challenges and Interventions in Reading
Current research on the challenges of reading, particularly in identifying and supporting children with difficulties.
(00:15:03) The Role of Technology in Reading
The impact of technology on reading, the differences between reading on paper and digital formats, and the potential of educational technology in literacy development.
(00:20:38) Importance of Family in Reading Development
How families play a role in early reading, with emphasis on storytelling and culturally relevant practices.
(00:23:52) Challenges for Teachers in Literacy Education
Responsibilities of teachers in teaching literacy and the need for comprehensive support and training for teachers.
(00:27:44) Future Directions and the Potential of AI
Future research on AI in literacy education, and the importance of human oversight in technological interventions.
(00:29:29) Conclusion
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Professor and cultural psychologist Michele Gelfand’s latest book, Rule Makers, Rule Breakers, explores notions of what she calls “tight” and “loose” cultures, and how each shapes us as individuals and the world around us. Tight cultures closely follow unwritten cultural norms, while those on the looser side have more latitude. Culture is complicated, she says, but understanding its nuances is key to understanding the world, Gelfand tells host Russ Altman on this episode of Stanford Engineering’s The Future of Everything podcast.
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(00:00:00) Introduction
Russ introduces Michele Gelfand and her research on the study of culture and cultural intelligence.
(00:02:33) Defining Culture
A working definition of culture and the invisible impact of cultural norms, values, and beliefs.
(00:03:46) The Tight-Loose Spectrum
The concept of tight and loose cultures and how social norms vary across cultures.
(00:06:30) Cultural Variance within and between Societies
Variations of tight-loose norms at national, state, and organizational levels, and the role of threat in shaping these norms.
(00:11:34) Cultural Intelligence in Global Leadership
How the tight-loose spectrum and cultural studies inform leadership, and the significance of cultural intelligence (CQ) in global interactions.
(00:18:59) Cultural Evolutionary Mismatch
Implications for global threats and societal responses.
(00:23:56) Applying Cultural Insights in Business
Insights on applying cultural understanding to improve business mergers, negotiations, and the success of expatriate assignments.
(00:26:09) Enhancing Cultural Intelligence
Improving cultural intelligence and steps individuals can take to enhance their CQ and adapt to cultural differences.
(00:28:48) Urban vs. Rural Cultural Differences
Tight-loose division in politics and societal contexts, and the cultural divide between urban and rural areas.
(00:31:19) Conclusion
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We’re taking you into our archive of over 250 episodes to re-share an interview Russ Altman did in 2022 with Stanford Medicine Professor of Surgery, Carla Pugh. Performing surgery is profoundly complex and requires precision, dexterity and lots of practice. Dr. Pugh shares about how she’s studying the movements of skilled surgeons to better understand what makes them successful, which can in turn help to improve training for new surgeons.
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(00:00:00) Introduction
Host Russ Altman introduces the episode with Dr. Carla Pugh discussing her research studying the movements of surgeons to improve surgical training.
(00:02:27) Dr. Carla Pugh's Research and Goals
Introduction of Dr. Carla Pugh and her research utilizing sensor technology to quantify physician performance and the long-term goals of her research.
(00:04:32) Wearable Sensors in Surgical Training
How wearable sensors are being used, and the reaction of surgeons to being monitored.
(00:06:21) Expertise Identification & Universality of Movement
How idle time and motion tracking can distinguish between novice and expert surgeons & how expert surgeons exhibit similar motion patterns.
(00:10:10) Expert vs. Novice Surgeon Behaviors
Observed differences in speed and precision between expert and novice surgeons, & working volume.
(00:12:48) Ethical Considerations
The ethical considerations of measuring surgeon performance, with a focus on
managing the careers of aging surgeons through data-driven decisions.
(00:16:03) The Role of Robotics in Surgery
The current and future roles of robots in surgery, debunking myths, setting realistic expectations & how this research can be applied.
(00:20:29) Demand for Robotic Surgery and Tech Trust
Patients' trust in technology and robots for surgery and the pitfalls of relying too much on the technology, using orthopedic surgery as a specific example.
(00:23:07) Preserving Human Skills in Medicine
Dr. Pugh elaborates the importance of capturing human surgical skills amidst the rise of automation in order to maintain a record of traditional practices.
(00:24:49) Evolution of Surgical Procedures and Techniques
The evolution of surgical procedures due to technological advancements, and how surgeons transition between different surgical technologies.
(00:27:17) Conclusion
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Mark Skylar-Scott is one of the world’s foremost experts on the 3D printing of human tissue, cell by cell. It’s a field better known as bioprinting. But Skylar-Scott hopes to take things to a level most never imagined. He and his collaborators are working to bioprint an entire living, working human heart. We’re printing biology, Skylar-Scott tells host Russ Altman on this episode of Stanford Engineering’s The Future of Everything podcast.
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(00:00:00) Introduction
Host Russ Altman introduces the episode, guest Mark Skylar-Scott and his work bioprinting the heart.
(00:02:15) What is Bioprinting & Tissue Engineering?
Explanation of bioprinting and its distinction from traditional 3D printing. Overview of the technology and its applications in tissue engineering and how to get the cells for this purpose.
(00:06:37) Engineering the Cells of the Heart
The 11 different cell types of the heart that are being created, and the steps involved in printing them, scaffolding them, and how they form tissue.
(00:12:23) Building Hearts: Size and Growth Considerations
The scale of bio-printed hearts, potential strategies for growth and integration, & technical challenges in controlling cell growth and development.
(00:15:05) Scaling Up Cell Production
The importance of scaling up cell production for efficient experimentation. Exploration of the transition from laboratory research to clinical implementation.
(00:18:40) Vascularization: The Key to Functional Bioprinted Organs
Critical importance of creating a comprehensive vascular network & the challenges of integrating capillaries and ensuring nutrient delivery to all cells.
(00:23:00) Ethical Considerations in Bioprinting
Examination of the ethical issues surrounding the use of human cells in bioprinting, focusing on consent and the potential for inequality in access due to cost.
(00:26:12) The Future of Bioprinting: Timeline and Field Dynamics
Projections about the timeline for the clinical application of bio-printed organs and the state of collaborative competition within the fabrication field.
(00:28:28) Conclusion
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Cognitive scientist Michael Frank studies differences in how children and AI learn language. There is a “data gap” between the billions of words ChatGPT has to work with and the millions of words a toddler is exposed to. But, says Frank, children learn in a rich social context that supports their learning. He’s currently conducting the “BabyView Study,” where he puts cameras on young children's heads to help him understand their learning experience, as Frank tells host Russ Altman on this episode of Stanford Engineering’s The Future of Everything podcast.
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Chapters:
(00:00) Introduction
Russ Altman, host, introduces the episode's focus on the future of language learning and guest, Michael Frank, an expert on how children acquire language
(02:05) Child Vs AI Language Acquisition
Child language acquisition and the comparison with AI systems like ChatGPT, the differences in language learning between humans and AI, including the vast data exposure AI systems have compared to children.
(05:23) Data-driven Approaches
The importance of big data in understanding language acquisition and the Wordbank database.
(08:04) The Early Stages of Language Learning
The universal aspects of language learning across different languages and cultures, specifically babbling and its evolution into language-specific sounds.
(10:30) Exploring Multimodal Language Learning
Introduction to the SAYcam project, and the BabyView study both using camera footage from children to gather multimodal information.
(13:12) Social Learning and Language Acquisition
Insights into how social interactions and grounded contexts facilitate children's language learning. Exploration of active learning strategies in children.
(18:22) The ManyBabies Project
A Global research consortium to understand child development across cultures, their first study documented infants' global preference for infant-directed speech. Michael outlines the funding challenges
(21:28) Understanding Pragmatics and AI Common Sense
Explanation of pragmatics in language acquisition and its importance in social cognition and inference making. The connection between pragmatic language skills in children and the challenge of instilling common sense in AI systems.
(24:21) The Role of Reading in Language Learning
The benefits of reading to children for language development while still recognizing diverse learning paths and early auditory learning.
(27:54) Multilingualism and Early Learning Flexibility
The natural ease of learning multiple languages in childhood and when and why the flexibility in language learning begins to decline.
(30:35) Conclusion
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We’re re-running an important episode on Alzheimer’s disease — a topic that touches many people. We still don’t have a complete understanding of the disease and that makes it hard to design effective therapies. In 2022, Russ Altman sat down with mechanical engineer Ellen Kuhl who offered a glimpse into the way she’s using computational modeling to help improve our understanding of Alzheimer’s disease.
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Chapters:
(00:00:00) Introduction
Russ introduces the episode on Alzheimer's disease, highlighting its global impact, challenges treating it, and Dr. Ellen Kuhl’s research on it.
(00:02:08) The Approach and Research Methods
Ellen Kuhl discusses her lab's interdisciplinary approach, and method of using existing data to create dynamic models to study the brain's lifecycle and degeneration in Alzheimer's disease.
(00:03:46) Key Features of Alzheimer's Disease and Detection
Biomarkers of Alzheimer's, their role in brain cell death and cognitive decline, and the possibilities for early detection methods of these protein issues.
(00:07:20) How Computational Models Function
How the models integrate various data points and physics principles to comprehensively understand Alzheimer's progression.
(00:08:43) Spread of the Disease
Exploring the mechanisms of how Alzheimer's spreads from cell to cell in the brain, and the progression through the lobes of the brain, regardless of the cause genetic or trauma induced.
(00:12:33) Interdisciplinary Collaboration
The challenges and benefits of working as a mechanical engineer in Alzheimer's research and the opportunities of a multidisciplinary approach.
(00:14:33) Alzheimer's Drug Development
Modeling a controversial Alzheimer's drug, its potential impact, and the importance of early diagnosis for effective treatment.
(00:16:04) Transition to COVID Research and Modeling
How the Alzheimer's model was rapidly adapated to study the spread of COVID-19, drawing parallels between brain regions and city networks.
(00:18:38) Covid Modeling Learnings and Applications
How their COVID models highlighted the importance of asymptomatic transmission and helped governments with reopening strategies.
(00:20:24) Responsible Model Application
The rampant and at times irresponsible use of models during the pandemic, and metrics for measuring credibility of models
(00:23:59) COVID Data Sharing
The positive legacy of COVID-19, focusing on the accelerated progress facilitated by open and transparent data sharing.
(00:24:53) Model Interpretability and Closing
Insights into the importance of model interpretability and the value of reducing complexity to enhance understanding.
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Ran Abramitzky studies the economic history of immigration by tapping into now-public government records and using AI to chart changing attitudes on immigration captured in written documents and official speeches. What’s revealed is a remarkable story that often diverges from conventional wisdom. Not all streets were paved with gold, Abramitzky tells host Russ Altman, himself a descendant of immigrants, on this episode of Stanford Engineering’s The Future of Everything podcast.
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Chapters:
(00:00:00) Introduction
Host Russ Altman introduces the episode's focus on immigration myths, and the data story behind them with economist Ran Abramitzky.
(00:01:56) The Methods & Data used
Ran explains his approach to researching immigration using quantitative methods, data sets, and text analysis.
(00:03:39) Who is an Immigrant?
A conversation on the scope of the term 'immigrant' and the focus on voluntary immigration in this work
(00:05:01) Personal Anecdotes and Immigrant Experiences
Russ & Ran discuss the truth behind opportunities presented through immigration, illustrated by Russ’s family experience.
(00:07:11) The Rags to Riches Myth
Debunking this story, looking at the economic status of immigrants on arrival and the generational improvements, often driven by taking jobs beneath their skill levels.
(00:09:17) Cultural Assimilation
Examining the cultural assimilation of immigrants, including marriage patterns, naming children, and citizenship.
(00:10:53) Current Relevance of Historical Immigration Patterns
The consistency of historical immigration trends across nationalities and generation, despite policy changes regarding borders
(00:13:09) Crime Myths
Exploration of resistance to immigration, debunking of myths linking immigrants to increased crime rates, incarceration data
(00:15:39) Historical and Contemporary Polarization
Examining how political rhetoric and attitudes towards immigrants have evolved over the last 150 years, focusing on polarization.
(00:18:00) Immigrant Beliefs on Immigration
Discussion on how immigrants' attitudes towards immigration change after settling in the U.S.
(00:20:34) Refugees & Ellis Island Interviews
Interviews with immigrants from Ellis Island provide insights into the experiences of refugees versus economic immigrants and the convergence of immigrant paths by the second or third generation.
(00:24:36) Impact of Research on Government Policy
The influence, or lack, of immigration research on government policy and public perception. Abramitzky shares the importance of a long-term view of immigration success.
(00:27:15) Conclusion
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We’re re-releasing a wonderful episode about the positive impact art has on individual and societal health. Guest Deborah Cullinan, vice president for the arts at Stanford, shares how including just 10-20 minutes of art in your day — whether through drawing or dancing to your favorite song — can contribute to improved health. Her insights remind us, and hopefully will remind you as well, that art plays a valuable role in both individual and societal well being.
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Chapters:
(00:00:00) Introduction
(00:02:04) The Power & Appreciation of Art
Discussion on the societal shift and increased appreciation and demand for art activities.
(00:05:30) Expansive Definition of Art
Discussion on potential pushback and challenges in defining art boundaries.
(00:07:55) Art and Health
The intersection of art and health, emphasizing its significance and the book “Your Brain on Art” and some of the neuroscience based benefits.
(00:11:33) Art in Healthcare
Highlighting some of the programs integrating art and healthcare at Stanford including, Stanford Medicine's program "Medicine in the Muse" art programs for healthcare providers, and supporting mental health services for students.
(00:13:30) Micro Art Moments
The potential benefits of small doses of art and demand for art programs
(00:15:19) Fluidity in Creating and Consuming Art
The symbiotic relationship between creators and consumers of art and the way creating makes you appreciate art more.
(00:18:04) Technology and the Arts
(00:22:44) Exciting Art Collaborations at Stanford
(00:25:53) The Importances of Art Spaces as safe spaces and community hubs
(00:28:27) Conclusion
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As the pandemic made a doctor visit as easy as a Zoom call and computer vision proved able to distinguish a benign blemish from something more worrisome, guest Eleni Linos, MD, DrPH, grew fascinated with the many ways digital technologies will impact all of medicine, not just her specialty, dermatology. She now believes the future of digital health is the future of health, period. But much work remains to ensure those benefits extend to every sector of society. Linos previews the future of digital health for host and fellow physician Russ Altman on this episode of Stanford Engineering’s The Future of Everything podcast.
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Chapters:
(00:00) Introduction
Russ Altman introduces Professor Eleni Linos and they discuss a future where digital health encompasses all aspects of healthcare and how we have moved towards that.
(02:10) Defining Digital Health
The challenge of defining digital health and envisioning a future where it integrates seamlessly into healthcare without differentiation.
(03:33) Dermatology and Digital Health
Eleni explains her interest in digital tools for dermatology, how they have been applied in dermatology and why they are useful.
(06:41) Challenges in Examining Diverse Skin Types
Addressing challenges in dermatological exams for patients with diverse skin tones and backgrounds.
(09:05) Impact on Patients and Health Disparities
Assessing patient reactions & benefits to remote interactions and studying health disparities concerning age, ethnicity, and technology literacy.
(10:56) LLMs, Digital Health, & Bias
How large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT are used in digital health, and their biases, and the need for and how Dr. Linos is working to reduce these.
(15:24) Empathy and AI
Dr. Linos tells a personal story about empathy demonstrated by Chat GPT, and reflects on the potential of AI to enhance patient interactions and care.
(18:47) Social Media in Public Health
Insights into leveraging social media for public health campaigns, the strategies used to influence behavioral changes in specific demographics, and how it was employed during COVID
(24:33) Challenges in Digital Medicine Education
Exploring the challenges & opportunities in preparing future clinicians for a digital medicine-infused future.
(28:20) Stanford Center for Digital Health
The vision and purpose of the Center for Digital Health at Stanford, emphasizing the collaboration between academia, tech companies, and a global perspective to tackle future health challenges.
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To kick off 2024, we’re bringing you an episode that’s been one of our most popular. The timing is just right as many of us are headed into the new year thinking about how to live better. In this episode, Professor Helen Blau, a stem cell biologist, tells us all about how she’s recruiting stem cells to regenerate youthful muscle in older people. We’re thrilled to bring this episode out of the archives for another listen and renewed hope about possibilities ahead in the world of health. Happy New Year from Russ and the team here at The Future of Everything.
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Chapters:
(00:00:00) Introduction & Importance of Muscles in Aging
Host Russ Altman introduces the episode, the ways that muscles weakening with age affects us, and how guest, Professor Helen Blau’s work with stem cells is addressing this.
(00:02:03) Regenerative Medicine & Stem Cells
The goals of regenerative medicine in enhancing the quality of life as people age. Overview of different types of stem cells and their potential.
(00:04:28) Focus on Muscle: Sarcopenia and Aging
Emphasizing the desire to age well, and the centrality of muscles in daily activities and how they atrophy with age.
(00:07:44) Approaches to Combating Muscle Aging
Lack of available drugs addressing muscle wasting and potential research directions. Targeting stem cells and mature muscle fibers for rejuvenation.
(00:09:09) Lab Discoveries and Challenges
Dr. Blau's lab experiments to identify and maintain functional stem cells, the breakthrough in bioengineering microenvironments & it’s impact.
(00:12:41) Stem Cell Rejuvenation
Insights into rejuvenating stem cell functions through cell therapy that lead to.
(00:14:37) Inflammatory Pathways and Stem Cell Response
Dr Blau explains the importance of the wave of inflammation for stem cells, and the discoveries this lead to.
(00:17:55) Broad-Scale Muscle Rejuvenation
Exploring systemic alterations targeting inflammation pathways for global muscle regeneration. Identification of PGE-2 degrading enzyme and results of limiting this enzyme.
(00:21:33) Human Trials, Challenges & Drug Development
Discussion on the prospects of translating findings to human treatments and developing an oral drug
(00:24:42) Timeline and Clinical Trials
Anticipated timelines for the drug's availability for human trials and potential applications.
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Russ's curated playlist of six episodes from our archive to accompany you through the holiday season & into the new year.
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Professor Michael Fischbach, tells us that the “gut biome” – that is, the complex community of bacteria that lives in our gastrointestinal tract – is what makes digesting and extracting nutrients from those meals possible. We hope you’ll tune in.
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Chapters:
(00:00:00) Introduction to Microbiome: A Primer
Host Russ Altman introduces the episode and its focus on the gut biome with guest Professor Michael Fischbach. Russ discusses the importance of bacteria & the influence of diet on maintaining a healthy microbiome, specifically yogurt
(00:04:08) The Role of Bacteria
An explanation of how bacteria are utilized by our body for digestion
(00:06:16) Antibiotics and Gut Microbiome Disruption
The repercussions of antibiotic use on the gut microbiome's composition and its effects on digestion.
(00:07:14) Bacterial Chemicals in the Body
A detailed explanation of how bacteria create chemicals that enter the bloodstream & example of one of these chemicals, of TMAO (trimethylamine N oxide) and its connection to heart disease risk.
(00:09:48) Vegans and TMAO
Insight into a study involving vegans and their lack of TMAO production due to the absence of specific gut bacteria & its implications.
(00:12:31) Bacteria's Use of Chemicals for Survival
Dr. Fischbach explains how bacteria utilize chemicals in food due to the absence of oxygen in the gut. The concept of electrons and their role in bacterial survival.
(00:14:17) Microbial Communities
Discussion on manipulating microbial communities and the challenges associated with making precise changes.
(00:15:22) Fecal Transplants and Community Dynamics
Insight into the success of fecal transplants in treating gut infections. Understanding the dynamics of microbial communities and their role in combating infections.
(00:18:30) Building Complex Microbial Communities
Exploring efforts to construct diverse communities and the stability of ecosystems. Early observations on the interactions between various bacterial species in complex communities
(00:21:16) Precision Fecal Transplants
Discussion on the limitations of fecal transplants and the need and potential for precision in microbial composition for treating diseases.
(00:22:29) Microbiome Diagnostics for Disease Detection
The potential of microbiome analysis as a diagnostic tool for diseases like Crohn's, based on differences in gut community rosters. The debate around whether changes in the microbiome precede or result from diseases, as well as genetic & environmental factors.
(00:25:39) Fermented Foods and Microbiome Impact
Discussion on the potential health benefits of fermented foods and predictions about future interventions involving bacteria
(00:26:29) Microbiome and Aging Effects
Early research on the impact of aging on the microbiome and the potential for programmed microbiome composition at different life stages.
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Professor Stephen Quake's research has helped countless patients avoid the pain and suffering that can come with invasive diagnostic testing. Russ and Stephen discuss his work to develop a number of noninvasive blood tests to help detect preterm births, genetic disorders like Down Syndrome, cancer, and organ transplant rejection. It’s an episode that reminds us of the power of good science. We hope you’ll take another listen and enjoy.
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Chapters:
(00:00:00) Introduction
Host Russ Altman introduces the episode featuring Dr. Stephen Quake, highlighting his contributions to non-invasive blood tests.
(00:00:46) Understanding DNA in Diagnostics
Introduction to the revelation of detecting DNA in the bloodstream, shedding light on various bodily processes.
(00:02:24) The Beginning of Dr. Quake’s work with Cell Free DNA
Dr. Quake tells the story of his journey into research with cell free DNA beginning with searching for a less risky alternative to an amniocentesis
(00:05:11) Impact on Prenatal Testing
The transformation in prenatal diagnostics, replacing invasive tests & understanding the detection capabilities for prenatal genetic disorders like using cell-free DNA.
(00:06:39) Transplant Rejection Monitoring
The discovery of cell free DNA & it’s use in heart & lung transplant patients detecting early rejection & the real-life implications of this technology.
(00:10:35) Unveiling Infectious Agents
The detection of infectious agents in blood & the real life applications of this discovery
(00:14:52) Advances in Cancer Detection
Discussion shifts to cancer detection using cell-free DNA, emphasizing the important application of monitoring cancer progression and treatment efficacy.
(00:17:18) Predicting Preterm Birth
Dr. Quake delves into the groundbreaking research predicting preterm births using cell-free RNA and DNA, sharing insights into discoveries indicating preterm birth risks and gestational age predictions and the significance of this.
(00:21:42) The Chan Zuckerberg Biohub's Mission
The origins and bold mission of Steve Quake’s current work at the Chan Zuckerberg Biohub, to cure, treat, or prevent all human diseases by the end of the century and the feasibility of such an ambitious goal.
(00:24:03) Biohub's Research Strategy
Biohub's strategy focusing on cell biology and infectious diseases internally, while funding nearly a hundred faculty across diverse areas in Bay Area Universities.
(00:26:26) Conclusion
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Guest Percy Liang is an authority on AI who says that we are undergoing a paradigm shift in AI powered by foundation models, which are general-purpose models trained at immense scale, such as ChatGPT. In this episode of Stanford Engineering’s The Future of Everything podcast, Liang tells host Russ Altman about how foundation models are built, how to evaluate them, and the growing concerns with lack of openness and transparency.
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Chapters:
(00:00:00) Introduction
Host Russ Altman introduces Percy Liang, who runs the Stanford Center on Foundation Models
(00:02:26) Defining Foundation Models
Percy Liang explains the concept of foundation models and the paradigm shift they represent.
(00:04:22) How are Foundation Models Built & Trained?
Explanation of the training data sources and the scale of training data: training on trillions of words. Details on the network architecture, parameters, and the objective function.
(00:10:36) Context Length & Predictive Capabilities
Discussion on context length and its role in predictions. Examples illustrating the influence of context length on predictive accuracy.
(00:12:28) Understanding Hallucination
Percy Liang explains how foundation models “hallucinate”, and the need for both truth and creative tasks which requires “lying”.
(00:15:19) Alignment and Reinforcement in Training
The role of alignment and reinforcement learning from human feedback in controlling model outputs.
(00:18:14) Evaluating Foundation Models
The shift from task-specific evaluations to comprehensive model evaluations, Introduction of HELM & the challenges in evaluation these models.
(00:25:09) Foundation Models Transparency Index
Percy Liang details the Foundation Models Transparency Index, the initial results and reactions by the companies evaluated by it.
(00:29:42) Open vs. Closed AI Models: Benefits & Risks
The spectrum between open and closed AI models , benefits and security impacts
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Guest Alex Konings studies fundamental links between the global cycle of water percolating into the ground and evaporating into the skies and a similar cycle of carbon moving through the world, shaping ecosystems, droughts, and fires. These cycles are inextricably bound, she says, and understanding how they function individually and in tandem is key to life on planet Earth. These important cycles may be easily overlooked but they cannot be ignored, Konings tells host Russ Altman on this episode of Stanford Engineering’s The Future of Everything podcast.
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Chapters:
(00:00:00) Introductions
Host Russ Altman introduces the episode's focus on plant water with Dr. Alex Konings.
(00:02:37) Understanding Global Carbon and Water Cycles
Dr. Konings defines and explains the global carbon and water cycles and their interconnectedness, and significance
(00:05:08) Transpiration
Detailed explanation of transpiration: the movement of water through plants, from soil to leaves and into the atmosphere. Significance of transpiration in the context of water loss and its impact on available resources.
(00:07:25) Implications of Transpiration
Discussion on how transpiration affects weather, solar energy, weather forecasts & water cycling via transpiration.
(00:10:21) Transpiration and Climate Change
Dr. Konings elaborates on the changing dynamics of transpiration in response to rising atmospheric temperatures & how plants adapt to increased transpiration, as well as their area of research.
(00:13:48) Using Satellites to measure Plant Water Content
Explanation of how satellites utilize microwaves and radar technology to measure water content in plants & challenges associated with it.
(00:18:37) Impact of Transpiration on Droughts
Dr. Konings elaborates on how increased transpiration in higher temperature intensifies and speeds up the onset of drought conditions.
(00:21:37) Satellite Gravity Measurements for Groundwater Assessment
An explanation of how satellites can be utilized to measure groundwater by measuring the force of gravity.
(00:22:30) Plant Water Dynamics, Fire Risk & Predictions
Dr. Konings discusses the intricate relationship between plant water dynamics and fire risk, and how satellite-derived plant water data can be utilized in fire risk assessment models.
(00:26:39) Satellite Sources and Public Data Accessibility
Insight into the satellites used for measurements & accessibility of satellite data from federal agencies for research and public use.
(00:27:51) Role in Governmental Agencies and Policy
Dr. Konings elaborates on how her measurements and research is being utilized by government bodies and the potential for it.
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We’re re-running a fascinating conversation Russ had with Zhenan Bao back in 2017 about the work she and her lab are doing to develop artificial skin. The possible applications of a material that could replicate properties of human skin range from restoring a sense of touch for amputees to creating bendable electronics. Thank you for tuning in, we hope you enjoy this episode from the archives.
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Chapters:
(00:00:00) Introduction and Understanding the Significance of Skin
Russ Altman introduces the episode, guest, Dr. Zhenan Bao, and the topic of artificial skin technology.
(00:02:40) Exploring the Science Behind Artificial Skin
Dr. Bao explains the materials and mechanisms behind artificial skin.
(00:05:51) Practical Applications and Future Possibilities
Potential applications, including foldable cell phones, sensors on prosthetic limbs, paint, and clothing, the opportunities and concerns.
(00:10:06) Self-Healing Properties of Artificial Skin
Dr. Bao explains the concept of self-healing materials, inspired by biological systems, enabled by shape memory materials.
(00:12:33) Exploring Applications in Energy Sources
Potential applications of flexible materials in solar cells and lithium-ion batteries, & safety concerns and battery health monitoring using these materials.
(00:15:05) Integrating Multiple Sensory Functions
Russ asks about the possibility of integrating various sensory functions into a single material, and Dr. Bao explains options for layering using inkjet and 3d printing.
(00:17:56) Interface Challenges and Communicating with the Human Brain
The conversation delves into the challenges of interfacing electronic materials with the human brain.
(00:19:54) Research Motivation and Collaborative Approach
Dr. Bao shares her journey into her field of research, the collaborators she chooses and her studentès innovations.
(00:22:51) Bendable Cell Phones: A Glimpse into the Future
Insights into the future of smartphones, describing bendable devices that offer a transformative user experience.
(00:25:11) University Research and Transformative Impact
Dr. Zhenan Bao explains the focus of university research, emphasizing the importance of dreaming about the future, training the next generation, and balancing transformative impact with long-term goals.
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Space exploration and travel are two topics that are always exciting, and that have sparked a lot of enthusiasm about the future. Debbie Senesky, a previous guest on the show, researches ways to develop tiny, tough electronics that could help augment our abilities to further explore extreme environments, such as those found in space. Today we’re re-running a conversation Russ had with Debbie in 2017 on this topic. Enjoy.
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Chapters:
(00:00:00) Introduction
Russ Altman introduces the episode, guest, Dr. Debbie Senesky and electronics for extreme environments.
(00:04:29) Challenges in Space Exploration
Dr. Senesky's insights into the challenges of space exploration, focusing on the need for tiny and tough electronics and introduces wide bandgap semiconductor materials.
(00:07:38) Operation Temperatures of New Materials
Discussion on the operational temperatures of wide band gap semiconductor materials, & contextualization of these temperatures in everyday life.
(00:10:13) Venus and it’s harsh environment
Introduction to Venus, and its unique characteristics as well as the scientific goals and reasons for studying it.
(00:13:10) History of Venus Missions and Exploration
Overview of past Venus missions, including the Venera program by Russia, and the challenges faced in engineering for these missions
(00:16:21) Engineering Challenges in Other Space Exploration
The conversation moves on to some of the other challenges posed by exploring other planets and areas of space including cold temps and power sources.
(00:18:03) Collaboration with Space Agencies
Discussion on collaborations between research labs and space agencies like NASA; Dr. Senesky explains her current area of research and opportunities for testing.
(00:21:15) The Space Industry Renaissance and Access to Space
Russ & Debbie discuss the current boom of the space industry, the technology and developments, as well as the challenges raised by it.
(00:23:34) Nanoscale Materials and Engineering Challenges
Introduction to nanoscale materials, their production, and their applications in space technologies.
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Using math to improve photographs, with expert guest Gordon Wetzstein. Such methods have exploded in recent years and have wide-ranging impacts from improving your family photos, to making self-driving cars safer, to building ever-more-powerful microscopes. Somewhere in between hardware and software, he says, is the field of computational imaging, which makes cameras do some pretty amazing things. Wetzstein and host Russ Altman bring it all into focus on this episode of Stanford Engineering’s The Future of Everything podcast.
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Chapters:
(00:00:00) Introductions
Host Russ Altman introduces the guest, Gordon Wetzstein as well as the concept of non-line-of-sight imaging.
(00:02:58) Computational Imaging
Gordon Wetzstein explains the concept of computational imaging and the way it integrates hardware and software for optimal image capture.
(00:04:22) High Dynamic Range (HDR) Imaging & Focal Stacking
An explanation of what HDR is and how it captures high-contrast scenes, and the similar process of focal stacking, using multiple images to create depth.
(00:09:56) Non-Line-of-Sight Imaging
(00:15:51) Optical Computing: Extending Hardware Capabilities
Insights into optical computing, explaining how specially designed hardware can preprocess data for AI algorithms.
(00:18:08) Applications of Optical Computing
Exploration of applications for optical computing in power constraint systems and increased efficiency in data centers.
(00:23:07) The Intersection of AI, Physics, and Computer Graphics
Synergy between AI, physics, and computer graphics in creating 3D content and models.
(00:25:47) Generative AI to Create 3D from 2D
Exploring the challenge of generating 3D digital humans from unstructured 2D images using algorithms
(00:32:02) Challenges & Advancements in VR and AR Design
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Almost everyone knows someone who has battled cancer. Today, on The Future of Everything, we’re re-running our episode with Professor Jennifer Cochran who is bringing some hope in this area through work she and her lab are doing to find ways to localize therapies directly to the site of cancer tumors for more efficient and effective treatment. You won’t want to miss this one, it’s full of inspiring insights that will hopefully move us toward a future of improving outcomes for cancer patients.
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Chapters:
(00:00:00) Introduction
Host Russ Altman introduces the episode, highlighting the widespread impact of cancer and the need for innovative treatment methods.
(00:00:45) Traditional Cancer Treatments
Overview of conventional cancer treatments: surgery, radiation, and chemotherapy. Challenges and limitations associated with existing treatments.
(00:03:30) New Approaches to Cancer Therapy
Exploration of targeted therapies utilizing biological understanding of cancer cells.
(00:05:46) Guided Chemotherapy Missiles
Introduction of guest Dr. Jennifer Cochran and her work developing ‘guided chemotherapy missiles’. Dr Cochran explains how they work and the benefits of them.
(00:09:04) Directed Evolution and Designer Proteins
Introduction to the concept of directed evolution, the process of driving evolution in a test tube to create designer proteins with specific properties.
(00:11:16) Utilizing Squirting Cucumber Seed Peptides for Chemotherapy
Dr. Cochran discusses how they transformed a peptide from the seeds of the squirting cucumber into a tumor-targeting agent, the challenges of the process and the current state of the research.
(00:14:56) Immunotherapy and Cancer Treatment
Introduction to immunotherapy and how these therapies work in our body to fight cancers
(00:16:45) Orchestrating Immune Responses: Combining Immunotherapy and Targeted Molecules
Dr. Cochran explains the collaboration between tumor targeting technology and immunotherapy and current developments.
(00:20:08) Making Immunotherapy Accessible: Challenges and Innovations
Dr. Cochran discusses the availability of immunotherapies for cancer patients and the need for broader accessibility.
(00:21:30) Interdisciplinary Collaboration and Technology Application
Exploration of interdisciplinary collaborative research, the challenges and opportunities.
(00:22:59) Translating Lab Discoveries into Treatments
Russ & Jennifer discuss the process and challenges of translating lab research from academia into actual drug development including “ the valley of death”
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Transformational research techniques shaping our understanding of how the brain works.
Guest Karl Deisseroth is a bioengineer and a psychiatrist who has developed two of the most transformational research techniques shaping our understanding of how the brain works — optogenetics, which allows neuroscientists to control brain cells with light, and CLARITY, a way to render the brain’s gray matter transparent yet retain all its intricate wiring for easier study. There is a vast chasm between neuroscience and psychiatry, Deisseroth says of the reasons he felt compelled to develop technology ahead of pursuing science. It was never a trade-off of one over the other, however. It was simply where we had to go to get better at the science, Deisseroth tells fellow bioengineer and host Russ Altman on this episode of Stanford Engineering’s The Future of Everything podcast.
Chapters:
(00:00:00) Introduction to Karl Deisseroth
Russ Altman introduces the episode and Karl Deisseroth, highlighting his roles as a professor of bioengineering and psychiatry. Explanation of Karl Deisseroth's approach to addressing challenges in neuroscience through technology development and application.
(00:03:23) Balancing Technology Development and Scientific Exploration
Discussion on the challenges of balancing technology development with scientific exploration. Karl Deisseroth's perspective on integrating technology development as a primary goal in neuroscience research.
(00:05:03) Optogenetics: Controlling Neurons with Light
Introduction to optogenetics as a method for precise control of individual cells using light. Explanation of the historical challenges in controlling neurons and the need for precise techniques.
(00:07:25) Importance of Bioengineering in Innovation
Highlighting the role of bioengineering in translating scientific ideas into practical tools. Importance of collaboration and interdisciplinary approaches in bioengineering and neuroscience.
(00:10:04) Discovering Microbial Rhodopsins and Opsins
Karl Deisseroth explains the class of proteins known as microbial rhodopsins and their genes, microbial opsins. Discussion on the historical knowledge of these proteins and their presence in biochemistry textbooks.
(00:12:50) Realizing Optogenetics in Human Brains
Karl Deisseroth discusses the practical application of optogenetics in the central nervous system of human beings. An example of a successful experiment by Karl's colleague Botond Roska, enabling a blind person to see objects.
(00:16:01) Bridging Psychiatry and Neurotechnology
Transition to discussing Karl Deisseroth's role as a practicing psychiatrist and the challenges faced in patient care. Integration of clinical experiences into scientific research and its impact on experimental design and understanding disease processes.
(00:16:54) The Intersection of Science and Medicine
Examination of the balance between clinical practice and scientific research in Karl Deisseroth's work. Importance of firsthand patient experiences in shaping research goals and addressing clinical challenges.
(00:20:25) Unraveling Brain Complexity with Optogenetics
Discussion on the complexity of the brain's parts list and challenges in categorizing cell types. Utilizing optogenetic tools to explore specific brain cell types and their functions. The intersection of clinical psychiatry, technology, and neuroscience in advancing our understanding of the brain.
(00:21:00) Integrating Optogenetics into Neuroscience
Exploration of the significance of having a detailed parts list for the brain and its impact on optogenetic research. Integrating optogenetic tools to study diverse brain functions and disorders. The evolving landscape of neuroscience research and the potential applications of optogenetics in the future.
(00:24:53) The Interconnectedness of Brain Cells
Examination of experiments recording from tens of thousands of cells while observing a thirsty mouse's behavior. Insights into the rapid and interconnected nature of the brain, lead to widespread correlations among neurons.
(00:28:05) Writing "Projections": Balancing Science and Literature
Karl Deisseroth's motivation for writing "Projections" was to share the inner worlds of psychiatric patients and communicate scientific advancements. Challenges in balancing literary creativity with scientific accuracy, capturing patients' experiences while staying grounded in truth.
(00:31:02) Receiving Feedback and Impact of "Projections"
Reflection on the reception of "Projections" and feedback received from readers, including patients with psychiatric disorders.Karl Deisseroth's satisfaction in capturing the experiences of patients and the impact of the book on diverse readers.
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A perspective on the need for diversity and empathy in the engineering profession. As we enter a new academic year, it’s an opportune time to think about how we’re educating the next generation of engineers. Russ's conversation in 2020 with Sheri Sheppard, an emeritus professor of mechanical engineering and founder of the Designing Education Lab at Stanford, sheds light on this important topic.
Professor Sheppard shares about ways that will help us educate engineers who not only are technically trained but also bring empathy into their work.
Chapters:
(00:00:00) Introduction
Russ Altman introduces the episode and the importance of engineering education in society.
(00:00:46) The Core of Engineering
Russ Altman discusses the overarching themes of engineering education: problem-solving, scientific grounding, social context, and design.
(00:02:11) The Need for Diversity in Engineering
Introduction to Professor Sheri Sheppard and her efforts in expanding engineering education. Discussion on the lack of diversity in the engineering profession and its implications. The influence of engineers on everyday life and the need for diverse perspectives in product design.
(00:06:51) Beyond Traditional Sciences
Reflecting on the historical shift from a focus on sciences to incorporating design and social sciences in engineering education.
(00:09:11) Human-Centered Engineering
Examining the importance of considering human factors, ergonomics, and cognitive aspects in engineering solutions.
(00:10:35) Student Challenges and Responses
Addressing student responses to the expanded approach in engineering education. Discussing the importance of learning to interpret qualitative data and the openness to learning in various fields.
(00:12:26) Diverse Perspectives in Engineering Education
Russ Altman discusses the expansion of engineering education beyond traditional sciences and mathematics. Professor Sheri Sheppard emphasizes the importance of empathy, ethics, and diverse perspectives in engineering problem-solving. Exploring the challenges of integrating these principles into the curriculum and industry practices.
(00:14:42) Industry Response and Cultural Change
How companies are recognizing the positive impact of diversity on innovation and bottom-line performance. Challenges faced by companies in integrating diversity into their organizational culture and recognizing it in job descriptions.
(00:17:00) Challenges Faced by Trailblazers
Professor Sheri Sheppard shares her experiences as a woman engineer in the automotive industry. Navigating the feelings of isolation and strategies for finding allies and support within organizations.
(00:18:34) Industry Perspectives and Evidence of Diversity Impact
The evidence supports the positive impact of diverse teams on innovation. Challenges faced by companies in recognizing diversity efforts and integrating them into performance evaluations.
(00:21:50) Empowering Change Agents
Strategies for individuals to become change agents within their organizations. Introduction to the concept of "Tempered Radicals" and navigating organizational change while maintaining professional integrity.
(00:25:35) Building Relationships and Gaining Respect
The challenges faced by young and female engineers in gaining respect and credibility in their roles. Encouraging students to find allies and create a supportive network in the workplace.
(00:26:58) Navigating Workplace Dynamics
Advice for students entering the workforce as potential change agents. The significance of finding allies and creating spaces for diverse voices to be heard. Developing soft skills, such as networking and communication, as essential tools for success in engineering careers.
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Discover how quantum mechanics is reshaping our understanding of time, reestablishing computational capabilities, and ensuring the security of sensitive data transmission. Guest Monika Schleier-Smith is a physicist who says that quantum principles, like entanglement, can make atoms do funny things, such as allowing two atoms to share secrets across great distances. While entanglement opens tantalizing possibilities like quantum computing, there’s still much we don’t know about quantum mechanics. She now uses lasers to “cool” atoms to near motionlessness as a starting point for controlling and proving entanglement, as she tells host Russ Altman on this episode of Stanford Engineering’s The Future of Everything podcast.
Chapter Timestamps:
(00:00:00) Opening Remarks
Monika Schleier Smith, a distinguished professor of physics at Stanford University, kickstarts the episode by introducing the enthralling world of quantum mechanics.
Russ Altman introduces the episode and welcomes Monika Schleier Smith to discuss quantum mechanics and entanglement. And he encourages listeners to engage with the podcast by rating and reviewing it.
(00:02:50) Quantum Mechanics Fundamentals
Monika provides insights into the fundamental principles of quantum mechanics, including the concept of quantum uncertainty.
(00:04:22) Embracing Entanglement
The episode delves into the concept of entanglement, highlighting its non-local properties and the intriguing correlations between particles.
(00:06:55) Initiating Quantum Entanglement
Monika explains the initial interactions required to establish quantum entanglement between particles. Explore the challenges in preserving entanglement and the impact of quantum measurement.
(00:10:12) Laser-Cooled Atoms in Research
Monika Schleier Smith sheds light on her lab's laser-cooled atoms research and their vital role in entanglement studies.
(00:11:39) The Doppler Effect and Slowing Atoms
Monika explains the Doppler effect and its role in slowing down atoms using laser beams. Russ Altman connects the Doppler effect to everyday experiences, like the sound of approaching vehicles.
(00:13:04) Tracking and Holding Atoms
Monika describes the next steps in their experiments, involving tracking and holding well-controlled atoms in a vacuum. Russ Altman mentions the challenges of maintaining atoms at low temperatures and in isolation.
(00:14:49) Getting Atoms to Talk
Monika explores the need for entanglement and how it involves making atoms interact. Different approaches, including using Rydberg states and optical resonators, are mentioned.
(00:16:17) Leveraging Light as a Messenger
Monika introduces the concept of using light to convey information between atoms. The discussion includes optical resonators and controlling interactions on different length scales. Russ Altman jokingly mentions the potential size of the lab.
(00:16:32) Preserving Entanglement
Monika highlights the challenge of preserving entanglement and preventing information leakage to the outside world. The importance of maintaining secrecy for entangled states is emphasized.
(00:17:34) Proving Entanglement
Monika explains the need for proving entanglement, distinguishing it from classical correlations. She mentions John Bell's contributions to the theory of proving entanglement. Russ Altman seeks clarification on classical correlations.
(00:20:13) Measuring Incompatible Observables
Monika outlines the measurement of incompatible observables as a way to prove entanglement. The discussion touches on the concept of spin for atom measurements.
(00:22:19) Quantum Computing Potential
The conversation shifts to quantum computing, where Monika discusses how quantum bits (qubits) can provide computational advantages over classical bits, paving the way for solving complex problems like drug discovery and material science.
(00:28:15) Quantum Communication Secrets
Monika sheds light on quantum communication's ability to secure data transmission by leveraging the principles of entanglement and quantum error correction.
(00:32:39) Conclusion & closing
Russ and Monika wrap up their enlightening conversation, emphasizing the ongoing pursuit of quantum knowledge and technology.
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Discover the astonishing intricacies of microbial ecosystems and their potential to improve healthcare. Guest KC Huang is many things: A bioengineer. A microbiologist. An inventor. But mostly he’s an expert on the ecology of the human gut. He and his collaborators have developed a device that can sample bacterial DNA and create a living map of the gut microbiome from mouth to … ah, well … you know. Every step of the way, he says, we play host to trillions of guests we know very little about. It’s time we got to know them, Huang tells host Russ Altman on this episode of Stanford Engineering’s The Future of Everything podcast.
Chapter Timestamps:
(00:00:00) Introduction
Russ introduces the gut microbiome and its impact on health. The potential for engineering ourselves through microbiome manipulation.
(00:00:57) Overview of Gut Microbiome
Russ Altman introduces the guest, KC Huang. KC provides an overview of the gut microbiome and its impact on health and everyday life.
(00:05:21) Challenges in Studying the Gut Microbiome
KC Huang discusses the challenges in studying the gut microbiome, including the limited data and the difficulty in accessing the ecosystem.The unique interface between human cells and gut microorganisms is emphasized.
(00:07:02) Poop as a Data Source
Russ Altman humorously mentions the collection of poop for research purposes. The difficulties in studying the bowel's internal microbiome are discussed.
(00:08:53) Diversity of Gut Microorganisms
KC Huang addresses the diversity of microorganisms in the gut microbiome. The challenges of characterizing the complex ecosystem are highlighted.KC Huang corrects a common misconception about the location of the gut microbiome. The gut microbiome as an external influence on the human body is explained.
(00:10:45) The Impact of Gut Microbiome Beyond Bowel Movements
Russ Altman mentions the gut microbiome's influence on brain function, diet, exercise, and more. The far-reaching effects of the gut microbiome are introduced.KC Huang addresses the connection between the gut microbiome and brain function. The constant interaction between microorganisms and the brain is emphasized.
(00:12:22) Impact of Gut Microbiome on Sleepiness
The relationship between post-meal sleepiness and gut microbiome activity is mentioned. The gut as a source of constant growth and activity is explained.
(00:13:19) The Device for Studying the Gut Microbiome
KC Huang introduces an innovative device designed to study the gut microbiome by collecting samples at different points in the gut. The device's simplicity and capabilities for multi-dimensional analysis are highlighted.
(00:17:32) Exercise and Its Effect on Body Temperature
The role of exercise in increasing body temperature and its potential influence on the gut microbiome is explored. Possible connections between exercise, temperature, and gastrointestinal effects are mentioned.
(00:21:55 ) The Student Survey on Microbiome Therapies
KC Huang shares the results of a student survey about microbiome-based therapies, highlighting changes in perception after studying the field. The evolving excitement and uncertainty surrounding the field's future are mentioned.
(00:23:52) The Need to Embrace Ecosystem Complexity
KC Huang emphasizes the importance of embracing the complexity of the gut microbiome ecosystem. The limitations of reductionist approaches in the field are highlighted.
(00:28:20) Complexity with a Thousand Species
KC Huang explores the challenges of dealing with complex microbial ecosystems containing thousands of species. The significance of interactions between these species is discussed.
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Guest Jane Willenbring is a geoscientist who studies accelerating coastal erosion. The challenge lies not in understanding why coasts are receding today, but in determining what they looked like a thousand years ago to know how much they’ve changed — a secret revealed in coastal rocks through isotopes shaped by cosmic radiation. But measurement is only one part of the equation, she says. We must now think about erosion’s impact on humans, Willenbring tells host Russ Altman on this episode of Stanford Engineering’s The Future of Everything podcast.
Chapter Timestamps:
(00:00:00) Introduction by Jane Willenbring
Jane Willenbring, a distinguished expert in coastal erosion and a professor at Stanford University, joins Russ Altman to explore "The Future of Coastal Erosion."
(00:01:42) Defining Coastal Erosion
Dr. Willenbring provides an overview of coastal erosion, explaining its causes and effects on coastlines around the world. She discusses the natural processes and human influences contributing to coastal landscape erosion.
(00:04:56) Challenges of Coastal Erosion
The conversation delves into the challenges of coastal erosion, including the impacts on infrastructure, property, and communities. Dr. Willenbring highlights the complexities of addressing erosion in different geographical regions and the importance of understanding erosion rates.
(00:06:44) Erosion Rates and Predictions
Dr. Willenbring discusses the methods used to measure erosion rates and predict future coastal changes. She explains how these predictions can guide policy and planning decisions to mitigate the impacts of erosion.
(00:10:49) Impacts on the Infrastructure
Dr. Willenbring shared the impacts on the infrastructure and on the actual coast. Also shared all the different kinds of reasons to be concerned about the same.
(00:12:44) Interplay with Policy and Planning
The conversation shifts to the intersection of coastal erosion with policy and planning. Dr. Willenbring explores how episodic erosion events and long-term projections influence decision-making for infrastructure and land use.
(00:15:49) Building Bridges vs. Managed Retreat
Exploration of options for addressing coastal erosion, such as building bridges.Consideration of the downsides of building bridges and hardening infrastructure. Examination of landscape "unzipping" and its implications for erosion.
(00:18:15) Sea Level Rise and Its Coastal Impact
Delve into the ways in which sea level rise affects coastlines and the Impact of flooding and potential changes in coastal shapes. Explore the significance of wide beaches in protecting coastlines.
(00:22:33) Displacement and Human Impacts
Delve into the potential displacement caused by coastal erosion. Focus on the impact on low-income communities and indigenous villages. Reflection on the ethical considerations of policy responses.
(00:25:16) Health Implications and Infrastructure Challenges
Examining the potential health risks associated with coastal erosion.Consideration of compromised water treatment plants and their consequences.Discussion on the uncertainties and challenges of responding to erosion-related threats.
(00:26:34) Role of Vegetation in Coastal Defence
Explore the role of vegetation in protecting coastlines. Difference between invasive and native plants in coastal environments.Insights into the potential use of kelp for wave buffering.
(00:27:50) Human Activities and Cliff Stability
Examining the impact of human activities, such as irrigation, on cliff stability. Discussion on the potential consequences of excessive water use on erosion.
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Join host Russ Altman with guest Rania Awaad, M.D., a Clinical Associate Professor of Psychiatry at the Stanford University School of Medicine where she is the Director of the Stanford Muslim Mental Health & Islamic Psychology Lab. Delve into the intersection of mental health and spirituality, shedding light on the importance of holistic approaches for comprehensive healing. Drawing from historical wisdom, Awaad introduces the concept of Maristans, ancient healing centers that integrate physical, mental, and spiritual therapies to offer a holistic model of care.
As the conversation unfolds, listeners gain a deeper understanding of how these principles can be applied in modern healthcare, fostering patient-centric approaches that consider mind, body, and spirit. From addressing diverse faiths to collaboration between medical and spiritual practitioners, Awaad's insights pave the way for a future where holistic healing is at the forefront of medical practice.
Chapter Timestamps:
(00:00:00) Introduction
Rania Awaad discusses her journey in studying the connection between Islam and mental health, including historical understandings of mental illness and treatments, such as talk therapy.
(00:03:05) Special Challenges in Studying Muslim Mental Health
Professor Awaad discusses the challenges of providing mental health care to the diverse Muslim community in the United States. The impact of immigration, intergenerational trauma, and racial diversity on mental health is highlighted. Factors like acculturation, family dynamics, and historical trauma are considered.
(00:06:50) The Intersection of Faith and Mental Health
Professor Awaad shares insights into how the Islamic faith intersects with mental health. The concept of holistic health in Islam and its implications for mental health are explained. Early Muslim scholars' references to scripture in understanding and treating mental illness are discussed.
(00:13:13) Faith and Resistance to Treatment
The conversation delves into addressing resistance to medical treatment based on religious beliefs. The concept of "spiritual bypassing" is introduced, where religious frameworks are used to explain mental health issues. Professor Awaad shares her unique approach as a dual-trained psychiatrist and theologian.
(00:14:22) Transferring Knowledge to Practitioners
Russ Altman inquires how to transfer Professor Awaad's insights and dual training to other practitioners. The role of her nonprofit, Maristan, in providing training and resources is highlighted. The development of integrated psychotherapy models and training is discussed.
(00:17:09) Common Threads in Different Faiths
The discussion explores commonalities in mental health challenges and solutions across Abrahamic faiths. The potential for sharing insights and strategies among different religious communities is emphasized.
(00:19:19) The Impact of COVID-19 on Muslim Mental Health
The challenges faced by the Muslim community during the COVID-19 pandemic, especially during Ramadan, are discussed. Professor Awaad shares findings from a global study on Muslims' mental health perceptions during the pandemic.
(00:23:00) Maristan: A Place of Healing
The nonprofit organization Maristan is introduced, and its name's historical significance is explained. The role of Maristan in integrating spirituality and mental health care is discussed, along with its goal of making mental health care more accessible to all communities. While modern languages have introduced alternative terms for hospitals, the historical terminology persists in some regions.
(00:25:10) Bringing Holistic Healing to Modern Medicine
Russ Altman discusses the concept of healing centers and the need to reintroduce holistic healing into modern medicine. Professor Awaad shares her vision of Maristans serving as a model for modern healthcare, emphasizing holistic care for the mind, body, and soul.
(00:27:21) Maristans: A Model for Holistic Healing
Russ Altman reflects on the patient's desire for holistic care and the limitations of current medical practices. Professor Awaad describes the architectural and therapeutic aspects of Maristans, highlighting their use of water fountains, greenery, acoustics, and sound therapy. The contrast between Maristans and historical asylums/prisons for the mentally ill is discussed.
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Bad science is a big problem for society, says guest Jonathan Osborne, an expert in science education, but we don’t have to surrender to it. Beating bad science requires young people to learn three skills, Osborne says. First is an ability to size up conflicts of interest. Second, to evaluate a source’s qualifications. And third, to more rigorously question those who go against consensus. The whole goal of science is consensus, Osborne tells host Russ Altman on this episode of Stanford Engineering’s The Future of Everything podcast.
Chapter Timestamps:
(00:00:00) Introduction to the Episode
Welcome to this episode featuring an insightful conversation with Jonathan Osborne about the nuances of scientific argumentation and its implications for education.
(00:2:00) The state of science education
The situation is a pretty dire, and we need to act soon to make sure that we outfit the future generations with the tools they need to navigate truth and falsehoods in science.
(00:03:01) The Importance of Science Education
The role of science education in society and the need for a new approach to science education
(00:08:31) Developmental Learning Progression in Science Education
Discussion on when young people are cognitively ready to understand the challenges of science education. The Finnish curriculum in media literacy as an example.
(00:09:31) Student Attitudes and the Fundamentals of Science Education
The importance of student attitudes towards science. The role of science education in preparing students to be citizens in a rapidly changing world.
(00:11:31) The Shortcomings of Current Science Education
Critique of the current state of science education. The need for focusing on big ideas rather than just facts.
(00:14:51) The Key Stakeholders in Changing Science Education
Discussion on who holds the keys to curricular practices. The role of boards of education, textbook writers, and faculty members in shaping science education.
(00:15:21) The Challenges of Changing Science Education
Jonathan Osborne's career reflections on trying to make changes. The resistance faced from institutional conservatism. The impact of government changes on science education
(00:17:01) The Problem with Current Curriculum
Lack of opportunities for teachers to pursue their interests. The need to cut back on performance expectations. Giving teachers more freedom and agency.
(00:18:29) Misinformation and Science Education
Concerns about misinformation in science. Tools needed to help young people vet information.
(00:19:31) The Role of Scientific Argumentation
Different forms of scientific argumentation. The importance of teaching scientific argumentation to students.
(00:22:36) The Power of Storytelling in Science
The need for more stories in science education. How stories can make science more relatable and convincing.
(00:27:21) The Urgency of Updating Science Education
The rate at which teaching standards are updated. The need for flexibility in science education standards.
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The Future of computer chip design: delve into a revolutionary approach to chip design. A re-run of a conversation Russ had in 2021 with Priyanka Raina, an assistant professor of electrical engineering. Priya is an expert in computer chip design. Whether or not you realize it, chips are everywhere and power everything from your toaster to your car. Priya discusses the slowing pace of progress in improving chip efficiency, and how she sees a future where chip makers will need to shift away from general-purpose computer chips to task-specific chips.
Chapter Time Stamps:
(00:00:00) Introduction
Host Russ Altman introduces the episode and the guest, Professor Priyanka Raina, an expert in electrical engineering.
(00:01:15) The Traditional Chip Design Paradigm
Explore the traditional chip design process and its challenges, including long development times and limitations in reusability.
(00:04:28) The Role of Specialized Chips
Understand the emergence of specialized chips and how they target specific applications for improved performance.
(00:07:56) The Promise of Core-Grain Reconfigurable Arrays (CGRAs)
Learn about core-grain reconfigurable arrays and how they bridge the gap between specialization and adaptability.
(00:10:12) Balancing Flexibility and Specialization
Discover the concept of specialized compute units within CGRAs and how they can be tailored to various applications.
(00:13:25) Agile Hardware Design
Explore the concept of agile hardware design and how it enables faster chip development iterations.
(00:16:40) Overcoming Hardware and Software Challenges
Understand the challenges of combining adaptable hardware with rapidly changing software and applications.
(00:19:02) The Role of Compilers in Chip Design
Explore the significance of compilers in translating high-level programming into efficient hardware instructions.
(00:21:30) Adapting Compilers for CGRAs
Discover how compilers are adapted to work seamlessly with core-grain reconfigurable arrays, enabling automatic updates as hardware changes.
(00:23:40) Benefits of Agile Chip Development
Learn about the potential benefits of agile chip development, including reduced time-to-market and adaptability to evolving applications.
(00:26:15) Revolutionizing Chip Development with CGRAs
Discuss how CGRAs can reshape the landscape of chip design, offering a new approach to balancing specialization and adaptability.
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Today we're rerunning a conversation Russ had in 2020 with Mykel Kochenderfer, a professor of Aeronautics and Astronautics at Stanford University.
Mykel's research has impacted anyone who has been on a plane recently for any kind of travel. His research led to the creation of a program known as the Airborne Collision Avoidance System, or ACAS X , which as he explains in more detail, is a critical tool in keeping air travel safe.
Thank you for tuning in, and we hope you enjoy this episode from the archives.
Chapter Time Stamps:
(00:00:50) ACAS X Origins
Russ Altman sets the stage by revisiting a conversation from 2020 with Professor Mykel Kochenderfer, a pioneer in aeronautics and astronautics at Stanford University. They discuss Mykel's groundbreaking research leading to the creation of the Airborne Collision Avoidance System, ACAS X.
(00:03:10) Ensuring Trustworthy Autonomous Vehicles
Exploring the challenges in building trustworthy autonomous systems, Mykel discusses the complexities of imperfect sensor systems, uncertainty in predicting future trajectory, and the trade-off between safety and operational efficiency.
(00:07:20) Dynamic Programming: The Key to ACAS X
Mykel explains the role of dynamic programming in ACAS X, transforming complex computations into tractable tasks through offline modeling and a lookup table, balancing safety and efficiency.
(00:10:30) Balancing Safety and Efficiency
Russ and Mykel delve into the intricate balance between safety and operational efficiency in ACAS X, highlighting the need for AI systems to make sound decisions even in rare, low-probability scenarios.
(00:14:15) ACAS X Implementation and Use Cases
Mykel elaborates on the role of ACAS X in aviation safety, detailing its advisory nature and its integration with air traffic control systems, while addressing the potential automation in specific aircraft models.
(00:17:40) Broadening Horizons: Urban Air Mobility
Exploring the expansion of ACAS X to urban air mobility systems, Russ and Mykel discuss the challenges of modeling and validating models for a wide range of aircraft, and the importance of incorporating human expertise.
(00:21:05) Global Collaboration and AI Consensus
Mykel emphasizes the collaborative nature of ACAS X implementation, involving different stakeholders, such as the FAA, Eurocontrol, and ICAO, and the role of AI in reaching a consensus on safety objectives.
(00:23:30) The Journey Ahead
As the conversation draws to a close, Mykel reflects on the evolution of ACAS X, its future applications, and the fusion of AI and human wisdom shaping the skies of tomorrow.
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Guest David Rehkopf is an expert in population health who says that where we live is one of the strongest influences on how long we live. While we know diet and health care are important, it has been tough to tease out what about these places allows people to live longer and healthier lives. By examining environmentally induced changes in DNA, we may be able to more quickly and more accurately quantify what aspects of environments promote longer, healthier lives, Rehkopf tells host Russ Altman in this episode of Stanford Engineering’s The Future of Everything podcast.
Chapter Time Stamps:
(00:00:00) Introduction
Host Russ Altman delves into the fascinating world of longevity with Dr. David Rehkopf from Stanford University. Discover the surprising links between government policies, corporate practices, and their impact on health.
(00:02:14) The Quest for Centenarians
Explore Dr. Rehkopf's research on centenarians in Costa Rica and how these long-lived individuals offer insights into the factors influencing longevity.
(00:06:20) Unraveling the Genetics of Longevity
Learn how genetic factors play a role in determining how long we live, and how centenarians possess unique genetic signatures that may hold the key to extended lifespans.
(00:09:45) Lifestyle and Environment
Discover the impact of lifestyle choices and environmental factors on longevity. From the benefits of traditional diets to the potential effects of infectious disease exposure, the picture becomes clearer.
(00:10:55) The Role of Exercise
Dive deeper into the significance of physical activity on long-term health and how regular exercise can contribute to increased lifespan and overall well-being.
(00:11:40) Social Connections and Longevity
Explore the intricate relationship between social connections, community engagement, and the potential impact on living longer and healthier lives.
(00:13:30) Government Policies and Health
Dr. Rehkopf sheds light on the influence of government policies, such as the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC), on health outcomes. Find out how these policies can positively impact maternal health and sickness absence rates.
(00:15:20) The Power of Public Health Initiatives
Learn about the importance of public health initiatives in promoting healthy behaviours, preventing diseases, and potentially extending the human lifespan.
(00:16:05) Access to Healthcare
Explore the crucial role of accessible healthcare in longevity, and how disparities in healthcare access can affect different populations.
(00:18:30) Work-Life Balance
Delve into the concept of work-life balance and its potential impact on employee health and happiness in the long run.
(00:19:45) Corporate Wellness Programs
Learn about the various corporate wellness programs and initiatives aimed at improving employee well-being and how they might influence longevity.
(00:21:05) Hybrid Work Models and Longevity
As the world adapts to the pandemic-driven hybrid work models, Dr. Rehkopf discusses the potential long-term effects on workforce health and well-being.
(00:23:40) The Road Ahead
In this final chapter, we speculate on the future of longevity research and how understanding the intricate connections between government, corporations, and individual choices can shape a healthier and longer life for all.
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As anyone with chronic disease knows, access to health care doesn’t always equate with equitable health care outcomes, says guest Alyce Adams, an expert in innovations in health policy. Too often, care delivery breaks down along racial and socioeconomic lines. Our focus should be on better outcomes for all people, she says. Adams now develops interventions to help communities and health systems improve care delivery — and health equity — as she tells host Russ Altman in this episode of Stanford Engineering’s The Future of Everything podcast.
Chapters:
(00:00:00) Introduction
Host Russ Altman introduces the episode and welcomes Professor Alyce Adams from Stanford University to discuss how new approaches in communities and health systems are improving care delivery for traditionally underserved populations.
(00:01:29) Unraveling Health Disparities
They discuss the disparities present in healthcare, particularly among underrepresented populations, and the importance of integrating patient voices in research.
(00:02:42) Addressing Socioeconomic Factors
The role of socioeconomic factors in health disparities and how they influence access to quality care. The discussion also examines efforts to eliminate barriers and provide equitable healthcare.
(00:04:15) Cultural Competence in Medicine
The conversation shifts to the significance of cultural competence in healthcare delivery. Prof. Adams explains the need for healthcare professionals to understand and respect diverse cultural backgrounds to ensure effective patient care.
(00:07:50) Bridging the Knowledge Gap
Insights into understanding patient knowledge and disease understanding, focusing on the example of tobacco use. The efforts to integrate patient and caregiver perspectives early in the research process are discussed.
(00:09:15) Empowering Patient Decision-Making
The discussion explores strategies to empower patients in their healthcare decisions. Prof. Adams explains the importance of personalized care plans that align with patient values and priorities.
(00:11:30) Digital Health Literacy
The increasing role of digital health tools and the importance of health literacy in utilizing these technologies effectively. The challenges of ensuring equitable access to digital health resources are also addressed.
(00:15:10) Qualitative Methods in Research
Insights into qualitative research methods and their significance in understanding patient experiences and priorities. The need for collaboration with community partners to shape research questions is emphasized.
(00:17:05) The Power of Patient Stories
The conversation discusses the impact of patient narratives in healthcare research. Prof. Adams explains how patient stories provide valuable context and humanize data, leading to more comprehensive and patient-centric research outcomes.
(00:20:30) Building Patient-Centric Algorithms
The development of AI algorithms to assess patient risk and facilitate decision-making for clinicians. Prof. Adams discusses the challenges of encoding priorities in these algorithms while considering potential biases.
(00:22:12) Algorithmic Transparency
The discussion delves into the importance of algorithmic transparency and its role in building trust between patients and AI-driven healthcare systems. Prof. Adams explains the need for clear and interpretable AI models.
(00:27:45) Ethical Considerations in AI Implementation
The conversation explores ethical considerations in implementing AI technologies in healthcare. Prof. Adams discusses the potential risks and benefits and the importance of continuous evaluation and oversight.
(00:30:15) Engaging Policy Makers
The episode concludes with an optimistic view of policymakers' receptivity to research insights. Prof. Adams explains the importance of proactive engagement and communication in policy decisions.
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We’re on the cusp of another election season. As people across the country educate themselves on the issues and candidates on this year’s ballot, one question they will have to ask themselves is, how do I tell fact from fiction? In early 2022, my guest Johan Ugander shared his research to better understand the ways information spreads online. We’re re-running this episode today, and I hope you’ll take the time to hear a few of the strategies he recommends for preventing the spread of misinformation.
Chapter Time Stamps:
(00:00:45) Exploring the Spread of Information with Johan Ugander
Johan Ugander joins Russ Altman to discuss the intriguing dynamics behind the spread of information, drawing parallels to viral infections and shedding light on the battle between true and false news.
(00:01:14) Matching Methods and Treatment Control Analysis
Discover how matching methods and treatment control analysis play a crucial role in understanding the differences between true and false news, helping us unravel the complexities of information dissemination.
(00:02:22) The Tree Analogy: True News vs. False News
Exploring the tree analogy to understand how the spread of false news resembles that of true news, raisins intriguing questions about their results.
(00:04:14) The Battle on One Front: False News Infectiousness
Dive into the heart of the debate surrounding false news, as Johan uncovers a startling finding - false news not only spreads more but also exhibits higher infectiousness, challenging the notion of battling on multiple fronts.
(00:05:34) Epidemiological Metaphors and the Spread of Information
Johan elucidates the long-standing connection between epidemiological metaphors and information spread, revealing the fascinating interplay between social psychology and cognition in the dissemination process.
(00:08:34) Information Spreading vs Viral Infections
Distinctions between information spread and viral infections, as Johan highlights the critical role of decision-making and cognition in the former, in contrast to the particle-based interactions in the latter.
(00:10:22) The Common Basic Toolkit of Spread Processes
Discover the underlying commonalities between information spread and viral infections, as Johan emphasizes the presence of a shared basic toolkit while acknowledging the specific inquiry methods unique to each domain.
(00:12:40) Lessons for Stopping the Spread of False News
Uncover valuable insights on combatting the spread of false news, as Johan explores the power of drawing attention to accuracy, introducing frictions in information sharing, and leveraging product changes for differential control.
(00:14:25) Drawing Attention to Accuracy and Decision Consequences
Explore the psychology behind information spread and decision-making, as Johan highlights how drawing attention to content accuracy can differentially limit the propagation of false information, exemplified by Twitter's retweet validation feature.
(00:16:12) Adding Friction to Information Sharing
Learn about the significance of adding frictions to information sharing, exemplified by Twitter's prompt to prompt users to reconsider retweeting unread content, and its impact in curbing the spread of false information.
(00:18:30) The Value of Computational Auditing in Parole Systems
Shift gears as the discussion transitions to the world of parole systems, where Johan and Russ delve into the significance of computational auditing in shedding light on inconsistencies and arbitrariness within the California parole system.
(00:21:40) Analyzing Parole Grant Rates Across Commissioners
Explore the disparities in parole grant rates across different commissioners, as Johan explains the computational techniques employed to evaluate the system's fairness by shuffling commissioner assignments and examining deviations from expected outcomes.
(00:23:15) Unveiling Inconsistencies and Arbitrariness
Dive into the discoveries made through computational auditing, as Johan reveals the presence of inconsistencies and arbitrariness in the parole system, raising important questions about its fairness and potential avenues for improvement.
(00:25:16) Conclusion and Future Impact of Computational Audit
Reflect on the transformative potential of computational auditing in parole systems, as Johan and Russ discuss the broader implications of their work, including increased transparency, societal impact, and collaboration with criminal justice reform groups.
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Delve into the possibilities of silicon photonics as a game-changer in chip manufacturing. This is a re-run of a show that Russ did with David Miller back in 2021. David is an electrical engineer, and works in the field of photonics. As he shares in this conversation, there’s great potential for the field of photonics to help solve the problems posed by an increasing demand for computing power. Silicon-chip computers are starting to hit fundamental limits, and advances in the field of photonics – technology that uses light waves – may be just the help we need. David’s research offers a bright spot as we look to a future that continuously demands more computing power. Enjoy!
Chapter Notes
(00:00:00) Introduction
Join us as we delve into the world of optical computing, exploring its potential to revolutionize information processing and overcome the limitations of traditional electronic systems.
(00:00:27) Limitations of electronic systems
Gain insights into the current constraints faced by electronic systems, such as speed and energy efficiency, and discover why alternative approaches are necessary.
(00:01:42) Challenges of copper wire interconnects
Understand the challenges associated with copper wire interconnects and how optical interconnects offer a promising solution with their potential for increased speed and bandwidth.
(00:04:12) Optical interconnects explained
Dive deeper into the concept of optical interconnects, exploring the principles behind transmitting data through light and the advantages they hold over traditional copper wires.
(00:06:08) Optics in long-distance communication
Learn about the significant role optics plays in long-distance communication, from transmitting data through undersea cables to interconnecting cities with optical fiber networks.
(00:07:41) Growing demand for high-speed data transmission
Discover the growing demand for high-speed data transmission in data centers and the need for scalable solutions that can handle the increasing volume of information.
(00:09:50) Silicon photonics
Explore the cutting-edge technology of silicon photonics, which leverages existing manufacturing processes to create photonic chips, opening new possibilities for optical computing.
(00:11:08) Transparency of materials, germanium's role & integration challenges
Delve into the optical properties of materials like silicon and glass, the potential of germanium as a complementary material to silicon, and the challenges of integrating new materials into existing silicon-based manufacturing processes.
(00:13:37) Overcoming device energy limitations
Learn about the progress made in reducing the energy consumption of devices that convert electrical signals into optical signals, a crucial step in achieving efficient optical computing.
(00:15:48) Introduction to "deep optics" and future prospects
Explore the concept of "deep optics," which goes beyond interconnects to encompass the potential use of optics for processing tasks within computing systems, and discover the immense potential of deep optics to transform computing systems and pave the way for a new era of information processing.
(00:19:04) Programmable and self-configuring optical systems
Gain insights into the development of programmable and self-configuring optical systems that can adapt their behavior, optimize light streams, and open up possibilities for advanced information processing.
(00:23:36) Future prospects
Explore the immense potential of deep optics to transform computing systems and pave the way for a new era of information processing.
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Chaitan Khosla is a chemical engineer who says that the world’s most advanced drug factories are not behemoths of the industrial age, but microscopic bacteria. These tiny creatures have evolved enzymatic assembly lines that ingest raw materials and churn out valuable other molecules, like life-saving antibiotics. By engineering new microbes, we hope to create next-generation drugs, Khosla tells host Russ Altman on this episode of Stanford Engineering’s The Future of Everything podcast.
Chapter Show Notes:
(00:00:43) Introduction to Assembly Lines and Antibiotics
Russ welcomes Professor Khosla and introduces the intriguing world of bacterial assembly lines and their crucial role in antibiotic synthesis. He emphasizes the significance of antibiotics and their intricate molecular structures.
(00:06:19) Enzymatic Assembly Lines: The Automotive Analogy
Drawing an analogy between assembly lines in nature and automotive assembly lines, discussion highlights the remarkable efficiency and meticulous organization of bacterial assembly lines.
(00:08:17) The Scale of Antibiotic Assembly Lines
Russ Altman and Chaitan Khosla delve into the scale of antibiotic assembly lines, using erythromycin as a prime example. They explore the multitude of enzymes involved in the assembly line process.
(00:10:34) Challenges in Antibiotic Synthesis
The conversation centers around the challenges faced by human chemists in synthesizing antibiotics compared to the remarkable efficiency and complexity of bacterial assembly lines.
(00:12:00) Uncovering Nature's Engineering Marvels
Russ Altman and Chaitan Khosla discuss the awe-inspiring engineering feats found in nature's assembly lines, exploring the intricacies of their construction and their functional significance.
(00:15:15) Expanding the Search for Assembly Lines
Russ Altman and Chaitan Khosla broaden the scope of assembly line research, discussing the potential for discovering novel assembly lines in previously unexplored organisms and environments.
(00:19:00) The Mystery of Orphan Assembly Lines
Russ Altman and Chaitan Khosla explore the enigmatic world of orphan assembly lines, discussing the fascination and curiosity surrounding these assembly lines whose functions remain unknown.
(00:22:00) Decoding the Language of Genes
Russ Altman and Chaitan Khosla delve into the process of deciphering the genetic code to unravel assembly line functions. They discuss the techniques and strategies employed in this intricate decoding process.
(00:24:00) Leveraging Artificial Intelligence in Assembly Line Analysis
The hosts discuss the application of artificial intelligence and machine learning in analyzing assembly line data, showcasing the potential of these technologies to accelerate the discovery of assembly line functions.
(00:26:00) A Window into Nature's Medicine Cabinet
Russ Altman and Chaitan Khosla explore the remarkable potential of assembly lines in antibiotic discovery, unveiling how studying these assembly lines can unlock nature's vast repertoire of medicinal compounds.
(00:28:32) Novel Insights from Recent Assembly Line Discoveries
Russ Altman and Chaitan Khosla highlight the groundbreaking insights gained from recent assembly line discoveries, discussing the exciting prospects and implications of these findings.
(00:30:30) Conclusion and Show Wrap-up
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Explore the frontiers of 3D printing in healthcare and its potential to revolutionize personalized medicine, reshape prosthetics, and reimagine drug delivery systems.
In this episode we're re-sharing a conversation Russ had in 2021 with Joseph DeSimone, a professor of chemical engineering at Stanford University. This one is about health, and Joe tells us how 3D printing is transforming healthcare. His group is using it to make vaccine delivery easier and more effective. They're also creating implantable chemotherapy that kills tumors, while having fewer side effects for the patients.
We hope you enjoy this glimpse of how 3D printing technologies are being used in novel and unexpected ways.
Chapter show notes:
(00:00:00) Introduction
Host Russ Altman introduces the episode and welcomes Joseph DeSimone, a renowned 3D printing expert and bioengineer.
(00:01:14) Exploring the Potential of 3D Printing in Healthcare
Altman and DeSimone discuss the transformative possibilities of 3D printing in personalized medicine, prosthetics, and drug delivery.
(00:04:25) Advancements in Personalized Prosthetics
The advancements in 3D printing technology for personalized prosthetics are explored, highlighting the benefits of customized solutions for patients.
(00:07:36) Innovations in Implantable Devices
DeSimone discusses the groundbreaking use of 3D printing for creating implantable devices, such as bone replacements and joint implants, with improved functionality and longevity.
(00:09:19) Custom Prosthetics and Implants
The use of 3D printing for custom prosthetics and implants is highlighted, showcasing its potential for improving patient outcomes.
(00:11:05) Enhancing Drug Delivery through 3D Printing
DeSimone explains how 3D printing has revolutionized drug delivery systems, allowing for precise control and targeted release of medications to enhance therapeutic outcomes.
(00:13:10) Precision Drug Delivery for Cancer Treatment
DeSimone discusses the implantable devices used for targeted chemotherapy delivery, including a description of their appearance and components.
(00:15:40) Applications of localized drug delivery in various cancers are explored.
(00:20:10) Advanced Materials for Bioprinting
The use of bioprinting and the development of advanced materials for creating functional tissues and organs are discussed, highlighting their potential impact on regenerative medicine.
(00:22:15) Harnessing 3D Printing for Regenerative Medicine
The potential of 3D printing in regenerative medicine, including tissue engineering and organ transplantation, is examined, highlighting its ability to create patient-specific solutions.
(00:23:35) Ensuring Data Security and Patient Privacy
The importance of data security and patient privacy in the context of 3D printing healthcare solutions is emphasized, exploring strategies to safeguard sensitive information.
(00:25:05) Trust and Ethics in 3D Printing Healthcare
The ethical considerations and challenges surrounding 3D printing in healthcare, including regulatory frameworks and patient privacy, are discussed.
(00:27:14) Diversity and Trust in Bioengineering and Healthcare
DeSimone discusses his involvement in issues of diversity and trust within bioengineering and healthcare. The connection between values, diversity, and fostering an innovative environment is examined.
(00:28:30) The Mathematical Impact of Diversity
Altman and DeSimone discuss the tangible benefits of diverse teams in driving progress and innovative solutions. The concept of combinatorial approaches and the need for diversity in disciplines and human experiences is highlighted.
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Neuroscientist Kalanit Grill-Spector studies the physiology of human vision and says that the ways computers and people see are in some ways similar, but in other ways quite different. In fact, she says, rapid advances in computational modeling, such as deep neural networks, applied to brain data and new imaging technologies, like quantitative MRI and diffusion MRI, are revolutionizing our understanding of how the human brain sees. We’re unraveling how the brain “computes” visual information, as Grill-Spector tells host Russ Altman on this episode of Stanford Engineering’s The Future of Everything podcast.
Chapter Time Stamps:
(00:01:30) Episode introduction: Exploring the fascinating field of cognitive neuroscience and brain development with Kalanit Grill-Spector.
(00:02:45) Dr Grill-Spector's background and research interests: The intersection of cognitive neuroscience, psychology, and computer science.
(00:04:00) The crucial role of experience in shaping brain development: Understanding how environmental factors influence neural specialization.
(00:09:55) The development of word processing regions in the brain: Investigating the emergence and evolution of brain regions associated with reading and word recognition.
(00:11:30) The evolution of word specialization and its implications: Exploring how the brain acquires the ability to read and process words.
(00:14:20) Shift in research focus to studying brain development in infants: Exploring the critical early phases of brain development and the impact of experience on neural circuits.
(00:16:40) Pokemon, Brain Representation, and Perception: The surprising findings on the continued development of word and face processing regions. Discovering the extended period of specialization and plasticity in these brain areas.
(00:19:10) Unexpected decline in specialization for body parts, particularly hands: Examining the trade-off between different cognitive abilities as brain regions specialize.
(00:22:00) Understanding the potential impact of experience on brain organization: Examining how environmental factors shape the neural pathways and cognitive capabilities.
(00:25:00) Investigating the influence of Pokemon on brain representation and perception: Analyzing the effects of exposure to specific visual stimuli on brain organization.
(00:27:15) The unique characteristics of Pokemon stimuli: Exploring how visual features, animacy, and stimulus size affect brain responses.
(00:29:00) Specificity of brain representation for Pokemons: Uncovering whether the brain develops distinct neural pathways for Pokemon stimuli.
(00:31:45) Comparing the effects of word learning: Understanding the potential trade-offs in brain specialization.
(00:32:45) Technical challenges in studying infant's brains: Discussing the need for new tools and analysis methods to study developing brains.
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Guest Debra Kaysen is a psychologist specializing in treatment of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) who says that promising new cognitive and behavioral therapies are, quite literally, giving people “their lives back.” These therapies work without drugs to help patients manage their disease and its symptoms and, perhaps, even cure PTSD. We’re providing tools to change how they think, Kaysen tells host Russ Altman on this episode of Stanford Engineering’s The Future of Everything podcast.
For interested listeners, Kaysen offers a list of PTSD resources:
Resources
Free apps from the VA for PTSD and other related concerns
For a Cognitive Processing Therapy (CPT) trained therapist
Stanford’s PTSD clinic
International resource for a Prolonged Exposure (PE) trained therapist
Chapter Timestamps:
(00:00:00) Introduction to Trauma Therapy and Digital Mental Health
Russ Altman introduces the topic of trauma therapy and discusses the advancements in digital mental health.
(00:01:45) Support Apps for Trauma Survivors
Debra Kaysen explores the use of mobile applications as a means of support for sexual assault survivors in the immediate aftermath of trauma.
(00:03:15) Overcoming Barriers
Finding Therapists: Debra Kaysen highlights the challenges survivors face in finding therapists and the potential of apps to bridge that gap.
(00:05:10) Bridging the Gap: Challenges in Accessing Support
Debra Kaysen discusses the difficulties survivors face in accessing timely support and how apps can provide a solution.
(00:08:00) The Power of Telehealth for PTSD Treatment
Debra Kaysen emphasizes the effectiveness of telehealth in treating post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and its growing acceptance in the field.
(00:10:15) Equivalence of Telehealth and In-Person Therapy
Debra Kaysen shares her personal experience of providing therapy to her patients via telehealth and highlights its equivalence to in-person sessions.
(00:12:30) Exploring Asynchronous Therapy with Text Messages
Debra Kaysen delves into the use of text messages as a form of asynchronous therapy for PTSD treatment, offering flexibility and convenience.
(00:14:20) Enhancing Support: Immediate Response and Accessibility
Debra Kaysen discusses the immediate response and accessibility benefits of asynchronous therapy with text messages.
(00:16:00) Building Trust and Establishing Rapport
Debra Kaysen emphasizes the importance of building trust and establishing rapport in digital therapy settings.
(00:18:00) Honesty and Reduced Fear of Judgment
Russ Altman discusses the potential for reduced fear of judgment in digital therapy, allowing individuals to be more open and honest in their communication.
(00:20:00) Exploring Effective Therapeutic Techniques
Debra Kaysen explores various therapeutic techniques used in trauma therapy and their effectiveness in promoting healing.
(00:24:15) Long-Term Outcomes and Prevention
Debra Kaysen explores the long-term outcomes of trauma therapy, highlighting its potential to prevent symptom recurrence and equip individuals with lifelong resilience skills.
(00:26:00) Empowering Individuals: Coping Strategies
Debra Kaysen discusses empowering individuals with effective coping strategies to navigate future traumas.
(00:28:00) Sustaining Progress: Follow-up and Resilience
Debra Kaysen discusses the importance of follow-up care and how trauma therapy helps individuals develop resilience.
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Hi everyone, Russ here, we’re running a best-of episode this week to re-share a conversation I had in 2021 with Karen Liu, an associate professor of computer science here at Stanford Engineering. The conversation is relevant today because, as we all know, AI is having a moment, and robotics is an important part of that. Karen and her lab have a goal of enabling robots to contribute in caregiving roles - think of tasks like helping medical patients get dressed each day - and they’re using physics-based simulations to do that. I hope you’ll take some time to tune into this discussion, it’s a timely and relevant one given larger societal conversations about AI. Enjoy!
Chapter Time Stamps:
(00:00:00) Introduction
Russ Altman interviews Karen Liu, a Stanford professor in computer science, to explore the advancements in exoskeleton technology and their impact on human augmentation.
(00:01:12) Defining Exoskeletons
Karen Liu provides an overview of exoskeletons as wearable devices that enhance human capabilities and become an integral part of the wearer's body.
(00:02:30) Wearable Devices and Human Augmentation
The discussion delves into the concept of wearable devices augmenting human abilities, drawing parallels to popular culture references such as Iron Man.
(00:05:40) Incorporating Sensors and Cameras
Karen Liu explains how sensors and cameras are integrated into exoskeletons to understand the wearer's environment, enabling the exoskeleton to anticipate future actions.
(00:07:55) Parallels with Self-Driving Car Technologies
Exploring similarities with self-driving cars, the conversation highlights how exoskeletons can leverage environmental awareness to guide the wearer's movements.
(00:09:20) Modeling Human Behavior and Intentions
The discussion shifts to the modeling of human behavior and predicting user intentions to ensure exoskeleton assistance aligns with user expectations and maintains their independence.
(00:11:30) Ensuring User Safety and Comfort
The focus turns to designing exoskeletons that prioritize user safety and comfort, considering factors such as ergonomics and personalized adjustments.
(00:13:45) Real-Time Adaptive Assistance
The conversation explores the potential for exoskeletons to dynamically adapt assistance levels in real time based on the wearer's needs and changing circumstances.
(00:15:20) Balancing Assistance and User Independence
The importance of finding the right balance between providing assistance and preserving user independence is discussed, ensuring that exoskeletons empower rather than hinder.
(00:17:05) Ethical Considerations and Accessibility
The discussion touches upon ethical considerations surrounding exoskeleton technology, including accessibility, affordability, and ensuring equal opportunities for all users.
(00:18:30) Optimizing Performance and Efficiency
The conversation dives into strategies for optimizing the performance and efficiency of exoskeletons, including advancements in energy management and battery technologies.
(00:19:45) User Feedback and Iterative Design
Karen Liu highlights the significance of user feedback and iterative design processes in refining exoskeleton technology to better meet user needs and preferences.
(00:20:30) Future Possibilities and Advancements
Looking ahead, the conversation explores potential advancements in exoskeleton technology, including advancements in artificial intelligence and personalized exoskeleton designs.
(00:22:00) Collaborations and Interdisciplinary Research
The importance of interdisciplinary collaborations in advancing exoskeleton technology is discussed, emphasizing the need for expertise from various fields.
(00:23:10) Summary and Key Takeaways
Russ Altman summarizes the main points discussed throughout the episode, highlighting key takeaways for listeners to reflect upon.
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Guest Bill Mitch says it’s no secret the world is running short of fresh water. As a civil and environmental engineer, he sees wastewater as a potential solution, if only we can eliminate the impurities. Mitch designs systems to remove toxic chemicals from wastewater to enable its reuse as a drinking water supply. It’s not easy, but it costs half as much as desalinating seawater, Mitch tells host Russ Altman on this episode of Stanford Engineering’s The Future of Everything podcast.
Show Notes & Chapters: The future of Wastewater
(00:00:05) Introduction
Russ introduces the podcast and guest, William Mitch, who discusses the future of wastewater treatment.
(00:00:38) Nitrogen in Wastewater Treatment
Russ and William kick off the conversation with an insightful discussion on the issues surrounding the nitrogen cycle in wastewater treatment. They discuss the nitrogen cycle, the role of nitrogen in wastewater treatment, and the challenges of removing it from wastewater, including the current technologies being used.
(00:02:28) The Basics of Wastewater Treatment
Mitch explains the fundamental process of wastewater treatment, highlighting the initial step of removing solids and the biological process of removing organic matter.
(00:07:35) Understanding Biochemical Oxygen Demand (BOD)
Mitch explains the concept of BOD, its importance in water treatment, and how technology has evolved to measure it.
(00:10:19) The Challenge of Nitrogen Removal
Discussion about the difficulties and processes involved in removing nitrogen from wastewater, focusing on the traditional and newer approaches.
(00:14:02) Energy Consumption in Wastewater Treatment
Mitch talks about the substantial energy demand involved in wastewater treatment, especially in the nitrogen removal process.
(00:17:32) Research on Nitrogen Removal
Mitch discusses his lab's research on a more energy-efficient process for nitrogen removal from wastewater, explaining the concept of anammox bacteria and their role in this process.
(00:20:49) Phosphate Removal and Regulation
Mitch talks about the lack of regulatory pressure for phosphorus removal from water and its potential future implications.
(00:21:30) Public Acceptance of Wastewater Treatment Technologies
Russ probes into the public acceptance of wastewater technologies, specifically potable reuse of wastewater. William discusses the changes in public attitudes towards recycled water over the past decades, the importance of public relations campaigns and community education in shaping these attitudes, and the future of potable reuse facilities.
(00:24:39) The Quality of Potable Reuse Waters vs. Conventional Water Supplies
William discusses a recent study comparing the quality of water from potable reuse plants to conventional water supplies. He reveals that the treated waters were found to be of higher quality than surface waters and comparable in quality to groundwater supplies.
(00:27:00) Chlorinated Taste in Drinking Water
Russ asks William about the common chlorinated taste in drinking water. William explains the chemical reactions that lead to this taste and why it isn't necessarily a red flag for consumers.
(00:28:00) Future of Separate Infrastructures for Potable and Non-Potable Water
They wrap up the conversation discussing the possibility and implications of having separate infrastructures for potable water and water used for other purposes. William explains the logistical challenges and why many utilities are moving towards potable reuse.
(00:29:08) Conclusion
Russ concludes the episode, thanking William for his insights into the future of wastewater, and invites listeners to subscribe, rate, and review the podcast for future episodes.
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Guest Matteo Cargnello approaches the challenge of greenhouse gases from a different perspective. He doesn’t study how harmful chemicals got in the skies, or even the consequences. Instead, Cargnello is using his skills as a chemical engineer to turn them into other benign or useful chemicals. So far, he’s turned greenhouse gases into valuable industrial chemicals, polymers, renewable fuels, and even ethanol. Useful products from greenhouse gases, that's the dream, Cargnello tells host Russ Altman on this episode of Stanford Engineering’sThe Future of Everything.
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This episode of The Future of Everything podcast with Srabanti Chowdhury first ran in 2022. We’re sharing it again to offer a glimpse into research being done to identify new materials for semiconductors that could lead to smaller, faster, more powerful and more energy efficient electronics. Since we recorded this episode, the CHIPS and Science Act was signed into law, creating a $280 billion dollar investment in the field over the next 10 years, and in light of the renewed commitment to this technology, we’re excited to share this conversation on the future of semiconductor materials.
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Deborah Cullinan’s job is to integrate arts of every form across campus. She says art has the power to heal and may be the answer to many of our present-day societal problems, such as growing political polarization and social isolation borne by the pandemic. Art advances equity, improves health, and enhances well-being for all, she says. Everyone should see themselves as artists—engineers, physicians, political scientists alike. "We all want to have creative lives," Cullinan tells host Russ Altman in this episode of Stanford Engineering’s The Future of Everything podcast.
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Helen Bronte-Stewart is a neurologist and an expert in movement disorders, like Parkinson’s. She says new approaches, such as closed-loop deep-brain stimulation, and new digital health technologies that chart subtle changes in movement are reshaping the field, leading to new understandings and new treatments for this once-untreatable disease. To modulate behavior, you first have to measure it, Bronte-Stewart tells host Russ Altman. It’s the future of movement disorders in this episode of Stanford Engineering’s The Future of Everything podcast.
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Our guest, Christopher Manning, is a computational linguist. He builds computer models that understand and generate language using math. Words are the key component of human intelligence, he says, and why generative AI, like ChatGPT, has caused such a stir. We used to hope a model might produce one coherent sentence and suddenly ChatGPT is composing five-paragraph stories and doing mathematical proofs in rhyming verse, Manning tells host Russ Altman in this episode of Stanford Engineering’s The Future of Everything podcast.
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This episode of The Future of Everything podcast with Mehran Sahami first ran in 2019. We’re sharing it again to offer a glimpse into the ways our faculty are thinking about computer science education, an increasingly popular and impactful field of study. Earlier this week, Sahami and another of his colleagues, Chris Piech, launched the third offering of Code In Place, a free online course that offers coding education to people all over the world.
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Kathleen Eisenhardt is an expert in strategy and organizational behavior. She studies corporate decision making. She says the most creative companies are like jazz bands. Bound by a few simple rules, they are able to innovate continually. Other companies are like orchestras, tied to rigid scores and complex rules; they find it hard to improvise. If innovation is your metric, Eisenhardt says, having a few simple rules is the best path to success, as she tells host Russ Altman on this episode of Stanford Engineering’s The Future of Everything podcast.
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While DNA may be the blueprint of life, proteins are the workhorses, says Polly Fordyce, a bioengineer, explaining how one of her favorites, kinesin, “walks” in 8-nanometer steps transporting chemical cargo through the body. More remarkable still, Fordyce says, kinesin is just one among thousands of “incredible” proteins that make life happen, as she tells host Russ Altman on this episode of Stanford Engineering’s The Future of Everything podcast.
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Rising temperatures and rainfall from climate change will have a surprising effect on human health, says biologist Erin Mordecai, an expert in diseases borne by mosquitoes, ticks and other living creatures. Such conditions are perfect breeding grounds for parasites that will bring deadly diseases to the U.S. and other places once thought out of reach. Hope may rest in mathematical models to guide smarter environmental policies, as Mordecai tells host Russ Altman on this episode of Stanford Engineering’s The Future of Everything podcast.
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When we’re sick, the time between onset and diagnosis is critical, sometimes life-saving. It turns out the human immune system is pretty good at knowing what’s making us sick. In fact, it’s telling us all the time, but only now is science tuning in to what nature has to say, explains Purvesh Khatri. The immune system is a “perfect diagnostic,” he tells host Russ Altman in this episode of Stanford Engineering’s The Future of Everything podcast.
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When one has a medical procedure in America, it is often an algorithm that figures out how much of the cost will be reimbursed. That leads to a lot of unfairness, worse health outcomes for many and a group of insurers who learn to game the system, says guest Sherri Rose, a statistician and health policy researcher who studies the causes of such inequities. Rose is using artificial intelligence to root out these bad incentives and to bring greater equity and better care to the American health system, as she tells host Russ Altman on this episode of Stanford Engineering’s The Future of Everything podcast.
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With the advent of wearable devices and omnipresent monitoring of heart, lungs, blood and more, scientists can now gather unprecedented amounts of personal medical data. Just ask guest Michael Snyder, referred to as “medicine’s most-measured man.” He is the author of Genomics and Personalized Medicine: What Everyone Needs to Know and has collected billions of bytes of his own biodata. Snyder says that all this data can lead to earlier diagnosis than ever before, often before symptoms appear, as he tells host Russ Altman on this episode of Stanford Engineering's The Future of Everything podcast.
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While many users remain blissfully unaware, a battle is raging for the future of the internet. On the one hand are the large phone and cable companies who want to promote their services and to charge more for video and other data. On the other are people, like guest Barbara van Schewick, a lawyer, who champions a more democratic approach known as net neutrality. Net neutrality guarantees unfettered access for all and makes sure that we get to choose what we do online, van Schewick tells host Russ Altman on this episode of Stanford Engineering’s The Future of Everything podcast.
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Beatriz Magaloni is a lawyer and a professor of political science who studies the challenges at the intersection of governance, poverty, and police violence in Latin America. On this episode of Stanford Engineering’s The Future of Everything podcast, Magaloni tells host Russ Altman that the solution to these challenges begins with studying the root causes as explained by people living in the communities that are most impacted.
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Guest Nicholas Bloom has studied telecommuting for 20 years. Prior to the pandemic, he says, just five percent of days were “worked from home,” but the number is now closer to one in three. It looks like the hybrid workplace is here to stay. What was once thought to be a boon to employee morale has also helped companies slash real estate budgets. But, it’s not all sunshine and roses, as Bloom tells host Russ Altman on this episode of Stanford Engineering’s The Future of Everything podcast.
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On this episode of Stanford Engineering’s The Future of Everything podcast, guest Mac Schwager talks safety in multi-robot systems, like those controlling the autonomous vehicles that will soon fill our future. Some engineers are helping robots communicate better among themselves while others are working on “emotionally aware” algorithms able to pick up on subtle cues in how others are driving to help robots make better on-the-road decisions.
Never fear, Schwager says, the future is in good hands. “Autonomous cars will reach a level of safety that surpasses that of human drivers, but it may take a little while,” he tells host Russ Altman on this episode of The Future of Everything podcast.
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Our guest on this episode of Stanford Engineering’s The Future of Everything podcast, Ilan Kroo, is an expert in aircraft design. But when Kroo talks of aircraft, he means a new generation of flying vehicles that could transform our very concept of transportation—like personal flying cars that take off and land vertically or commercial airliners fueled by clean-burning hydrogen.
Kroo says the rapid changes he’s seeing in the industry could lead to safer, less expensive, more efficient—and quieter—air travel. Listen in as he shares more with host Russ Altman on this episode of The Future of Everything podcast.
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Helen Blau is a stem cell biologist and expert in why, as we age, our muscles weaken, even if we get exercise and try to stay fit. In an age when humans are living longer, our muscles are critical to living life to the fullest and Blau is helping them keep pace by recruiting stem cells to regenerate youthful muscle in older people.
Join us on this episode of Stanford Engineering’s The Future of Everything podcast as Blau and host Russ Altman discuss the science of muscle regeneration.
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This episode's guest on Stanford Engineering’s The Future of Everything podcast is Lawrence Wein, an expert in the science of catching criminals using DNA left behind years or even decades prior. All it takes is a snippet of the killer’s DNA and for a relative of the killer to have registered their DNA with one of the many genealogy websites in operation today. Armed with those few details, genetic detectives quickly narrow in on the suspect. They’ve used it to capture some of the most reviled, previously unidentified killers on record.
Listen in as Wein joins host Russ Altman to discuss the mathematics of forensic genetic genealogy on this episode of The Future of Everything podcast.
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Natural sounds in the world around us are based on the principles of physics. Today’s guest on Stanford Engineering’s The Future of Everything podcast, Doug James, uses those same principles to create computer-generated sounds to match the imaginary computer-generated objects and creatures that inhabit almost every movie or game these days.
His algorithms speed the animator’s work and make the final product all-the-more believable, as James tells host Russ Altman on this episode of The Future of Everything podcast
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This episode's guest on Stanford Engineering’s The Future of Everything podcast, management science and engineering professor Melissa Valentine studies a workplace phenomenon known as the flash organization. These ad hoc groups of experts are assembled online and exist only long enough to solve a particular problem—perhaps a week or few months at a time. As soon as the problem is solved, the flash org dissipates, and the participants get paid for their time and expertise. It’s a whole new way to work.
Join us for a look at the future of the gig economy on this episode of Stanford Engineering’s The Future of Everything podcast.
At the end of this episode, host Russ Altman, along with the entire production team of The Future of Everything, offer a tribute to our audio engineer, Ray Avila, who passed away in October of 2022. Ray's work was instrumental in making this podcast possible and his presence is sorely missed.
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Our guest on this episode of Stanford Engineering's The Future of Everything podcast, Elaine Treharne, is an English professor and an authority on ancient manuscripts. She's using modern tools like machine learning to unlock the secrets hidden inside these aged pages. Despite frequent predictions of the demise of physical writing, she says, books will never go away. Physical writing, she believes, is a perfectly human manifestation of our humanity—an effort by transient beings to create something eternal.
All this and more as Treharne and our host Russ Altman discuss the future of books, writing and reading on this episode of The Future of Everything.
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On this episode of Stanford Engineering's The Future of Everything podcast, robotics expert Oussama Khatib takes us on a deep dive into the vagaries of creating robots that swim. His most recent project is OceanOneK, a 200-pound, humanoid robot with stereoscopic vision and opposable thumbs that can travel nearly a thousand meters below the surface. When the pressure was on, Khatib had to redesign everything he thought he knew about robots, he says, beginning with a new glass-like shell good to 6,000 PSI.
Listen as Khatib and host Russ Altman plumb the depths of underwater robots on this installment of The Future of Everything.
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On this episode of Stanford Engineering's The Future of Everything podcast, Stanford infectious disease expert Desiree LaBeaud talks trash, literally. She says carelessly discarded plastics can collect water, providing a perfect nursery to mosquitoes that then spread dengue, chikungunya, Zika, yellow fever and other killer diseases worldwide. Plastic trash has become a public health nightmare as LaBeaud tells host Russ Altman and listeners of The Future of Everything. Reducing it is now a critical component of life-saving disease prevention strategies.
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Civil and environmental engineer Alexandria Boehm joins Stanford Engineering’s The Future of Everything podcast to discuss how a new form of epidemiology is using the tools of engineering to test wastewater to track COVID-19’s true spread. The wastewater that enters a treatment facility is really just one big biological sample, Boehm says. Testing it is far more accurate than COVID-19 case data, and it is useful for tracking other diseases in our communities, as well.
Listen in to this episode of The Future of Everything, as Boehm and host Russ Altman explore the great promise of wastewater epidemiology.
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On this episode of Stanford Engineering's The Future of Everything podcast, Stanford bioengineer Jan Liphardt talks about the challenge of getting good medical recommendations and diagnoses while guaranteeing that a patient's health secrets remain private. Computing on encrypted data is the way, he says. Tune in as health data expert Liphardt and host Russ Altman discuss the future of health privacy.
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Stanford pediatrics professor Anisha Patel tells us how engaging a local community about their health concerns can lead to impactful discoveries and interventions. She recounts how a visit to a middle school helped her team realize that simple access to drinking water was a problem in schools across the nation. Patel also shares how similar interactions during the COVID pandemic created a system of free lunches at public schools that helped ensure food security for children throughout the country. On this episode of The Future of Everything, Patel and host Russ Altman discuss the future of community health.
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To better understand the inner workings of glacier — which are often many kilometers in depth — researchers are using ice-penetrating radar, which sends radio waves through the ice, to create maps of what it looks like inside.
In this episode of Stanford Engineering’s The Future of Everything, Stanford radio glaciologist Dustin (Dusty) Schroeder explains how this technique works and how the data it generates can help us understand the implications of climate change here on Earth. Together with host, bioengineer Russ Altman, Schroeder also discusses how he and his team are using this technology to investigate the habitability of moons and planets in our solar system – and whether there might be life already there. Listen and subscribe here.
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When we think of synchrony, we often think of positive things, like ice skaters gliding in tandem. But if there’s too much synchrony in the brain – when neurons fire simultaneously – it can be a problem.
In fact, abnormal neural synchrony underlies many neurological conditions, including Parkinson’s disease, epilepsy, and dystonia. In this episode of Stanford Engineering’s The Future of Everything, Stanford professor of neurosurgery Peter Tass joins host, Stanford bioengineer Russ Altman, to discuss how vibrational therapies, such as a glove that applies vibrations to an individual’s fingertips, can help patients with neurological conditions by helping the neurons break and unlearn synchronicity. Listen and subscribe here.
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Primary care medicine represents 52% of all care delivered in the United States, but when it comes to AI innovation, it’s been largely left behind.
In this episode of Stanford Engineering’s The Future of Everything, Stanford physician Steven Lin, explains how AI could improve healthcare logistics, optimize patient care, and significantly lower costs by reducing the clerical burdens that cost the U.S. healthcare system billions of dollars a year and keep physicians from spending more time with their patients. Learn more with Lin and host, bioengineer and fellow physician, Russ Altman. Listen and subscribe here.
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Take a look around your neighborhood and you’ll see a few things you like -- and, most likely, a few you don’t. Maybe you need a crosswalk near the senior home. Or garbage keeps getting dumped on the sidewalk.
Now imagine if you and others in your community could document what you saw, collect those data, identify and agree on issues to prioritize, and then find feasible solutions for them?
In this episode of Stanford Engineering’s The Future of Everything, Stanford faculty member Abby King, professor of epidemiology and population health and of medicine, explains how this scenario is possible, starting with a mobile app called the Our Voice Discovery Tool. King and host, bioengineer Russ Altman, also discuss how this by-the-people type of citizen science can help improve the well-being and health of communities in the U.S. and around the world. Listen and subscribe here.
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Algorithms inform the news you read, the TV shows you watch, and the advertisements that appear on your internet searches – and they also have a say in who gets a bank loan, what medical procedures are covered by insurance, and who gets selected for a job interview. As algorithms are used to make these decisions, how do we make sure they’re fair? And what does fairness even mean?
In this episode of Stanford Engineering’s The Future of Everything, computer science professor Omer Reingold explains how we can create definitions of fairness that can be incorporated into computer algorithms. Reingold and host, bioengineer Russ Altman, also discuss how flawed historic data may result in algorithms making unfair decisions and how a technique called multi-group fairness can improve health predictions for individuals. Listen and subscribe here.
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Unfortunately, not every medical procedure is 100% successful. Due to the complexity of breast cancer lumpectomies, for instance, 16–25% of surgeries fail to remove the entire tumor, requiring patients to repeat the procedure. But to improve surgery success rates, and their efficiency, physicians are now looking to technologies from a surprising source: the gaming industry.
In this episode of Stanford Engineering’s The Future of Everything, Bruce Daniel, a professor of radiology, explains how technologies developed by the gaming industry, such as virtual reality and body tracking, can be used to improve medicine. With host, bioengineer Russ Altman, Daniel also discusses how the potential of these technologies goes beyond surgeries, even helping patients manage anxiety before undergoing stressful diagnostic procedures like MRIs. Listen and subscribe here.
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Since they were invented more than a century ago, airplanes have gone from carrying a single person to ferrying many hundreds of people and several tons of cargo. Despite the increase in size and capacity, commercial aircraft have actually become quieter over the past several decades, thanks to a few key design changes informed by fluid mechanics, a branch of physics that studies fluids in motion.
In this episode of Stanford Engineering’s The Future of Everything, Sanjiva Lele, a professor of aeronautics and astronautics and of mechanical engineering, explains how adjustments in aircraft design, landing gear, and engines can have massive consequences for the field of aeroacoustics.
Lele joins host, bioengineer Russ Altman, to also discuss how high-fidelity simulations can be used to study and improve the fluid mechanical modeling of aircraft engines, as well as wind turbines. Listen and subscribe here.
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Data shows that greater gender diversity on company leadership groups leads to improved business outcomes, says Stanford cardiologist Hannah Valantine. Likewise, she says, in medical research, where diversity boosts the development of new technologies.
In this episode of Stanford Engineering’s The Future of Everything, Valantine, the former inaugural chief officer for scientific workforce diversity at the National Institutes of Health, as well as a senior investigator at the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute, discusses why increasing the diversity of researchers and study participants is vital to medical innovation. Valantine and host, bioengineer Russ Altman, then explore the barriers that keep new medical technologies, such as a blood test to detect signs of heart transplant rejection, from being used in hospitals. Listen and subscribe here.
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In our deeply polarized society, the prospect of holding thoughtful discussions on policy issues seems impossible. But it doesn’t have to be. In this episode of Stanford Engineering’s The Future of Everything, James Fishkin, a professor of communication at Stanford, describes the deliberative polling model, a system of structured and moderated small group discussions that can help bring people together and bridge differences in perspective on even some of the most politically fraught issues. Together with host, bioengineer Russ Altman, Fishkin discusses how deliberative democracy has been successfully used in more than 30 countries, including Chile, Denmark, and Japan, and how it can be scaled up through technology. Listen and subscribe here.
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Many of the lies, distortions, and pieces of disinformation online are easy to spot. But as technology advances it will become harder to tell the difference between video and images that are true and accurate and those that are manipulated or outright made up. In this episode of Stanford Engineering’s The Future of Everything, Jonathan Dotan, of Stanford’s Starling Lab for Data Integrity, and host, bioengineer Russ Altman, discuss what researchers are doing to keep ahead of advances in deep fakes and other forms of manipulated media. Dotan explains how the lab is using cryptography and blockchain technologies to verify the veracity of images and videos, and how these tools are already being used to document war crimes in Syria and Ukraine, and to secure the testimonies of genocide survivors. Listen and subscribe here.
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Physicians diagnose Alzheimer’s disease with tests that measure memory loss and behavioral change. But many years before these symptoms appear, the disease is changing the brain, leading to the buildup of misfolded proteins and brain shrinkage that cause cognitive decline. In this episode of Stanford Engineering’s The Future of Everything, Stanford mechanical engineer Ellen Kuhl explains how she’s using databases of brain images of both Alzheimer’s patients and healthy individuals to create computational models that show how the disease spreads through distinct parts of the brain and gradually impacts different brain functions. Kuhl and host, Stanford bioengineer Russ Altman, explore how these models have generated new insights into how Alzheimer’s affects the brain, as well as its diagnosis and its potential treatment. Listen and subscribe here.
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Humans have been trying to predict when earthquakes will happen for centuries, with little success, by developing earthquake detectors and by wondering if unusual animal behavior could be a sign of an incoming temblor. In this episode of Stanford Engineering’s The Future of Everything, Eric Dunham, a geophysicist at Stanford University, explains that while we’re still unable to predict when earthquakes will happen, advanced computers and new sensors on the seafloor are pushing the field of natural-hazard modelling forward and providing new information about the nature of earthquakes, tsunamis, and volcanoes. Dunham and host, bioengineer Russ Altman, discuss how this modeling could help us understand where large earthquakes and tsunamis are likely to happen – and how it could help us prepare for these potentially devastating events. Listen and subscribe here.
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Computer chips are everywhere: your cellphone, your car, even your refrigerator. And they’re essential to enabling advances in artificial intelligence, autonomous vehicles, and faster and better computers -- and to solving global challenges such as climate change. The omnipresence of this foundational technology has been growing for decades, but the pandemic accelerated the digital transformation of society, significantly increasing the demand for more and better chips.
In this episode of Stanford Engineering’s The Future of Everything, Stanford electrical engineer Philip Wong and host, bioengineer Russ Altman, discuss why filling that need will require a greater emphasis on semiconductor research in universities, global cooperation, and increased investment in both research and development (R&D) and manufacturing. They also discuss the importance of shortening the distance between the kind of computer chip innovations happening in university labs and the fabrication of the next generation of chips, or what Wong calls “the lab-to-fab gap.” Listen and subscribe here.
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Search online and you’ll find lists of all the skills entrepreneurs should have - among them are imagination, creativity, innovation, entrepreneurship. But are entrepreneurs born with these relevant skills, or can they be taught?
In this episode of Stanford Engineering’s The Future of Everything, Tina Seelig, professor of the practice in the Department of Management Science and Engineering at Stanford, explains the differences between imagination, creativity, innovation and entrepreneurship, and how all four can be taught and then applied to finding solutions to big challenges. Join Seelig and host, bioengineer Russ Altman, as they discuss how to train a generation of entrepreneurs who will make positive contributions to the world. Listen and subscribe here.
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The consequences of climate change have already been devastating: wildfires, drought, coastal flooding, and increased temperatures, among them. And there are massive economic, societal, and geopolitical and security costs as well. It's no wonder that many people may feel the situation at this point is hopeless. But in this episode of the Future of Everything, Stanford’s Chris Field tells host and bioengineer Russ Altman that the world has made more progress than we might have expected a decade ago, and that we can still pave a way to a sustainable future, both by reducing emissions and by adapting to the impact of increasing temperatures through such things as technological innovation and improved infrastructure and land and resource management. Listen and subscribe here.
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The vast majority of substances are neither liquid, solid, nor gas – but an alternative form that shares characteristics of liquids and gases. Among them are gels, glasses, and colloidal suspensions, and they’re an essential part of everyday products like toothpaste, paint, hair products, and even windows. Stanford chemical engineer Roseanna Zia is an expert on the gel-like substance known as colloids.
In this episode of Stanford Engineering's The Future of Everything, Zia joins host Russ Altman to talk about the physics of these substances, and how a greater understanding of colloids can improve our understanding of cells, biological processes, and human health and disease. Listen and subscribe here.
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Conducting a surgery is one of the most complex tasks an individual can do — but how do you recognize the difference between the highly skilled surgeons performing at the top of their game and those still honing their techniques? With the help of wearable sensors, motion tracking and video, physicians can now watch surgeons in action, quantify their movements, and determine how highly skilled physicians accomplish the unique choreography of surgery.
In this episode of Stanford Engineering’s The Future of Everything, Carla Pugh, a professor of surgery at Stanford, discusses what we learn when we measure physicians’ movements, and how studying the movements of skilled surgeons can shorten the learning curve for their less experienced colleagues. Dr. Pugh joins bioengineer and host Russ Altman to explore the future of surgery. Listen and subscribe here.
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Are U.S. adults happy? Sad? Depressed? One can answer these questions by calling thousands of people and surveying their psychological state, a strategy that’s both costly and time-consuming. But with the help of machine learning and artificial intelligence, you can also measure a population’s well-being by turning to social media platforms and tracking what millions of people are talking about.
In this episode of Stanford Engineering’s The Future of Everything, computational social scientist Johannes Eichstaedt and host, bioengineer Russ Altman, discuss how social media can be used to gauge a population’s psychological state, including how events like COVID-19 have impacted well-being. They also discuss how social media has the potential to work as an early warning system for public health crises to help cities and counties deploy resources where they’re most needed. Listen and subscribe here.
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Start an email with “I hope” and before you can type the next word, the program will suggest you complete it with “all is well.” You may not have realized it, but this is AI-generated text. In the past several years, this technology has advanced beyond completing sentences in emails: It can now respond to others’ emails, and write essays, hip-hop songs, public health messages, and much more. What’s more, it can sometimes be even more effective than humans at conveying certain messages. In this episode of Stanford Engineering’s The Future of Everything, Jeff Hancock, a professor of communication at Stanford, explores this phenomenon and its positive and negative implications for how we communicate and how we understand our interactions with one another and the world. Learn more with Hancock and host Stanford Professor Russ Altman. Listen and subscribe here.
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The world has made remarkable gains in pediatric medicine and public health over the past several generations. The average American child of the 21st century has access to clean water and milk, fully functioning sewage systems, and antibiotics, vaccines, and other medicines. Result: Child mortality rates have declined dramatically over the past century. At the same time, a widening income gap in the United States has led to vastly different prevalence rates for health conditions between low- and high-income families, says Stanford pediatrician Lisa Chamberlain. And COVID-19, she says, has put a spotlight on many of the health challenges associated with these wealth disparities. In this episode of Stanford Engineering’s The Future of Everything, Chamberlain joins host Professor Russ Altman to discusses these issues, and how telehealth might help overcome some of the burgeoning challenges in pediatric health. Listen and subscribe here.
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It may not be immediately obvious, but there are huge financial, environmental and security costs associated with storing all the selfies, videos, documents and other digital assets the world is generating. One way to address this issue is by developing better compression algorithms that can represent the data more succinctly. Another is by creating new ways of storing the information itself, including, potentially, within biological molecules.
In this episode of Stanford Engineering’s The Future of Everything, Stanford electrical engineer Tsachy Weissman discusses with host Professor Russ Altman the challenges associated with storing our ever-growing mountains of digital data – and how they can be addressed. Listen and subscribe here.
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Children have an amazing capacity for healing after injury. Break a leg, the bone grows back; cut a finger, the skin heals. But as we age, most tissues no longer heal easily, and tissue loss is unavoidable due to aging, degenerative diseases such as arthritis, and cancer.
In this episode of Stanford Engineering’s The Future of Everything, Fan Yang and host and fellow bioengineer Russ Altman, discuss how biomaterials created in a lab can be injected into wound sites to enable tissue regeneration or rejuvenation by modulating stem cells, vasculature, or immune responses.
They also discuss the potential of exploiting such biomaterials to create 3D cancer models to facilitate discovery of novel drugs with reduced time and cost. Listen and subscribe here.
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You might not realize it, but AI-driven systems are integrated into virtually every aspect of our lives. But how can we be certain the values AI systems are striving for reflect what we want for ourselves and for society? And how can scientists and engineers do a better job of increasing people’s trust in AI? Stanford computer scientist Carlos Guestrin is a leading voice on how to advance and implement a more trustworthy AI. Learn about his work in this area, and his particular interest in AI and healthcare, on this episode of Stanford Engineering’s The Future of Everything, with host Professor Russ Altman. Listen and subscribe here.
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Anyone who’s ever been to a hospital knows that the healthcare system is extremely complex. Every patient has their own challenges – and they will typically see multiple physicians, nurses, pharmacists, and other healthcare practitioners, and come into contact with a slew of medical technologies, protocols, and billing and insurance systems.
Sara Singer, a Stanford professor of medicine, is an expert on integrated care – the development of tools, technologies, and processes designed to improve the interactions among patients, clinicians, and other providers to lower costs and improve health outcomes.
In this episode of Stanford Engineering’s The Future of Everything, she explains how new technology, and its improved integration into the healthcare system, can enhance practitioners’ ability to care for patients. Learn more with host Professor Russ Altman. Listen and subscribe here.
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Whether it’s autonomous vehicles or assistive technology in healthcare that can do things like help the elderly do core tasks like feeding themselves, some of the most challenging problems in the field of robotics involve how robots interact with humans, with all of our many complexities.
Drawing from fields as varied as cognitive neuroscience, psychology, and behavioral economics, Stanford computer scientist Dorsa Sadigh is exploring how to train robots to better understand humans – and how to give humans the skills to more seamlessly work with robots.
Learn more on this episode of Stanford Engineering’s The Future of Everything, with host Professor Russ Altman. Listen and subscribe
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Among the many areas James Zou might have chosen to apply his considerable knowledge of artificial intelligence, he opted for health care. It was the most interesting, the most complex and the most impactful area of study. In short, it was the most exciting outlet for his expertise.
Since that epiphany, Zou has gone on to publish influential studies that have improved the patient experience, shaped basic research and sped the development of new drugs. Among his most important contributions, Zou says, are efforts to expose and overcome bias in the data and algorithms.
His latest project, Pathfinder, uses anonymized, real-world medical records to allow researchers to conduct synthetic clinical trials on fictional (but realistic) patients, as Zou explains in this episode of Stanford Engineering’s The Future of Everything podcast with host Russ Altman. Listen and subscribe here.
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Stanford professor Johan Ugander is an expert in making sense of messy data. Lately he’s been working to tell fact from fiction online, as news stories spread on social media. He comes at the question from a unique angle, using machine learning to study the differing patterns in how both types of information spread (or don’t).
In so doing, Ugander has come to some interesting conclusions and, more important, suggests some novel strategies for preventing the spread of misinformation. False stories, he says, are more “infectious,” with wide-ranging consequences for how they spread. Strategies to slow or restrict this infectiousness range from increasing digital literacy to asking potential sharers to consider the factual accuracy of a story they are about to share.
Ugander has also started to take his research in a new direction, criminal justice, working to make sense of the complex data records that a Stanford team has collected to understand California’s parole system, as he tells listeners to this episode of Stanford Engineering’s The Future of Everything podcast with host Russ Altman.
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For a profession that has existed essentially since the beginning of human civilization, few people fully appreciate the importance of construction in our everyday lives, but Martin Fischer does. To build the key infrastructure of society, he says, requires intimate understanding of human nature, the environment, the materials and the ever-evolving techniques of building things.
Fischer has grown frustrated with the present state of his profession and decided to change its trajectory using artificial intelligence and virtual reality to redefine what construction will look like in the future.
It’s an effort he hopes will unite the profession in creating more efficient, safer and more livable homes, buildings, airports, bridges and more. Fischer muses all about the future of construction in this episode of Stanford Engineering’s The Future of Everything podcast with host Russ Altman. Listen and subscribe here.
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Much of what the world knows about genetic diseases is learned by comparing the DNA of people with a shared disease against the DNA of otherwise healthy people to learn where the differences lie.
This is all well and good except that, written into all that DNA, is a lot of other information that the subjects would rather keep private. And that’s where Gill Bejerano enters the scene. He’s an expert in cryptogenomics, a discipline that marries the fields of cryptography and genomics to essentially scramble the genetic code to researchers in such a way that they can still glean valuable information from it without revealing the donor’s entire genetic code.
Bejerano’s efforts have been so successful he’s now applying a similar process to medical records, as he explains to host Russ Altman and listeners of this episode of Stanford Engineering’s The Future of Everything podcast. Listen and subscribe here.
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As the field of computer science has evolved over the last half century, so too has the way in which computer science is taught and to whom it is taught.
Stanford lecturer Cynthia Lee says she is encouraged by the diversity she sees as she looks out over her classroom. But that wasn’t always the case, particularly when she, a woman, was in college. Lee has since dedicated her career to changing that mindset from a fixed and rigid outlook to one that is more open and welcoming of diverse backgrounds and skills.
Change, she says, can come from the top in how classes are structured and at the foundation in undoing preconceptions about who can excel in the field. Diverse faces, myriad skills and interests, fewer lectures and more hands-on, peer-to-peer collaboration are in order, Lee tells listeners to this episode of Stanford Engineering’s The Future of Everything podcast with host Russ Altman.
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In one of computer science’s more meta moments, professor Chelsea Finn created an AI algorithm to evaluate the coding projects of her students. The AI model reads and analyzes code, spot flaws and gives feedback to the students. Computers learning about learning—it’s so meta that Finn calls it “meta learning.”
Finn says the field should forgo training AI for highly specific tasks in favor of training it to look at a diversity of problems to divine the common structure among those problems. The result is AI able to see a problem it has not encountered before and call upon all that previous experience to solve it. This new-look AI can adapt to new courses, often enrolling thousands of students at a time, where individual instructor feedback would be prohibitive.
Emboldened by results in class, Finn is now applying her breadth-over-specificity approach to her other area of focus, robotics. She hopes to develop new-age robots that can adapt to unfamiliar surroundings and can do many things well, instead of a few, as she tells host Russ Altman and listeners to this episode of Stanford Engineering’s The Future of Everything podcast. Listen and subscribe here.
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For experts in digital graphics and visual perception, like computer scientist Kayvon Fatahalian, the recent pandemic has been a call to arms. Fatahalian says he and others in the field felt an urgent responsibility to harness their background in computer graphics and interactive techniques to improve life for people across the globe. He says new, virtual tools have proved better than past, real ones in improving certain aspects of our everyday lives.
His job as a computer scientist is to make those experiences more successful, more of the time. His role as a teacher is a case in point. While the virtual world is not a replacement for face-to-face interaction between students and instructors, Fatahalian notes there are many aspects of the live virtual lecture experience that enable more students to participate, and participate more frequently than in a physical classroom.
Fatahalian is now busier than ever discovering where and how the virtual world excels and creating new tools to meet the evolving need, as he tells listeners to this episode of Stanford Engineering’s The Future of Everything podcast with host Russ Altman. Listen and subscribe here.
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One underappreciated fact about the explosion in genetic databases, like consumer sites that provide information about ancestry and health, is that they unlock valuable insights not only into an individual’s past and future, but also for that individual’s entire family. This raises serious concerns about privacy for people who have never submitted their genetic information for analysis, yet share much the same code as one who did.
Today’s guest, Kuang Xu, is an expert in how genetic information can and should be used. He says that the DNA problem weighs heavily on privacy experts in fields ranging from law and engineering to public health and criminal justice. The fundamental question is: Can we create methods for accessing genetic data while maximizing the privacy of all involved?
The problems will only grow more intense as time and data accumulate, Xu says, unless we resolve them now, as he explains on this episode of Stanford Engineering’s The Future of Everything podcast with host Russ Altman. Listen and subscribe here.
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Readers of Eric Appel’s academic profile will note appointments in materials science, bioengineering and pediatrics, as well as fellowship appointments in the ChEM-H institute for human health research and the Woods Institute for the Environment. While the breadth of these appointments does not leap to mind as being particularly consistent, the connections quickly emerge for those who hear Appel talk about his research.
Appel is an expert in gels, those wiggly, jiggly materials that aren’t quite solid, but not quite liquid either. Gels’ in-betweenness is precisely what gets engineers like Appel excited about them. Appel has used gels for everything from new-age fire retardants that can proactively prevent forest fires to improved drug and vaccine delivery mechanisms for everything from diabetes to COVID-19. Hence the appointments across engineering and medicine.
Listen in with host and bioengineer Russ Altman as Appel explains to Stanford Engineering’s The Future of Everything podcast why gels could be the future of science. Listen and subscribe here.
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As the world has learned through the recent pandemic, epidemiological studies can be complicated by many unanticipated factors. Lianne Kurina is an expert in the design of epidemiological studies who says that the key to greater confidence is better design.
The gold standard, she says, is the randomized controlled trial—a study that compares groups that are essentially identical by every apparent factor but one— the vaccinated vs. the unvaccinated, for instance. In the case of COVID-19 vaccinations, Kurina stresses that investigators did an exemplary job of this.
In situations where we can't use a randomized controlled trial, achieving a similar balance and specificity is far harder. Kurina says that researchers working with observational data, rather than trial data, must always be attuned to the overlooked factors—“confounders” she calls them—that can muddy the data and render a study moot.
However, Kurina notes, the better one controls the confounders in these observational studies via better design and data collection, the greater confidence we can have in the end results, as she tells listeners to this episode of Stanford Engineering’s The Future of Everything podcast with host Russ Altman. Listen and subscribe here.
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For decades, the general-purpose central processing unit—the CPU—has been the workhorse of the computer industry. It could handle any task—literally—even if most of those capabilities were unnecessary.
This model was all well and good as chips grew smaller, faster and more efficient by the day, but less so as the pace of progress has slowed, says electrical engineer Priyanka Raina, an expert in chip design. Raina says that, to keep chips on their ever-improving trajectory, chip makers have shifted focus to chips that do specific tasks very well. The graphics processing unit (GPU), which handles the intense mathematics necessary for video and gaming graphics, is a perfect example.
Soon, there’ll be a faster, more efficient chip for every task, but it’ll take industry-wide cooperation to get there, as Raina tells listeners to this episode of Stanford Engineering’s The Future of Everything podcast with host Russ Altman. Listen and subscribe here.
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Most people know the seismograph, those ultrasensitive instruments that record every small shift in the Earth’s crust.
But did you know that the very latest method for measuring earthquakes involves fiber optic cables that carry internet data around the world?
Stanford geophysicist Biondo Biondi says that the waves of energy sent forth by an earthquake cause fiber optic cables to stretch and contract ever so slightly. Using precise mathematical algorithms, experts like Biondi can measure earthquake intensity, making every meter of fiber optic cable a potential seismograph and dramatically increasing the data experts can gather in a day. Biondi’s sensor arrays are so sensitive they can detect sinkholes, landslides and even the rumblings of failing urban infrastructure.
These new technologies – and the secrets they might reveal – are only starting to emerge, as Biondi tells listeners in this episode of Stanford Engineering’s The Future of Everything podcast with host Russ Altman. Listen and subscribe here.
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Anyone who’s ever made weekend plans based on the weather forecast knows that prediction – about anything – is a tough business. But predictive models are increasingly used to make life-changing decisions everywhere from health and finance to justice and national elections. As the consequences have grown, so has the weight of uncertainty, says today’s guest, mathematician and statistician Emmanuel Candès.
Candès knows this paradigm all too well. He is an expert in identifying flaws in today’s highly sophisticated computer models. He says the secret to better prediction rests in building models that don’t try to be right every time, but instead offer a high degree of certainty about things of real consequence.
In that regard, the old scientific maxim holds, he says. Correlation does not equal causation. The statistician’s job, therefore, is helping to sort through the noise to find the nuggets of truth in the things that really matter, as Candès tell listeners to this episode of Stanford Engineering’s The Future of Everything podcast with host Russ Altman. Listen and subscribe here.
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Electronics are everywhere these days, so much so that often we don't even register that we are using them. The use of electronics will only grow over time as engineers solve societal challenges through increased connectivity, faster computation, new high-tech gadgets, and energy sustainability. Against that backdrop, electrical engineers like Stanford’s Srabanti Chowdhury have been searching for new semiconductors that can expand the application space beyond the ubiquitous silicon. Among the options she’s exploring is an old familiar friend—diamond—and a few new ones, too, like gallium nitride.
The diamonds Chowdhury works with are a far cry from the sparkly gems a jeweler might prize. These diamonds are “doped” with other elements to achieve optimal electrical performance. Meanwhile, gallium nitride has shown promise in LEDs and lasers, as well as in cutting-edge radar systems—among other applications.
While these new semiconductors have raised hopes of scaling new heights where even silicon cannot reach, much work remains if they are ever to move from lab bench to laptops and myriad other electronic devices. The payoff, however, will be smaller, faster, more powerful, more energy efficient, and more versatile electronics, as Chowdhury tells listeners to this episode of Stanford Engineering’s The Future of Everything podcast with host Russ Altman. Listen and subscribe here.
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It now seems more certain than ever that the world will make the all-important transition to electric vehicles, but that shift raises important questions about global preparedness.
The world is going to need a lot of batteries to make it happen and engineers are rightly concerned about everything from the availability of raw materials to how many miles can I drive before I run out of juice?
Simona Onori is an electrical engineer by training and a professor of energy resources engineering as well as an expert in creating computer models of what that electric future will look like. For instance, she is developing mathematical battery management systems that assess the internal chemistry of a battery to predict how much life is left in it, how safe it is and, yes, how long until that next charge is needed.
Onori likens her analyses to “battery biopsies” that can help engineers and everyday drivers get more life out of their batteries. Don’t fret, our electric future is in good hands, Onori reassures listeners in this episode of Stanford Engineering’s The Future of Everything podcast with host Russ Altman. Listen and subscribe here.
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Engineer Irene Lo studies markets, but not traditional marketplaces based in cash.
Instead, she studies markets for goods/resources that place a high value on social goods like diversity, fairness and equity.
Thus, Lo came to help San Francisco create an algorithm to assign kids more fairly to public schools across geographic, social, racial and economic boundaries. As it turns out, math is just the first step. The most challenging part was getting families to trust in the system, begetting a multi-year community engagement effort.
Lo is now turning her attention to other markets with social impact, like her work on the system that places medical students in residency programs across the country or one trying to make the palm oil supply chain fairer for farmers.
Listen in as Irene Lo explains the changing face of markets to host Russ Altman in this episode of Stanford Engineering’s The Future of Everything podcast. Listen and subscribe here.
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Oft-heralded 3-dimensional printers can build objects ranging from simple spoons to advanced running shoes.
While those objects are usually made very slowly, the latest printing technologies portend a new era of 3D printing in real-time for use in health care.
The possibilities are endless, says Joseph DeSimone, who is an expert in translational medicine – the field of transferring promising technological breakthroughs into real-world products. He says printers he developed have led to the first FDA-approved 3D printed dentures, ultra-thin microneedles that make it easier and more effective to deliver vaccines, and even implantable chemotherapy devices that kill tumors while reducing side effects for patients.
From dentistry to oncology, the promise of 3D printed medical devices is only just emerging, as DeSimone explains in this episode of Stanford Engineering’s The Future of Everything podcast with host Russ Altman. Listen and subscribe here.
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Tina Hernandez-Boussard is an expert in biomedical informatics who says a new era of understanding the real outcomes of our health care systems is on the horizon thanks to big data, artificial intelligence, and the growing availability of electronic health data. She says that the combination of these tools and data holds the promise of providing never-before-possible insights into whether health procedures truly improve patient quality of life and for which populations.
With these tools, she says, her field can peer into the “real-world” details hidden in the medical records, even going so far as to use natural language processing to analyze the freeform notes and emails to and from the provider. The examples are virtually limitless: matching health records against data from wearable devices to know when a knee patient is not getting enough physical exercise, cross-referencing prescriptions to learn whether a patient might be susceptible to adverse drug combinations, or even revealing undisclosed medical events such as past mild heart attacks.
It’s all there in the data, waiting for us to explore, as Tina Hernandez-Boussard tells bioengineer and host Russ Altman in this episode of Stanford Engineering’s The Future of Everything podcast. Listen and subscribe here.
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Nate Persily is a professor at Stanford Law School and an expert in election law.
He sees the most recent presidential election as a fundamental change in the way Americans vote. For the first time ever, the majority of voters cast their ballot by mail, rather than at a polling place. It “was an earthquake,” Persily says, speaking metaphorically about the 2020 election’s profound implications for future elections.
But not all agree it was a success. Republicans and Democrats are further apart than ever in their beliefs as to whether the recent presidential election was free and fair. Addressing polarization in beliefs regarding the fairness of the election will be very difficult. Until leaders come together in a bipartisan fashion to affirm the legitimacy of an election winner, reform will not be able to do much to address this underlying problem.
Failing that, we need to bolster the institutional position of all nonpartisan election administrators who are placing the public interest over party, as Persily tells host Russ Altman in this episode of Stanford Engineering’s The Future of Everything podcast. Listen and subscribe here.
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Whether by injury or disease, paralysis has afflicted humans through the ages.
Only now have science and technology converged to a point where scientists can contemplate a day when computers and the human mind can communicate directly to restore a certain degree of independence to people with debilitating spinal injuries and other physical conditions that impede or prevent movement.
Electrical engineer Krishna Shenoy is an expert in such brain-computer interfaces and has built machinery by which humans can control the movement of computer cursors with mere thoughts. Using small chips implanted in the brain itself, Shenoy “listens intelligently” to the electrical “chatter” among a hundred or so of the 100 billion neurons of the brain’s motor cortex and then translates the meaning into language a computer can understand. In this way, Shenoy has allowed a man with paralysis to “write” his thoughts at some 17 words per minute, a record more than double the previous standard.
Work remains, but the future of brain-computer interfaces is on the horizon as Krishna Shenoy tells us on this episode of Stanford Engineering’s The Future of Everything podcast with host Russ Altman. Listen and subscribe here.
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Sam Wineburg, a research psychologist at Stanford’s Graduate School of Education, recently conducted a nationwide study of the fact-checking skills of thousands of American high school students.
He didn’t go about it with a survey asking the kids to self-report their own behaviors. Instead, he devised a live experiment that charged the 3,000 students in the study to determine the veracity of a now-famous bit of fake news from the 2016 election. Wineburg and team were then able to follow along as students tried to find the true source of the video, which had been produced in Russia as part of a disinformation campaign.
In the end, just three students – one-tenth of one percent – arrived at the right answer. Rather than blame the kids, however, Wineburg says fault lies with the tools they are using, which have changed so dramatically in speed and scope that their fact-checking skills have had trouble keeping up.
All is not lost, he promises, but fixing the problem will require changing not just what information students consume, but the way they think about it, as Wineburg tells host Russ Altman in this episode of Stanford Engineering’s The Future of Everything podcast. Listen and subscribe here.
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Many have now become familiar with the term herd immunity, an idea few outside the infectious disease community knew just a few short months ago.
It’s an elusive concept to comprehend, and harder still to achieve, but Stanford epidemiologist Dr. Julie Parsonnet says it’s important to understand just what herd immunity does – and doesn’t – mean for today’s pandemic.
Broadly speaking, herd immunity is reached when enough people have either recovered from or have been fully vaccinated against an infectious disease and there are no longer enough susceptible people in the entire population (the herd) to sustain transmission. Herd immunity doesn’t mean there won’t be cases, only that when they crop up, they will then die out. Parsonnet says this term is meant for epidemiologists to model what things will and won’t work; herd immunity is never really a public health goal in and of itself. Parsonnet also says that, in models, there are many obstacles to attaining herd immunity, including vaccine hesitancy, especially in people most likely to transmit the infection (young adults); imperfect effectiveness of the vaccine; movement of people; carriage of the virus in non-human hosts; and the continuous appearance of variants.
Importantly, Parsonnet says, herd immunity is unlikely to be permanent. Society must remain vigilant, continuously limiting the number of susceptible people to keep the herd safe. She therefore counsels deemphasizing the concept and instead bringing the diversity of communities into the conversation to achieve high levels of protection in the U.S. and globally. She says every vaccine given is a step in the direction of “normal.”
In this episode of Stanford Engineering’s The Future of Everything podcast, host Russ Altman and Parsonnet also talk about her other research showing that average human body temperature is on the decline worldwide. Listen and subscribe here.
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Imagine typing words into a text editor and watching on a nearby television as a well-known celebrity speaks those words within seconds.
Computer graphics expert Maneesh Agrawala has imagined it and has created a video editing software that can do it, too. Given enough raw video, Agrawala’s application can produce polished, photorealistic video of any person saying virtually anything he types in.
While he acknowledges concerns about manufactured “deep fakes” of political leaders or others speaking words they never said, Agrawala chooses to focus on the profound upside. He envisions the television and film industries using his technology to forgo costly reshoots, for instance, or medical professionals helping people with damaged vocal cords regain their natural voices.
In the end, while ethical and legal frameworks are being developed to address deep fakes with all due seriousness they deserve, Agrawala says the benefits of the technology, and his passion for it, gets at the most basic of all human endeavors — better communication. Agrawala tells host Russ Altman all about it in this episode of Stanford Engineering’s The Future of Everything podcast. Listen and subscribe here.
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Biology is not typically considered a mathematically intensive science, says Noah Rosenberg, an expert in genetics, but all that is about to change.
Math, statistics, data and computer science have coalesced into a growing interest in applying quantitative skills to this traditionally qualitative field.
The result will be better and more accurate models of life, ranging from genetic inheritance to the entirety of human society. The yield will be a greater understanding and, quite possibly, revolutionary interventions into disease, ecology, demography, and even evolution itself. The tools of mathematical biology have never been more apparent, Rosenberg says, as mathematical models of the spread of infectious disease have been central around the world in the response to the COVID-19 pandemic.
With applications in health care, forensic genetics, and human evolution, the tools of mathematical biology are proving more relevant and more needed than ever, as Noah Rosenberg tells Stanford Engineering’s The Future of Everything podcast, with host bioengineer Russ Altman.
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Slowly but surely, the highly centralized, industrial electric grid that supplies power to the vast majority of American homes and business is changing.
Our existing system of massive power plants and huge networks of high-voltage wires is giving way to a much leaner, decentralized system of small-scale power generation on a more personal, neighborhood- or residence-level scale.
In other words, we’re going from an “infrastructure-centric” model to a “human-centric” one, says grid expert Ram Rajagopal. He says that the new grid will be much smarter, more inclusive and better able to adapt to the individual needs of users, helping them to schedule power-intensive tasks, like laundry or charging of electrical vehicles, to off-peak times of the day.
Before that day can come, however, Rajagopal says we’ll need new sorts of sensors and algorithms that will provide much more data about who, how and when people are using power, as he tells listeners to Stanford Engineering’s The Future of Everything podcast with host bioengineer Russ Altman. Listen and subscribe here.
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The world’s once linear — take it, treat it, use it, dispose it — model of freshwater usage is changing fast.
Despite two-thirds of Earth being covered in water, just 2.5% of it is fit for human consumption. And that share is dwindling by the day, says civil and environmental engineer and expert in water treatment and distribution systems Meagan Mauter. With a rapidly increasing population and climate change disrupting traditional weather and distribution patterns, access to freshwater is headed for, if not already amid, a worldwide crisis.
Avoiding calamity will require industrial scale desalination and other technologies that can separate precious freshwater from other less desirable substances in the water, but also a shift to a more circular model where every drop of water is treasured and reused.
Doing that, Mauter says, will demand doing away with not only inefficient practices but also the very notion of “waste” water, as she tells us in this episode of Stanford Engineering’s The Future of Everything podcast with host bioengineer Russ Altman. Listen and subscribe here.
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Humankind has long harnessed the wind to its advantage. From ancient mariners to millers grinding grist, the wind has been an ally for millennia, but only now do engineers have at their disposal advanced computer simulations to better understand the details of wind flow and to optimize designs.
Catherine Gorle is one such engineer who has made it her career to design better built environments able to improve walkability, temper extreme winds, shuffle air pollution far away and dissipate heat islands arising from so much sun-beaten concrete in our cities.
Once, that work had to take place in wind tunnels, but now transpires through advanced computer simulations that both speed her work and add critical detail to her understanding of the close interrelationship between wind and human society. Join us as Catherine Gorle tells host bioengineer Russ Altman all about the future of wind on this episode Stanford Engineering’s The Future of Everything podcast. Listen and subscribe here.
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As the world moves to more efficient and cleaner energy solutions, there is a growing divide between the clean-energy haves and have-nots, says Anthony Kinslow II, PhD, a lecturer in civil and environmental engineering. Too often the divide falls along racial and socio-economic lines, as minority and low-income communities do not benefit from clean energy to the degree that whiter and wealthier communities do.
The problem is founded in history and in the federal government’s askew system of financing and incentivizing clean and renewable energy systems. The money flows to certain communities and not to others, Dr. Kinslow says.
Fixing the problem won’t be easy, but solutions might begin with energy audits of minority and low-income homes and communities to better understand where the gaps are and how wide they have become, as well as greater diversity in federal appointments to energy and finance positions in government. With audits will come opportunities for low-interest loans and other financing to transition to greater efficiency, as Dr. Kinslow tells host Russ Altman on this episode of Stanford Engineering’s The Future of Everything podcast. Listen and subscribe here.
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Electrical engineer Kunle Olukotun has built a career out of building computer chips for the world. These days his attention is focused on new-age chips that will broaden the reach of artificial intelligence to new uses and new audiences—making AI more democratic.
The future will be dominated by AI, he says, and one key to that change rests in the hardware that makes it all possible—faster, smaller, more powerful computer chips. He imagines a world filled with highly efficient, specialized chips built for specific purposes, versus the relatively inefficient but broadly applicable chips of today.
Making that vision a reality will require hardware that focuses less on computation and more on streamlining the movement of data back and forth, a function that now claims 90% of computing power, as Olukotun tells host Russ Altman on this episode of Stanford Engineering’s The Future of Everything podcast. Listen and subscribe here.
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Julie Owono is a lawyer, executive director of Internet Sans Frontières and a fellow at the Stanford Center on Philanthropy and Civil Society. She wants the world to know that the internet is the not the same for every person, everywhere. Born in Cameroon, and having grown up in Russia, she understands firsthand that every nation sets and maintains its own content standards.
Owono has dedicated her career to establishing and securing basic digital rights, but also to developing standards by which social media giants—like Facebook, Google and Twitter—can distinguish hate speech from free speech. In many ways, Owono says, the global internet is a local endeavor.
Owono tells Stanford Engineering’s The Future of Everything podcast and host Russ Altman that this dynamic means local voices will be critical to fairly determining standards of speech and, by extension, to charting the future of the global internet. You can listen and subscribe here.
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Words are a window into human psychology, society, and culture, says Stanford linguist and computer scientist Dan Jurafsky. The words we choose reveal what we think, how we feel and even what our biases are. And, more and more, computers are being trained to comprehend those words, a fact easily apparent in voice-recognition apps like Siri, Alexa and Cortana.
Jurafsky says that his field, known as natural language processing (NLP), is now in the midst of a shift from simply trying to understanding the literal meaning of words to digging into the human emotions and the social meanings behind those words. In the social sciences, our great digital dialog is being analyzed to tell us who we are. And, by looking at the language of the past, language analysis promises to reveal who we once were. Meanwhile, in fields such as medicine, NLP is being used to help doctors diagnose mental illnesses, like schizophrenia, and to measure how those patients respond to treatment.
The next generation of NLP-driven applications must not only hear what we say, but understand and even reply in more human ways, as Dan Jurafsky explains in his own words to host Russ Altman in this episode of Stanford Engineering’s The Future of Everything podcast. Listen and subscribe here.
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When Riitta Katila looks at old photos or movies about the space program of the 1960s, she sees one common thread among the people depicted there — homogeneity. The engineers and technicians who first put humans on the moon were, almost without exception, white and male.
While society has come a long way in the decades since, Katila, who is an expert in technology strategy and organizational learning, says there’s still a long way to go. She notes that companies need innovation not only to reach the top, but to stay there. And now more than ever, innovative companies should be hiring, promoting, and listening to a broader range of voices.
The good news is that innovation can be taught. It’s like a recipe, says Katila, who encourages entrepreneurs — even those who have already built successful companies — to seek out mentors who can help them navigate the future. More important, those same entrepreneurs need to proactively identify mentors who can empower their team members to think like innovators too, as Katila tells Stanford Engineering’s The Future of Everything podcast, hosted by bioengineer Russ Altman. You can listen and subscribe here.
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As the silicon chip embarks upon its second half-century of dominance in computing and communications, the field is confronting fundamental boundaries that threaten to halt that progress in its tracks.
The transistor cannot get much better or smaller and the copper wires that connect them cannot carry much more data than they do now. But, says electrical engineer David Miller, an alternative technology that uses light instead of electricity has the potential to transmit vastly more data than present technologies. It’s known as photonics.
“A silicon chip these days looks like six Manhattan grids stacked atop one another,” Miller says of the challenge facing today’s technology. Photonics holds the promise of more powerful computing by beaming tiny packets of photons through light-bearing conduits that carry 100,000 times more data than today’s comparable wires, and it can do it using far less energy, too.
Before that day can arrive, however, Miller says photonic components need to become much smaller and less expensive to compete with the sheer scale advantages silicon enjoys, and that will require investment. But, for once, a way forward is there for the asking, as Miller tells bioengineer Russ Altman, host of Stanford Engineering’s The Future of Everything podcast. Listen and subscribe here.
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In recent decades, medical and biological science have advanced by leaps and bounds using technologies that allow us to peer into the brain in myriad new and insightful ways — MRI, CT, PET, EEG, etc.
However, Stanford electrical engineer Jin Hyung Lee says, we are still missing critical insights that could lead to a cure for currently incurable brain diseases like Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, epilepsy and others.
Even in diagnosis, we still rely on “diagnosis of exclusion,” where tests are used to exclude other conditions that are relatively easy to identify, such as a tumor. However, there is still no way, for instance, to directly test why one’s memory is failing or why motor functions decline and lead to tremors.
Lee’s approach is to directly identify the brain’s underlying algorithms and to enable quantitative diagnosis of its malfunctions in order to design approaches to cure brain diseases. She employs optogenetic MRI and various measurement tools at different scales, which she then uses to reconstruct the algorithms of brain function using artificial intelligence. Lee defines healthy circuitry and function, which in turn allows identification of the characteristics of dysfunction. Her approach has put Lee on the cusp of new understanding and new treatments for epilepsy, for instance, as she tells Stanford Engineering’s The Future of Everything podcast, hosted by bioengineer Russ Altman. Listen and subscribe here.
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Stanford’s Mark Schnitzer says several of the more exciting recent advances in his field of applied physics have come through developing new imaging technologies that peer into the brain as never before. What’s more, Schnitzer says the insights gained have put the world closer to solving long-vexing brain diseases, like Parkinson’s and others, where the circuitry of the brain seems to be malfunctioning.
Schnitzer says that these new imaging methods are helping medical science discern the specific functions of various cells that make up the brain’s complex communications systems. No longer is the brain seen as a monolith of neurons, but instead as a complex organ made up of numerous cell types, each with its own role to play in proper function.
Best of all, medical science is starting to move toward manipulating these cells with new drugs and other treatments that could lead to a cure or effective treatment for previously untreatable diseases and chronic pain, as Schnitzer tells Stanford Engineering’s The Future of Everything podcast and host, bioengineer Russ Altman. Listen and subscribe here.
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The old maxim holds that a lie spreads much faster than a truth, but it has taken the global reach and lightning speed of social media to lay it bare before the world.
One problem of the age of misinformation, says sociologist and former journalist Mutale Nkonde, a fellow at the Stanford Center on Philanthropy and Civil Society (PACS), is that the artificial intelligence algorithms used to profile users and disseminate information to them, whether truthful or not, are inherently biased against minority groups, because they are underrepresented in the historical data upon which the algorithms are based.
Now, Nkonde and others like her are holding social media’s feet to the fire, so to speak, to get them to root out bias from their algorithms. One approach she promotes is the Algorithmic Accountability Act, which would authorize the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) to create regulations requiring companies under its jurisdiction to assess the impact of new and existing automated decision systems. Another approach she has favored is called “Strategic Silence,” which seeks to deny untruthful users and groups the media exposure that amplifies their false claims and helps them attract new adherents.
Nkonde explores the hidden biases of the age of misinformation in this episode of Stanford Engineering’s The Future of Everything podcast, hosted by bioengineer Russ Altman. Listen and subscribe here.
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Stanford’s Karen Liu is a computer scientist who works in robotics. She hopes that someday machines might take on caregiving roles, like helping medical patients get dressed and undressed each day. That quest has provided her a special insight into just what a monumental challenge such seemingly simple tasks are. After all, she points out, it takes a human child several years to learn to dress themselves — imagine what it takes to teach a robot to help a person who is frail or physically compromised?
Liu is among a growing coterie of scientists who are promoting “physics-based simulations” that are speeding up the learning process for robots. That is, rather than building actual robots and refining them as they go, she’s using computer simulations to improve how robots sense the physical world around them and to make intelligent decisions under changes and perturbations in the real world, like those involved in tasks like getting dressed for the day.
To do that, a robot must understand the physical characteristics of human flesh and bone as well as the movements and underlying human intention to be able to comprehend when a garment is or is not going on as expected.
The stakes are high. The downside consequence could be physical harm to the patient, as Liu tells Stanford Engineering’s The Future of Everything podcast hosted by bioengineer Russ Altman. Listen and subscribe here.
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It has been said that batteries hold the key to a sustainable future.
But so-called “clean energy” does not come without environmental costs. For instance, says Stanford geoscientist Jef Caers, the batteries in a single Tesla contain some 4.5 kilograms — about 10 pounds — of cobalt, in addition to plenty of lithium and nickel, too.
With some 300 million cars in the U.S. right now, a full transition to electric vehicles would be impossible without new resources. But, finding new deposits and getting them safely out of the ground is an expensive and environmentally fraught proposition. Half of all cobalt reserves and most of current production come from just one unregulated country, Congo. To close the gap using environmentally and labor-regulated resources, Caers says we need AI to rapidly explore countries with stricter safeguards.
To help, geoscientists like Caers are turning to data science and artificial intelligence to quickly identify new resources, to get the most out of those we already know about and to improve refining processes to leave as small an environmental footprint as possible. Their success, he says, could be key to America’s environmental future and its long-term energy independence. Learn more on this episode of Stanford Engineering’s The Future of Everything podcast, hosted by Stanford bioengineer Russ Altman. Listen and subscribe here.
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Evan Reed and a team of scientists recently identified a promising solid material that could replace highly flammable liquid electrolytes in lithium-ion batteries.
The trick? Reed didn’t discover the material the old-fashioned way, using trial and error to narrow down a list of candidates. Instead, he used computers to do the legwork for him. He says that until recent advances in computer science, the seemingly never-ending search for new materials was more like a quest for unicorns. Breakthrough materials must possess that rarest of combinations: precise physical characteristics with few if any downsides.
It's exacting and time-consuming work, Reed says, but computers are accelerating the pace of discovery. He now believes the future of materials science lies at the heart of a computer algorithm, as he tells listeners in this episode of Stanford Engineering’s The Future of Everything podcast. Listen and subscribe here.
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Renée DiResta is research manager at the Stanford Internet Observatory, a multi-disciplinary center that focuses on abuses of information technology, particularly social media. She’s an expert in the role technology platforms and their “curatorial” algorithms play in the rise and spread of misinformation and disinformation.
Fresh off an intense period keeping watch over the 2020 U.S. elections for disinformation as part of the Election Integrity Partnership, DiResta says the campaign became one of the most closely observed political dramas in American history.
She says that whether it comes from the top down or the bottom up, bad information can be spotted and beaten, but overcoming falsehoods in the future will require vigilance and a commitment to the truth. She explains more on Stanford Engineering’s The Future of Everything podcast, with host Russ Altman. Listen and subscribe here.
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Once the bathwater is drained, the toilet flushed or the laundry done, few give a passing thought to the wastewater that leaves our homes. But chemical engineer Will Tarpeh might change your mind, if you give him the chance.
Tarpeh says that that water is a literal mine of valuable chemicals. Chemicals like nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium make great fertilizers. Lithium can be used in lithium ion batteries. And even pharmaceuticals could be recovered and reused. In fact, Tarpeh points out that if we could harvest all the world’s urine, it could supplant 20–30% of our nitrogen needs — and in some places can be cheaper to do than existing production and transport methods.
Waste, Tarpeh says, is just a state of mind. His “pipe dream,” he says, is to develop next-generation treatment plants on the neighborhood or even household scale able to extract the valuable chemicals in water most would rather send down the drain. Tarpeh tells bioengineer Russ Altman all about it in this the latest episode of Stanford Engineering’s The Future of Everything podcast. Listen and subscribe here.
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Bioengineer Kwabena Boahen builds highly efficient “neuromorphic” supercomputers modeled on the human brain. He hopes they will drive the artificial intelligence future. He uses an analogy when describing the goal of his work: “It’s LA versus Manhattan.”
Boahen means structurally. Today’s chips are two dimensional — flat and spread out, like LA. Tomorrow’s chips will be stacked, like the floors of the skyscrapers on a New York block. In this analogy, the humans are the electrons shuffling data back and forth. The shorter distances they have to travel to work, and the more they can accomplish before traveling home, will drive profound leaps in energy efficiency. The consequences could not be greater. Boahen says that the lean chips he imagines could prove tens-of-thousands times less expensive to operate than today’s power hogs.
To learn how it works, listen in as Kwabena Boahen describes neuromorphic computing to fellow bioengineer Russ Altman in the latest episode of Stanford Engineering’s The Future of Everything podcast. Listen and subscribe here.
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In a world where a drug takes years and billions of dollars to develop, just one in 20 candidates makes it to market. Daphne Koller is betting artificial intelligence can change that dynamic.
Twenty years ago, when she first started using artificial intelligence to venture into medicine and biology, Koller was stymied by a lack of data. There wasn’t enough of it and what there was, was often not well suited to the problems she wanted to solve. Fast-forward 20 years, however, and both the quantity and quality of data, and the tools for studying biology, have advanced so dramatically that the adjunct professor of computer science at Stanford founded a company, insitro, that uses machine learning (a subspecialty of artificial intelligence) to explore the causes and potential treatments for some very serious diseases.
She tells bioengineer Russ Altman about the lessons she’s learned along the way, and the challenges and rewards of getting diverse teams of experts from many fields to speak the same language. It’s all on this episode of Stanford Engineering’s The Future of Everything podcast. Listen here, and subscribe to the podcast here.
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When Stanford bioengineer Markus Covert first decided to create a computer model able to simulate the behavior of a single cell, he was held back by more than an incomplete understanding of how a cell functions, but also by a lack of computer power. His early models would take more than 10 hours to churn through a single simulation and that was when using a supercomputer capable of billions of calculations per second.
Nevertheless, in his quest toward what had been deemed "a grand challenge of the 21st century," Covert pressed on and eventually published a paper announcing his success in building a model of just one microbe: E. coli, a popular subject in biological research. The model would allow researchers to run experiments not on living bacteria in a lab, but on a simulated cell on a computer.
After all was said and done, however, the greatest takeaway for Covert was that a cell is a very, very complex thing. There were fits and starts and at least one transcendent conceptual leap — which Covert has dubbed “deep curation” — needed to make it all happen, but he found a way. As Covert points out, no model is perfect, but some are useful. And that is how usefulness, not perfection, became the goal of his work, as he tells fellow bioengineer Russ Altman in this episode of Stanford Engineering’s The Future of Everything podcast. Listen here, and subscribe to the podcast here.
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COVID-19 is changing how many scientists, like Stanford sleep expert Rafael Pelayo, MD, view their field. First off, the shift to telemedicine is providing Pelayo, author of the new book How to Sleep, an unprecedented glimpse into the sleep environments of his patients. “I’m making house calls for the first time,” he says.
Second, surprisingly, some of his patients, unburdened of long commutes, say they are sleeping and dreaming more than ever. But, others are not so fortunate, reporting increased trouble sleeping and more nightmares. Pandemic-induced or not, the consequences of lost sleep are universal and readily apparent in the country’s diminished productivity, in the rates of stroke, heart attacks and car accidents, and in the pervasive irritable mood many can’t seem to escape.
To get a better night’s sleep, Pelayo says, put the screens away, consider that continuous positive airway pressure (CPAP) machine if you snore (it could save your life, he says), and find a way to create a personal sleep environment even if you share a bed with someone you love.
Join us as Rafael Pelayo and our host, Stanford bioengineer, Russ Altman, talk sleep on this episode of Stanford Engineering’s The Future of Everything podcast. Listen here, and subscribe to the podcast here.
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Marietje Schaake was a Member of the European Parliament from 2009 to 2019 and now serves as the international policy director at Stanford University’s Cyber Policy Center and international policy fellow at Stanford’s Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence. As she has watched democracy evolve in the age of instantaneous global communication and hyperconnected social media, she has grown concerned about the resilience of democracy as technology disrupts the status quo.
While the technologies—and the often-unregulated companies who created them—claim to be well-meaning, she says democracy is under attack from propagandists and bad actors using these transformative tools in troubling ways. The business models based on surveillance and advertising were never designed with preserving democracy in mind. We now find ourselves at a decisive moment for the future of elective government, she says. America and other democratic nations can expose the meddlers and their techniques or succumb to their approaches. The solutions, she says, begin at the grassroots and with the tech companies. We need real-time and independent monitoring and research to better expose manipulations and to allow for evidence-based policy making.
Join Stanford Engineering’s The Future of Everything podcast for an insider’s sobering look at democracy in the digital age. Listen here, and subscribe here to the podcast.
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Andrew Huberman is a Stanford neurobiologist and ophthalmologist keenly interested in the biology of stress and ways to manage stress.
He’s developed and tested a number of stress-relieving techniques — from specific patterns of breathing to visual tools — and uses virtual reality to help humans control their stress in adaptive ways. He is also testing how people can access better sleep using stress-relief tools. Much of this work is done in collaboration with David Spiegel, MD, associate chair of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Stanford Medicine.
Huberman studies how the nervous system takes in and processes information and uses it to drive reflexive and deliberate behavior. In that regard, humans are largely visual animals. The vast majority of the information we collect about the world comes through the eyes, and those circuits are tied directly to our most primordial “fight or flight” systems. Light, and how our brains process light energy, is closely tied to our stress mechanisms. Our most immediate reaction to stress, he notes, is for our pupils to dilate, which changes how we see the world — literally — in a way that allows us to better respond to threats. Breathing and vision can also be used to control stress.
Huberman tells us all about it in this episode of Stanford Engineering’s The Future of Everything podcast, hosted by Stanford bioengineer Russ Altman. Listen and subscribe to the podcast here.
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Manu Prakash was in France when COVID-19 took hold throughout the world. There, the Stanford bioengineer, famous for “frugal science” like his $1 field microscope made of paper, witnessed the challenges a relatively well-resourced nation experienced holding back the disease. His head was soon filled with visions of the nightmare awaiting developing nations, given that a COVID-19 test in developing countries can cost as much as $400.
In a flurry, Prakash jotted down an engineering manifesto of sorts for a worldwide revolution in open-source, inexpensive healthcare solutions. As he saw it, here were three areas of greatest need — diagnostics, protective equipment and critical care.
From his lab at Stanford, Prakash, his students and partners in academia, industry and government around the world led a frenzy of invention that yielded an array of transformative products in just months. There was the electricity-free COVID-19 test based on a simple children’s flashlight. There was Pneumask, a full-face, reusable N95 protective equipment for caregivers inspired by the mask Prakash uses in one of his favorite pastimes, snorkeling. And then there was the “N95 factory in a box” Prakash and his lab developed using cotton candy machines to spin N95-quality filtration materials from waste plastics. Finally, to tackle one of the most technical challenges of all, he built a global consortium with manufacturing partners in India, Kenya and Nepal to design an open-source full-feature ICU ventilator, known as Pufferfish (Prakash has a penchant for naming products after marine life) — bringing a low-cost critical care solution to the world.
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With the emergence of touchscreen smartphones, tablets and watches, so much of our lives is spent on our devices that in many ways we are what appears on screen. This “mediatization,” as Byron Reeves, a professor of communication at Stanford University, puts it, sparked a remarkable and unprecedented study of the way we live today.
In a series of field studies, Reeves has recorded screen time of his subjects one frame every five seconds for days on end — with promises of absolute privacy, of course. He then uses artificial intelligence to decipher it all — words and images are recorded and analyzed. The portraits that emerge play out like cinema, revealing never-before-imagined insights into how people live in the screen-time world.
Reeves says the pervading sense that everyone is multitasking and that attention spans are narrowing is not just a hunch, but demonstrable in the data. Our screens are often filled with radically different content side-by-side and each bit gets consumed in rapid-fire bursts of focus, often no more than 10 to 20 seconds each.
Join us for a fascinating look at our screen-time culture on the latest episode of Stanford Engineering’s The Future of Everything podcast. Listen here.
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There was a time when all great cities were built near water. Whether for agriculture, aesthetics, energy or just plain drinking, water was a life-affirming, life-sustaining resource. But with the advent of advanced engineering in the form of dams, pumps and pipes, cities like Los Angeles thrived in places with very little fresh water. Now, global climate change is leaving many of those cities in danger of running dry.
But there is hope on the horizon, says Newsha Ajami, senior research engineer at the Woods Institute for the Environment and director of urban water policy with Stanford University’s Water in the West program. Just as engineering made it possible to store and pump fresh water great distances, the field is developing new ways to use less water, to store more of this prized resource, to repurpose used “gray water” for non-potable uses like agriculture, and to inform inventive policy approaches to conserve fresh water.
It won’t be easy, she says. California alone has over 7,000 independent water agencies that must be wrangled into a cohesive team to make it real, but recent progress has people believing once again that our parched cities can be saved. It’s all here on this episode of Stanford Engineering’s The Future of Everything podcast. Listen here.
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In recent years, biologists have learned that the vaginal microbiome — the make-up of the bacteria in the vagina — during pregnancy may be the best predictor of pre-term birth. It is a valuable finding that could reshape obstetrics. What is perhaps more revelatory about this emerging knowledge is that biologists have learned it from a surprising source: statistics.
Stanford’s Susan Holmes is one such statistician in the rapidly evolving science of using statistics to understand biology. Holmes is now turning her attention to improving our understanding of the remarkable human immune system to help fight cancer and other deadly diseases. She says that the statistician’s greatest contribution to biology may not necessarily reside in analyzing the myriad numbers and data points available these days, but rather in divining and explaining which patterns are replicable and which are not.
Join bioengineering Professor Russ Altman for the latest episode of Stanford Engineering’s The Future of Everything podcast to discuss the fascinating and fast-evolving field of statistical biology with a leading proponent of the science, Susan Holmes. Listen here.
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Mechanical engineer Sheri Sheppard got her start in engineering working on the Corvette for General Motors and later worked for both Ford and Chrysler.
Back then, she was among a handful of women engineers in the auto industry, where she learned firsthand the risks a monolithic culture presents.
Today, Sheppard is a professor at Stanford University, where she works to encourage diversity in the student body, in the classroom and in the curriculum. She says that engineering needs to reach beyond the traditional disciplines to tap into sociology, history, ethics, psychology and even philosophy to help engineers explore the “peopleness” in the challenges they are trying to solve.
In that pursuit, she encourages women and minorities eager to transform their field to become what her colleague Deb Meyerson has dubbed “tempered radicals” — leaders who can rock the boat while remaining in the boat. The result, Sheppard tells Stanford Engineering’s The Future of Everything podcast, is more empathetic engineering that benefits everyone in society.
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We’re all familiar with those algorithms on our favorite e-commerce and streaming services that recommend purchases, books or movies based on what “others like you” have enjoyed. In the industry, they are known as “recommender engines.”
Medical doctor Jonathan Chen is an assistant professor of medicine at Stanford and an expert in bioinformatics who wondered if the medical profession might benefit from similar artificial intelligence. He now creates recommender engines for doctors that comb real-world clinical data to help them make key decisions based on steps other doctors have taken with similar patients, empowering individuals with the collective experience of the many.
Chen tells Stanford Engineering’s The Future of Everything podcast that such programs will soon be commonplace in exam rooms, helping doctors become better at what they already do and making medical practice a more consistent, universal experience for everyone.
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Artificial intelligence can help us design safety-critical systems for aircraft and other vehicles that are more robust to the many sources of uncertainty in the real world, says aerospace professor Mykel Kochenderfer.
Building systems that meet the exceptionally high level of safety expected of commercial air transport is challenging, but Kochenderfer says that the key is in modeling the likelihood of the full spectrum of outcomes and planning accordingly. Validating the safety of these systems is also difficult, often requiring billions of simulations. He tells Stanford Engineering’s The Future of Everything how AI, empowered by algorithms such as “dynamic programming,” can make autonomous systems safer.
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With a degree in photography with a concentration in mathematics and boasting high-profile jobs at two of the most influential visual outlets in the last century, National Geographic and Instagram, Pamela Chen knows a bit about the state of modern photography and the algorithms that shape popular tastes.
Now, as the Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence and John S. Knight Journalism (HAI-JSK) Fellow at Stanford, she studies how artificial intelligence is shaping the role of photography in society: particularly the rise of memes, which she refers to as “packets of culture.” Chen says mathematics is redefining photography as much as artistic vision, altering both consumer tastes and the creative eye of photographers who want to become – or remain – relevant in a rapidly changing world.
Chen joins The Future of Everything host Russ Altman to discuss why artificial intelligence’s influence on photography is only just in its infancy and why lovers of photography still have power to shape AI as much as it shapes us. [Listen here.]
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Stanford engineering alumnus Michael O’Sullivan, now at the University of Auckland, likes to say his business is the “science of decision-making,” and that expertise paid off handsomely in his native New Zealand’s successful response to COVID-19.
O’Sullivan pivoted his knowledge of computer modeling, usually reserved for optimizing business processes, to help predict how quickly the disease might have spread through the island nation’s 5 million inhabitants, and to gauge various national response strategies. Based on expert models from a team of researchers that included O’Sullivan, New Zealand’s leadership took an aggressive approach and quelled the disease after just a month of lockdown.
O’Sullivan tells Stanford Engineering's The Future of Everything he is now turning his attention to highly detailed geographic models to better understand how COVID-19 could spread geographically if a future outbreak occurs. He is also putting his modeling to work to help analyze how response to the disease will impact the coming flu season and how the lockdown might have had negative effects on the treatment of other illnesses such as the early detection of cancer.
Michael O’Sullivan, MS ’97, PhD '01, would like to acknowledge the work of Kevin Ross, MS '01, PhD '04 (Precision Driven Health), and Pieta Brown (Orion Health), who have been instrumental in making a pipeline for the modeling work discussed in this podcast readily available to the New Zealand government.
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Megan Palmer, executive director of Biopolicy and Leadership Initiatives at Stanford, joins bioengineer Russ Altman for this episode of Stanford Engineering’s The Future of Everything podcast, to discuss how we can better prepare for future virus outbreaks and how the world could ultimately become a more secure, peaceful and prosperous place as a result of the lessons learned from COVID-19.
The key to that future, she says, will be better coordination and communication among world leaders in science, security and policy, who will be charged with foreseeing and preventing the next crisis. Likewise, it will take better cooperation between humankind and the natural world.
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As she tells it, the life of immunologist Catherine Blish has not changed all that much from what it was just a couple months ago.
Her lab still studies deadly infectious diseases, but instead of myriad killers like HIV, dengue fever, influenza and the like, her team is now focused solely on the SARS-CoV-2 virus that causes COVID-19. Only a select group of researchers in the world are qualified to work with such serious viruses, and fewer still are properly equipped with the protective gear and sophisticated ventilation systems needed to guarantee the safety in the lab.
Blish recently joined Russ Altman for this special COVID-19 edition of Stanford Engineering’s The Future of Everything podcast, to talk about the unique character of the virus, a few surprises she and others have unearthed in their research, and how once-competitive scientists around the world have united to find treatments and a vaccine that are critical to ending the pandemic for good.
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Seema Yasmin is a rarity in public health: a medical doctor who is also a journalist. As such, she’s seen a lot, from Ebola in West Africa to SARS and MERS, and now COVID-19, the most serious pandemic in a century.
Yasmin is currently director of research and education at the Stanford Center for Health Communication. From her years in the Epidemic Intelligence Service at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention — a group widely described as “the disease detectives” — and as a reporter for The Dallas Morning News, Yasmin says that the greatest impediment to halting an outbreak is the rapid spread of bad information, and even abject disinformation, which when abetted by social media can spread faster than the disease itself. To halt the pandemic, she says medical science and public health experts — and the journalists who cover them — must become better storytellers to get ahead of bad information and to “pre-bunk” false claims that lead to bad decision-making.
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Child psychiatrist Victor Carrion has dedicated his career to studying and helping people deal with trauma, especially kids. He says that it is understandable that everyone in the family is dealing with some degree of stress due to COVID-19, and that’s okay. The key is to recognize and acknowledge the stress and deal with it head on.
In this episode of Stanford Engineering's The Future of Everything with host, bioengineer Russ Altman, Carrion explains that stress manifests differently at different ages. What works for parent may not for child. He also discusses strategies for minimizing the risk of future post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Carrion counsels trying creative outlets like art and mindfulness techniques like yoga to find what works best to beat stress in these very stressful times. Listen here.
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When humans roamed as hunters and gatherers, the ability to retain calories likely determined who lived and who died in times of famine.
Today, that evolutionary advantage may make us prone to diabetes.
Join host Russ Altman, professor of bioengineering, and guest Sanjay Basu, a foremost expert in disease prevention, for a broad-ranging discussion of what works, what doesn’t and what new approaches—including an emphasis on community gardens and healthier diets—are on the horizon as society battles this deadly disease.
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Imagine being born with just half a heart.
Alison Marsden does, pretty much every day. She is an associate professor of pediatrics specializing in cardiology and also of bioengineering. She works with children born with such dire defects.
Fortunately for those kids, Marsden is also an expert in computational modeling of cardiovascular system and developer of SimVascular, software that helps surgeons simulate surgeries on the computer without risk to living patients. The software provides researchers and surgeons a way to propose novel surgical procedures and then simulate the resulting blood flow patterns in order to better understand the potential for a successful outcome.
Join host Russ Altman and Alison Marsden for an exploration of the many ways computer simulations are making heart surgery more effective and more personal than ever before.
You can listen to the Future of Everything on iTunes, Google Podcasts, SoundCloud, Spotify, Stitcher or via Stanford Engineering Magazine.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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The geostationary satellites used for communication and weather forecasting today are very large and very expensive — and most are still functioning perfectly when they must be disposed of because they run out of fuel. In their place, Stanford astronautics professor Simone D’Amico imagines an new era of smaller, less expensive, more efficient satellites that work in tandem to accomplish things their bigger brethren never imagined. He calls it distributed space systems — formations or “swarms” of small satellites.
Distributed space systems have breakthrough applications in earth and planetary science, astronomy, and astrophysics, as well as in-orbit servicing and space infrastructure. One task D’Amico foresees for what he calls “The Swarm” is a sort of janitorial role. These “garbage trucks in space” would remove, repair or refuel the thousands of unused satellites orbiting the earth. He says The Swarm could also improve our knowledge of the Sun and its interaction with the upper layers of the atmosphere, leading to better space weather predictions or achieve other important scientific objectives — like detecting life on other planets.
Before this space age can be made real, however, D’Amico and his compatriots in astronautics must figure out how to control these distributed space systems with the required precision in safety, and help develop a new set of “galactic” rules to make space traffic sustainable in the long run.
Join host Russ Altman and astronautics professor Simone D’Amico for a look at “The Swarm” — the changing face of satellites in space — on the latest episode of The Future of Everything.
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Russ Altman: Today on The Future of Everything, the future of detecting DNA in your blood.
Now DNA is the building block of life. It is a relatively simple long molecule or polymer made out of four components or DNA bases which have one letter abbreviations, the famous ATCG, which stand for their chemical names. It’s like a string of beans, beads, beads, but it is long. A human genome is made of about three billion DNA bases, divided into 23 chromosomes. So if you add up the beads in each chromosome, you get about three billion. You get a genome from mom and you get one from dad. So you have two copies of the genome, mostly the same but obviously not identical, or six billion total.
Now DNA contains the blueprints for how your cells live, how they grow, how they interact with other cells, and like a computer program, it allows the cell to perform simple computations to make decisions about when and where things happen.
If this goes wrong, you can get cancer. Mutations in the DNA cause the computations and decisions to go wrong.
Other things can happen too. In the last ten years, researchers have learned that they can detect DNA in the blood. Now we knew that the cells in the blood had DNA, so that was not surprising, but what was surprising is that there is sometimes DNA from other cells in the body, often cells that have died and just released their DNA into the bloodstream. This is sometimes called cell-free DNA because it is floating in the blood and it’s not really part of a cell. Although this may seem like it’s junk, it offers evidence of lots of other processes going on in the body, processes diverse as cancer, pregnancy, stress on organs, or even death and many others.
Dr. Stephen Quake is a professor of Bioengineering, Applied Physics and Physics and Stanford University. Steve pioneered the detection of DNA in the blood and some its first applications.
Steve, what drove your interest in detecting DNA, and what was the first demonstration that this would actually be useful?
Stephen Quake: Well, my interest came actually when I became a father. My wife and I were in to see the doctor, and the doctor says you guys should think about getting amniocentesis. And it was seemed like a theoretical question and something we have time to think about. We said yeah, okay, that sounds like the right thing if recommending it.
Russ Altman: And this is a super risky procedure in many ways. A needle goes into the uterus near the baby to extract fluids.
Stephen Quake: Big needle right in the mom’s belly, right next to the fetus to try to grab a few cells, and so to do genetic testing. And we said yeah, it sounds like a good idea, thinking we schedule another appointment for it. Next thing we knew, the guy was turning around with a giant needle, plunges it right into my wife’s belly,
Russ Altman: Whoa.
Stephen Quake: Yeah, whoa, exactly. That was our response. And it’s the response of many people who undergo that certain invasive testing. And not surprisingly, there’s risk associated with doing that testing. Sometimes, you lose the baby and other health problems that might happen.
Russ Altman: How far into the pregnancy were you?
Stephen Quake: That’s typically done, I don’t know, around 14 weeks, something like that, 15 weeks, somewhere around there. And so that sensitized me to holy cow, there’s a problem here that you’re asking a diagnostic question, and there’s a lot of risk associated with it. And so I began to think are there ways to ask these genetic questions and do diagnostics without adding risk? And I eventually stumbled upon this old scientific literature about this cell-free DNA that you were mentioning, which, as it turns out, was first discovered as a phenomenon in 1948.
Russ Altman: That’s before Watson and Crick even articulated the importance of DNA for genetics.
Stephen Quake: It’s before the structure, and it’s before people knew. It’s roughly contemporary people first realized that DNA was the molecule of inheritance.
Russ Altman: Right.
Stephen Quake: Oswald Avery just that same year was working that out. So it was blood chemistry to those guys who did it. But the field stayed alive, and it was mostly people doing cancer research. And eventually, it was figured out that when you’re pregnant, some of the DNA in your blood comes from the fetus, and that was worked out in the late 1970s. And –
Russ Altman: And so this is not a large amount, I’m guessing.
Stephen Quake: It’s not much, just a few percent of what’s there, so it’s a very challenging measurement problem and the decade-long search to try to figure out how to really use that to build a diagnostic that would allow you to understand the genetics of the baby without having to risk the baby’s life. And we saw that at Stanford, and it was through the work of a really terrific graduate student in my lab when the bioengineering department was young, Christina Fan. And that has now been the first real clinical application of cell-free DNA in diagnostics, and that’s how I got into it, to answer your question.
Russ Altman: So in that initial demonstration or in your first industrial translation, what are the things that we can actually detect from the DNA of a fetus in the mom’s blood?
Stephen Quake: Well, when we published the paper on this, started getting press inquiries. When is this gonna be available in the clinic? I said, I don’t know, decades, something like that.
Russ Altman: That’s usually the answer.
Stephen Quake: It takes a long time, right. It turns out people jumped on like you wouldn’t believe. Clinical trials were launched immediately. Within three years, the first real commercial diagnostic products had been launched, and now it’s four million women a year, something like that, get the test, and the use of amniocentesis has plummeted.
Russ Altman: And so now you do this as a screening before you make the decision about the amnio. Is that the general use of it?
Stephen Quake: That was the initial indication, and it’s very quickly moving to replacing amnio completely.
Russ Altman: Completely, yeah. And what kind of things can we diagnose in the fetus these days?
Stephen Quake: So the major genetic disorders you have for live births are things like Down syndrome; that’s number one. And it’s an aneuploidy is what it’s called technically, means the extra copy of a chromosome. And there’s a few other disorders, which are extra copies of chromosomes that are also detected with this approach.
Russ Altman: Awesome. So that has had big-time market impact, and it’s changing people’s lives. I think it’s on the street now. People know you can get this blood test instead of the amnio, so it didn’t stop there. Now you had this hammer, and it worked. You hit one nail. What was the next nail you guys turned your attention to?
Stephen Quake: Well, after we published that, word got around Stanford that I was interested in non-invasive diagnostics. And I got a call one day from Hannah Valantine, who’s a cardiologist –
Russ Altman: Great cardiologist.
Stephen Quake: Yep, and she says, well Steve, we got a similar problem in heart transplants. We give people a new heart, and after the operation, we then go biopsy that new heart and rip out pieces of the tissue to make sure it’s not being rejected by the body. And we’re doing that every couple of months. And so is there a blood test that could replace that? Same sort of problem, patients were having this painful, risky procedure, and there was a question of whether it could be replaced by a simple blood test. And so we thought about that a bit, and –
Russ Altman: The key opportunity here is that the DNA and the heart that belongs to the donor is not gonna match the DNA of the person who received the heart, and, like the baby and the mom, because those are different DNAs, you have a chance of picking it up.
Stephen Quake: Yeah, the key there is that the DNA is different. A little different with the baby and the mom because we don’t use differences in their DNA. But in the case of the transplant, absolutely. The whole principle is based on there being different genomes of every cell in the heart compared to other cells in the recipient’s body. And we monitor those so-called polymorphisms, those changes.
Russ Altman: And so you went after this, and you were indeed able to show that people who were in rejection were spilling, so to speak, the heart DNA into the blood, and maybe we can avoid some of those biopsies.
Stephen Quake: Absolutely. So we did a proof of principle study with some bank samples she had, and then we wrote a grant together and were able to do a very large study on both heart and lung transplants where pretty much every transplant patient at Stanford for those two organs was enrolled in our study over a period of three years, and were able to validate it. It was amazing. One of my kids was in elementary school at the time, and there was a new family who was in the class that year. And at the end of the year, we got a note around saying that, well, there’s a family that’s in town because they were at the Ronald McDonald House. One of their kids was in the hospital and very ill, and would anyone wanna put them up for the last couple of months because their time had run out there. And so we invited them –
Russ Altman: Took them in.
Stephen Quake: to our house, yeah, and very interesting family. They were immigrants from Africa. The father had been a nurse there, had some medical training and knew that when his son was infant and very ill that needed serious help and eventually got him to Stanford where the son had had a heart transplant.
Russ Altman: Whoa.
Stephen Quake: And we were talking around the dinner table one night, and the dad says well, and we’re just so proud to be part of this study where people are trying to figure out if they can replace the biopsies. And we enrolled our son in it and drew the blood. I said that’s my study. It was amazing and felt very good about it.
Russ Altman: Of course, of course.
Stephen Quake: And now that’s available. So there’s now tens of thousands of people every year who are getting that test, and it’s saving a lot of pain and suffering for those patients.
Russ Altman: This is The Future of Everything. I’m Russ Altman. I’m speaking with Dr. Steve Quake about detecting DNA, and at this moment, detecting DNA in transplant, hoping to detect rejection. So does the test detect rejection potentially earlier than the old-fashioned biopsy approach would?
Stephen Quake: It does, and we’ve proved that, absolutely. You see rejection weeks, if not a month, earlier than the biopsy.
Russ Altman: And then presumably, that gives the docs more option for changing the immunosuppression.
Stephen Quake: Oh, absolutely because yeah, as you mention, all these patients are immunosuppressed to try to prevent rejection, and too much of that, and they’ll get an infectious disease. Too little of that, you have rejection. So they can dial up the immunosuppressants a little bit and try to avoid the rejection event, and that’s much better for the patients. Once they hit rejection, all sorts of bad things happen, and so the whole thing is trying to keep them properly suppressed.
Russ Altman: And just to flesh it out a little bit, how frequently are they getting these blood draws? Is this every six months or every three months or –
Stephen Quake: The standard of care for the invasive biopsies was every two months, and that’s where they initially matched it. But this is the sort of thing that can and should be done more frequently, and I think it’s gonna change the way people treat the patients over time.
Russ Altman: I know that there are more applications, and I’m interested to know which ones you wanna talk about, but let’s talk about one that fascinates me, which is the detection of infectious agents in the blood. Can you tell me how this technology has been used in that regard and what’s the future look like?
Stephen Quake: Yeah, so when we were doing the large transplant study, my post doc at the time, Ian De Vlaming, was looking at all the sequencing data very carefully and realized that not all of the sequence reads off the sequence that were mapping to the human genome. And he said maybe 98% of it’s mapping; there’s one or 2% that aren’t. And I said that’s great. It means we’re not having a lot of contamination and it’s all good, and he didn’t let it go with that, thank goodness. And he started looking at those things that weren’t mapping, and he realized it wasn’t contamination, and they actually were not human, and it was part of the microbiome of these individuals. So the bacteria and the viruses and funguses that live in our body also release cell-free DNA, and we were measuring that as well. And he realized that we could use that to monitor things like what happens to your microbiome when your immune system gets turned off
Russ Altman: Right, because a lot of folks —
Stephen Quake: Because a lot of patients are immunosuppressed, exactly.
Russ Altman: Right.
Stephen Quake: And then we realized ‘cause some of them are getting infectious disease, we could also see infectious disease. And so that has evolved into a new kind of infectious disease diagnostic, which is hypothesis free. You don’t have to test for a particular thing. You’re essentially testing for a thousand infections all at once, and it’s just now reached commercial development. We’re seeing the first peer-reviewed studies showing how to use it, and it’s a very exciting innovation for infectious disease.
Russ Altman: People might find this surprising so let’s just unpack this a little bit. We know that there are some bacteria that live in our gut, and we’ve always expected to see them there. Many of us have assumed that my blood should be pretty much infection free. That’s not where the bacteria and the viruses live. I guess the first question is how much of a surprise, what do you see in normal people who are not immunosuppressed, and how do we interpret this? Do we know that these are diseases? Are these pathogens causing problems, or might they be part of some ecosystem of health?
Stephen Quake: Yeah, all good questions. So a fun way to think about it is to do an order of magnitude calculation. Could we talk about calculations here?
Russ Altman: Yes, this is something that physicists do, folks.
Stephen Quake: So there’s a statistic going around by the microbiome people. You’ve got 10 times more bacterial cells in your body than you do human cells. If you take that at face value and you say well, the human genome is 1,000 times longer. You said three billion base pairs, then the typical bacterial genome, which about three million base pairs. You do the math on that, and you say by mass, all the DNA in our body is 99% human, 1% bacterial. And so if you were to mush this all up in a blender, purify the DNA out, that’s what would come out.
Russ Altman: And that matches what your post doc found.
Stephen Quake: Yes, exactly.
Russ Altman: So are these normal signs? Are these normal organisms, or are these things that we have to run to the doctor and get treated for?
Stephen Quake: The vast majority of it, the vast majority of is our normal microbiome, bugs that live with us commensally and happy, equilibrium, with us as humans.
Russ Altman: I’m guessing you saw viruses or bacteria that were either entirely novel or not appreciated as living in humans?
Stephen Quake: Absolutely, we have discovered traces of novel organisms that is an area of ongoing research in the group to try to understand what they are and where they fit into the tree of life.
Russ Altman: This is The Future of Everything. I’m Russ Altman. I’m speaking with Dr. Steve Quake, and now we’re talking about infectious disease detection.
As a doctor, I know that we have patients come into the emergency room or into the clinic with what we call FUO, fever of unknown origin. They look sick, they have a fever, it’s not normal to have a fever, and they look infected, but we can’t find an infection. And so I’m guessing that one of the key applications of this technology would be, well, what DNA are we seeing in the bloodstream, ‘cause that might point us to the infectious agent. Is that how the infectious disease community —
Stephen Quake: Absolutely, yep.
Russ Altman: — is taking this up?
Stephen Quake: Absolutely. That’s a major application. There’s a bunch of others that are really interesting. And to come back to the earlier point you raised about blood infections being a different thing, the point is that the blood is like the septic system of the body, and it’s exploring all the tissues and organs. And when cells are dying and they’re releasing their DNA, it picks it up and carries it. So even if the infection is not in the blood, you see the remnants of the infection in the blood from that cell-free DNA.
Russ Altman: Yes, and so the final area that I wanted to get into, of course, is cancer. And, in fact, you mentioned cancer in your initial comments. Where are we with the detection of cancer from cell-free DNA?
Stephen Quake: Yeah, that’s been an area of intense interest for decades. That’s the one that was primarily driving the field before the prenatal work and because tumors have different genomes than the normal body does. And so people would monitor those differences in the blood and try to understand how the disease was progressing and to try to do detection. And that’s been a little later into the clinic than the prenatal stuff, but it’s happening now. And it’s an area of intense interest. There’s a bunch of companies out there that have launched tests or about to launch tests, and it’s gonna be very important for helping monitor course of treatment, and that’s the first clinical application that’s out there.
Russ Altman: That’s what I was gonna ask. Is this about detection or about monitoring? And it sounds like the monitoring.
Stephen Quake: That’s the first one. It’s the easiest one ‘cause you’re in such a high risk group and it makes it an easier technical task.
Russ Altman: And you know the cancer, so you’ve been able to characterize what you’re expecting to find if the cancer comes back.
Stephen Quake: Correct. But the big thing to go after is early detection, and that would help a lot of people and save a lot of lives. And that’s something that is gonna be coming. Maybe it’s five years, maybe it’s sooner, but there’ll be some very valuable tools for that coming down the pike; I’m pretty confident about that.
Russ Altman: Yeah, so let’s just think about that for a moment because one of the things that I know is an issue is when these new technologies arise, they often move up the time of detection. You could get the cancer detection earlier, you get the rejection. In general, that’s a good thing. But in cancer, it’s a little tricky because there is some, if I understand the literature, there’s some indication that some cancers arise, and it’s the body’s own immune system suppresses the cancer effectively before it can grow. Have people worked out what actions you should actually take if you see a very early indication of cancer? Is it definite that we’re gonna hit the patient very hard with chemotherapy and radiation and whatnot, or might we still have to figure out what to do about that?
Stephen Quake: Yeah, that’s a really good question and important issue, and I think we’re so early on that that’s being worked out in the clinical community. But the initial thought is not that you would go right to treatment with chemotherapy but that you would reflex to other testing methods that are more expensive and more sophisticated and are not the sort of thing you use to screen people broadly but if you got a hint that something’s wrong, you’d use them, things like imaging techniques and such forth.
Russ Altman: Makes sense. This is The Future of Everything. I’m Russ Altman. More with Dr. Stephen Quake about DNA, the future of health and biology and bioengineering, next on Sirius XM Insight 121.
Welcome back to The Future of Everything. I’m Russ Altman. I’m speaking with Dr. Stephen Quake about the fabulous uses of DNA that’s floating around in our cells. Now Steve, we just went through a bunch of really killer apps, but I know that there’s yet another one, which is looking at pre-term birth. And that’s a funny one to me because it’s not immediately obvious how detecting DNA would have anything to do with a pre-term birth. So tell us that story.
Stephen Quake: Yeah, so pre-term birth ends up being number one cause of neonatal mortality and complications later in life. It’s a huge problem, and there’s been, despite decades of effort, no real progress on creating a meaningful diagnostic that tells people who’s at risk. And there’s been a lot of effort put into –
Russ Altman: So the goal would be very early, say this looks like a pregnancy that might have some pre-term problems.
Stephen Quake: Exactly. And more generally, when is the baby gonna be due? Even if it’s not early, can you predict the due date? And there’s been a lot of effort put into understanding the genetics of that, the DNA base part, that has not really had a lot of predictive power or success. And so we turned to looking at RNA, which is carries the message from the genome and tells you about not the inheritance but the state of the cell and body at any given point. And it turns out same guys who discovered cell-free DNA in 1948 also discovered cell-free RNA.
Russ Altman: They have a good year.
Stephen Quake: They did.
Russ Altman: Same year?
Stephen Quake: Same paper!
Russ Altman: Same paper!
Stephen Quake: And so we began looking at cell-free RNA as a way to measure what’s going on in the mom’s body and with the baby and the placenta at any given point in time and how are things changing and can that signal to us when the baby’s gonna be born and if the baby’s gonna be born early. And we were able, after a long effort, it took seven or eight years of work by a very large group of people, a number of collaborators here at Stanford, including David Stevenson and Gary Shaw and Yair Blumenfeld, bunch of the MFM docs.
Russ Altman: MFM is maternal fetal medicine.
Stephen Quake: Fetal medicine, thank you.
Russ Altman: It’s okay, it’s my job.
Stephen Quake: But we managed to, we managed to figure it out. And we published a paper last year showing that there’s a handful of transcripts which indicate when the mom is gonna give pre-term birth, about two months in advance of that.
Russ Altman: Wow, so these are like canaries in the coal mine.
Stephen Quake: Exactly. And we found another set of transcripts which were predict gestational age, so you can tell how old the baby is and predict when it’s gonna be born. And that turns out to be a really interesting problem as well.
Russ Altman: I was gonna say, I thought that good old-fashioned subtract nine months from the date of birth gets you a pretty, and in fact, I must say, I’m born on November 5th, and that’s important because if you go back nine months, that gets you to February 14th, Valentine’s Day. So that’s a side story.
Stephen Quake: Okay, I got a couple of stories there for you.
Russ Altman: But tell me about this.
Stephen Quake: All let me give you a couple of stories.
Russ Altman: Tell me about this.
Stephen Quake: So when we were having our first kid, the one with the amnio, right, I asked the doctor what’s the due date, tells us the due date. I said what’s the error of your measurement, your estimate? And he got very offended ‘cause he thought I was questioning his ability as a doctor.
Russ Altman: Of course, of course.
Stephen Quake: We had a very tense discussion. Finally, I manage to communicate I was asking about the uncertainty in the estimate ‘cause I wanted to know when to adjust the travel schedule to make sure I didn’t miss it. And he couldn’t tell me the uncertainty, but he told me a number that I could use to derive the uncertainty, and so I did that. Worked out to two sigma three sigma. I had three sigma baby. So the baby was premature by three and a half weeks, and it was fortunate –
Russ Altman: Oh, it was at the border of the plus minus.
Stephen Quake: Yeah, I was fortunately in town, and fortunately, she turned out fine. But this got me aware of the importance of not only pre-term birth but also understanding, trying to understand when the baby’s gonna be born and prediction of due date.
Russ Altman: Okay, so you sold me. This is actually an impactful question.
Stephen Quake: Yes, exactly.
Russ Altman: So what can you guys do?
Stephen Quake: Well, it’s early still. Our first paper was a small number of women, few dozen women, and yet it seems very promising, and we’ve now been able to reproduce it in a different cohort that we can predict pre-term birth and gestational age and, from gestational age, hopefully predict when the normal baby’s gonna be born. But it’s all now going into much larger clinical trials to validate it. It’s very much the beginning of the story, but it’s an exciting one.
Russ Altman: So, great. This is a new molecule for our discussion, this RNA molecule, also from the baby or the placenta or both and a combination of maternal and fetal factors gives you the data you need and a big data mining approach, not to overuse that, to actually draw inferences that might be very impactful both for the actual due date but, more importantly, for uh oh, we have a woman who might be having a pre-term birth, let’s do what we can, and again, the ability of doctors to intervene is probably much better if they have two-month warning.
Stephen Quake: Correct, correct.
Russ Altman: Well, so this has been an amazing ride, and I wanna turn our attention a little bit now to a separate thing but very excited that you’re involved with. A few years ago, I think three years ago, the Chan and Zuckerberg Foundation announced the creation of a big biomedical research institute with you and a colleague from UCSF, Joe DeRisi, as co-presidents, and it had a very bold mission. The mission was to, I believe, cure or manage all disease by the end of the century, something like that; you can correct me if I’m wrong.
Stephen Quake: Cure, treat, or prevent all human disease by the end of the century.
Russ Altman: Bingo. So you agreed to that charge. You’ve now been doing it for three years. Can you tell us a little bit about how it was set up and why it was set up, and is it really even possible to imagine that level of progress in the next century?
Stephen Quake: Yeah. So since we’ve been talking about becoming parents, and Mark and Priscilla began to turn their attention to philanthropy in a pretty large way when they became parents. And they wrote an open letter before their first daughter was born that launched the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative and ultimately the Biohub with this idea of trying to create a better world.
Russ Altman: It’s called the Chan Zuckerberg –
Stephen Quake: Chan Zuckerberg Biohub.
Russ Altman: Biohub, mm-hmm.
Stephen Quake: And so in their children’s lifetime, so broadly in this hundred-year span, they wanted to see if they could fund scientific research that would help make the world a healthier place for their kids and everyone else, which is a lovely mission. And it sounds crazy, right?
Russ Altman: Sounds crazy.
Stephen Quake: It sounds absolutely absurd, and for awhile, I couldn’t say it even to them with a straight face.
Russ Altman: And yet a few moments ago, you said it forcefully and convincingly, so wait to go.
Stephen Quake: In, well –
Russ Altman: What turned you?
Stephen Quake: Well, you think about it for awhile, and it helps to think backwards in time and think about how far medicine has advanced in the last 100 years. And in this country, mortality has been cut in half. And the things that kill us now are very different than the things that killed us 100 years ago. Primarily, it was infectious disease then. Now it’s things like heart disease and such forth. And so we’ve eliminated entire classes of diseases, effectively, and cut mortality in half. So you can project forward another 100 years and say if we don’t do anything, we should get another factor of two. And with some really serious effort, maybe we can do better than that. It’s just very hard for people to think on century-long timescales. We’re thinking when’s our next grand proposal or something like that or when’s our next student gonna graduate, and it’s not often that we have the opportunity to think on that sort of timescale.
Russ Altman: This is The Future of Everything. I’m Russ Altman. I’m speaking with Steve Quake, now about curing, managing, treating, and what was the other verb?
Stephen Quake: Prevent.
Russ Altman: Preventing all disease. Do you take a portfolio approach? It sounds like you were talking about the causes of death 100 years ago, so you have to look at the causes of death now. And I guess you have to pick the low-hanging fruit to say how do we make progress. So how have you decided to deploy the assets of the Biohub for the next five to 10 years?
Stephen Quake: Yeah, well, a two-fold approach. One approach is to pick a couple of areas that capture a large part of the global burden of disease, and we’ve chosen two that we focus on in our internal research. One is cell biology, and a lot of diseases are a consequence of disorders of cell biology, cancer, heart disease, pulmonary disease, a number of neurological diseases. And so better understanding how cells work will lead to new therapies and treatments.
Russ Altman: Could be a platform of discoveries that will have multiple applications.
Stephen Quake: Right, exactly, and that covers a large part of the global burden, as you work out the numbers of that. The other big part is infectious disease.
Russ Altman: So it’s still a problem.
Stephen Quake: Still a problem worldwide, absolutely. There’s a bunch of open areas, malaria, HIV. There’s a bunch of other ones, TB, number of viral infections. So that’s our other big internal effort. And at the Biohub, our researchers have been hired to focus on those two areas. Now the other, all the rest, what we’ve done is we’ve partnered with the Bay Area University, to Stanford, UCSF, and Berkeley, and we fund research of nearly 100 faculty at those universities across everything else. We have an open competition. We’ve committed roughly $100 million to those faculty over the next five years, and we’ll do it again for the second five years. And we’re encouraging them to work on the riskiest, most exciting ideas, whether they’re basic science, technological, or more disease focused, to cover the span of where we think a lot of the great innovations are gonna come over the next decades.
Russ Altman: So that does sound compelling. So basically, a two-fold strategy with some top-down projects that you know are gonna be impactful, and then you spread your bets by giving money to a bunch of smart people and say just do what you think is right. And the hope is that that will lead to the next set of challenges that you guys can perhaps adopt as top-down challenges.
Stephen Quake: That’s right.
Russ Altman: So how is it going?
Stephen Quake: Well, as you mentioned, we just celebrated our third birthday three weeks ago. Joe and I have been working really hard, but it feels great. I feel like we’re at full steam, and great science is happening, and the people we’re funding are doing great work, and the future is bright.
Russ Altman: And I guess are the donors satisfied? Are the people who put up the funds, are they starting to see their fruits of their vision?
Stephen Quake: Well, you’ll have to ask them that. It’s not my place to say. But they haven’t fired us yet, and so we take that as a good sign.
Russ Altman: Thank you for listening to The Future of Everything. I’m Russ Altman. If you missed any of this episode, listen anytime on demand with the Sirius XM app.
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In breast cancer pathology, a 2 percent chance of malignancy is the accepted threshold at which a radiologist refers the patient for further study. In reality, that threshold varies among doctors; some are more conservative, others less so. The result is either more false positives, in which a healthy patient worries unnecessarily they have cancer, or more-worrisome false negatives, in which a patient is told they are fine when they are not.
One researcher working to reduce that gap is Stanford’s Ross Shachter. He is a professor of management science and engineering and an expert in using probability to improve decision making. Though Shachter is an engineer, he applies his approaches not to operational efficiency or business management, but to the high-stakes field of mammography, where decisions often have life or death consequences.
He says that probability and decision making theory could be integrated into artificial intelligence applications that could help doctors better evaluate patient options, outcomes and preferences to improve care.
Join host Russ Altman and Ross Shachter for a look at how engineering and AI are changing the world of breast cancer diagnosis. You can listen to The Future of Everything on Sirius XM Insight Channel 121, iTunes, Google Play, SoundCloud, Spotify, Stitcher or via Stanford Engineering Magazine.
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
Russ Altman: Today, on The Future of Everything, the future of the microbiome. Now, the microbiome has gotten a lot of attention in the last few years.
Now, what is a microbiome? I guess we will learn more, but for the purposes of this discussion, it’s the full set of microbial organisms, chiefly bacteria, but maybe others, that live in different niches within our body. Our mouth, nasal cavity, skin folds, everywhere that has contact with the outside world.
The gut microbiome is one of those microbiomes and it’s the community of bacteria living in our digestive system, not necessarily related to disease, but as a normal part of our physiology. We have long known that there is a lot of bacteria in our digestive tract and we know, for example, that they help us digest our food. That’s what we were taught in medical school many decades ago when I was in medical school.
We also know that when we treat infections with antibiotics, it can alter these species because these species are sitting in your gut and they also can be very susceptible to antibiotics. So when I treat a patient for urinary tract infection or for pneumonia, not only am I killing the bacteria, hopefully, that’s causing the infection, but I’m probably altering the microbiome of that patient in ways that might lead to some symptoms. They might have some digestive issues that are associated with that antibiotic.
Now, it’s become clear that the bacteria living in our gut have much more complicated relationship with our health and with our disease. They seem to be involved in our immune system. They seem to be changing sometimes in both acute and chronic disease. The idea has even emerged that there’s a healthy microbiome, the set of bacteria that you would love to have and host in your bowel and that there might be treatments for some diseases that involve changing the microbiome to get it to be more healthy, so to speak. This has gotten probably the most publicity in the idea of fecal transplants. Yes, if you’re not familiar with that, you heard correctly. This is the idea where poop, forgive the terminology, the technical terminology, poop from healthy people is introduced into the digestive tract of people with disease in order to help them normalize their microbiome to hopefully get it back into a healthy state. So this is getting serious.
Ami Bhatt is a Professor of Medicine and Genetics at Stanford University. She has a medical specialty of hematology and studies the human microbiome, mostly in the gut, and has developed new ways to measure the presence of bacteria in the human body and ways to interpret these for health and disease.
Ami, you specialize in hematology, the study of blood and blood diseases. How does a hematologist get interested in bacteria that live in the gut?
Ami Bhatt: So, thanks a lot for having me, Russ. It’s a pleasure to be here. I actually first became interested in the bacteria viruses and fungi that live in and on us, as I think many young people did which was by watching a TV show. I remember being about, I don’t know, nine or ten years old, and I was left at home for the first time, for like ten minutes by myself or something like that, and so I turned on the TV. My younger brother and I were watching a television show about germs and, they showed these horrifying microscopic images of all of the bacteria that are squirming around everywhere. And I thought, “Wow, this is fantastic and also very gross, and we should really learn more about this.”
If you fast forward many years later, part of the reason I became interested as a hematologist and oncologist in viruses and bacteria was because I learned that viruses can cause cancers in some cases. And as you well know, there are viruses that cause well-known cancers like liver cancer. Liver cancer is caused, in some cases, by a hepatitis virus. We know that the human papilloma virus causes cervical cancer and other cancers. And I thought, “Wow, there are all of these relatively simple organisms. They don’t have many genes.” You know, a virus can’t even live by itself. It requires a human cell in these cases in order to replicate. It’s amazing that such simple organisms can alter the biology of such complex organisms like us.
That was how I ended up getting interested in bacteria viruses and fungi that live in and on us. Of course, first I learned about them as kind of bad guys but there are trillions of microorganisms that live in and on us and most of them are probably not bad guys. Many of them are probably actually quite helpful and so I’ve taken a more holistic view of what bugs mean to us.
Russ Altman: So tell me, what are we finding when we look at the microbiome? How many of these are old friends that we’ve known for years and how many surprises are there where we’re saying, “Wow, we had no idea that this bacteria species was living in us.” And then how do we figure out what they’re doing, good or bad?
Ami Bhatt: Yeah, this is an incredibly complex question in part because we don’t even know most of the microbes that live within us. Despite the fact that now, there have been tens of thousands of papers published on the gut microbiome of humans, for example, we know relatively little about who these organisms are. The classical ways of studying microorganisms was by taking them, culturing them, looking at them under the microscope.
Russ Altman: Right, give them a little sugar and they’ll grow.
Ami Bhatt: Exactly. Describing them based on what they grow on, so what they like to eat, what color they stain, what shape they are. But now what we’re understanding is organisms that look really similar under the microscope, and have very similar growth characteristics, for example, can have totally different genomes which means that they can probably do totally different things. So one of the things that we’re learning in the field is that we know relatively little about the organisms even within our own guts. And so a lot of effort has been put into trying to better enumerate who’s there and what they’re doing.
Russ Altman: I also know that these bacteria often, you can’t just grow them on sugar and salt, they actually need each other to live so it’s like a very highly interlinked environment. Is this idea of a healthy microbiome, is that an oversimplification or is it in fact true that you could look at a sample of somebody’s poop and say, “That looks pretty good,” versus, “Oh, we have a problem here.”
Ami Bhatt: You know, I think in general we’re coming to a consensus that for the gut microbiome, at least based on the individuals who’ve been studied to date, having a more diverse community is better. And so having a larger variety of different types of organisms is probably better than the alternative, which is having a handful of organisms that are present at a high abundance.
But in general, what we think we know now is that there isn’t just one healthy microbiome. There isn’t that golden poop out there that we should fecal transplant into everyone and then we’ll all look like a Kardashian and live for 250 years.
Russ Altman: I know a young man in Boston whose name will not be mentioned who’s actually made several thousand dollars donating his poop to research and to microbiome stuff for the last couple of years so he’s in the money.
Ami Bhatt: Yeah, oh yeah. It’s a great way to, you know, turn poop into cold, hard cash.
Russ Altman: Poop into cash. Okay, that was a very distracting idea. So there are many healthy microbiomes. And how can a patient or a person who’s listening, how can they figure out what the state of their microbiome is? You know, it’s interesting. I think if I talk to most laypeople or my patients or family members who aren’t in medicine and I ask them, “How’s your gut health?” Most people can actually tell you. Most people have a very good sense of how their gut is functioning based on their daily bowel movement or bowel movements, how they feel, do they feel bloated, etc. And so I would say most people who don’t have gastrointestinal symptoms, I’m talking about diarrhea, constipation, nausea, vomiting, bloating, those are people who probably have fairly healthy gut microbiomes.
Russ Altman: So that’s good news ’cause that means you can use your normal life experience to kind of self-diagnose if there’s a problem and if things are going well both literally and figuratively, then we’re okay and then there’s no need to worry. So what are the impacts…
Well, this is The Future of Everything. I’m Russ Altman, I’m speaking with Ami Bhatt about microbiomes and healthy and diseased ones.
What about when you take antibiotics? This is a huge insult to the system. Do we know what happens to the gut microbiome and does it bounce back or does it then change forever? Where are we in that knowledge?
Ami Bhatt: Absolutely. So, you know, I liken antibiotic exposure to a forest fire. You’re basically getting rid of the vast majority of life that exists in the gut microbiome. And you don’t get rid of everything because even the most broad-spectrum antibiotics that we use don’t kill off every single microorganism in our gut.
Russ Altman: And that’s also true of the forest fires where those few species come back right away.
Ami Bhatt: Absolutely, absolutely. So it’s very, very similar of a situation. Some of the best work that we have in the field focusing on how antibiotics affect the microbiome have actually come here from Stanford from a colleague named David Roman. He and his colleagues did some really transformative early work in the early 2010s on the exposures of antibiotics to the gut microbiome in healthy individuals. They took a handful of individuals, gave them antibiotics, and studied what happened to their microbiomes. What they found was that, there was definitely a simplification of the microbiomes when people were exposed to antibiotics.
Russ Altman: That loss of the diversity you were talking about.
Ami Bhatt: Exactly, that’s loss of diversity and then basically after the people stop the antibiotics assuming they were living a healthy lifestyle, which they were, they regained their diversity, mostly.
Russ Altman: So that’s good news.
Ami Bhatt: Good news. On repeated exposures to antibiotics, what people have observed is that there may be a point at which you can’t quite get back to your normal and every time you’re exposed to antibiotics, you may be readjusting to a new normal.
Russ Altman: Does the microbiome run in families? Can I assume that my wife and I, our kids are outta the house. That’s a whole different story, and I know nothing about their microbiomes. But do my wife and I have the same microbiome probably because we’re spending a lot of time together or could they be very different even in that home situation?
Ami Bhatt: Yeah, so we call the scientific jargon for this is cohabitating adults.
Russ Altman: That’s what I do with my wife.
Ami Bhatt: Yes, so you and your cohabitating adult, your lovely wife, you probably do have some shared species and strains. So research has suggested that cohabitating adults do share some strains. There has been some limited work to show exciting results that people who own pets, for example dogs, may actually even share a few strains with their pets.
Now this is really exciting because as you know, there’s this hygiene hypothesis out there and the idea that we’ve become too clean as a society that’s why we have, like, asthma and allergies and eczema that are increasing.
Russ Altman: We need more exposures as youths.
Ami Bhatt: Exactly, and we know that people who have animals when they’re young or who live on farms when they’re young actually have a decreased incidence of these diseases. So one question that has arisen is, is it because we’re actually getting microbes from these animals around us?
Russ Altman: That raises an issue that I really, I did wanna get to so I’m glad that you’ve raised this, which is, the role of the gut microbiome with the immune system. In fact, you would think they might be at battle with one another but I think it’s much more complicated and I know you’ve looked into this. So, how should I think about the relationship of my gut bacteria with the health of my immune system?
Ami Bhatt: Yeah, so we know that animals that can be reared without microbes, we call these germ-free animals.
Russ Altman: So like the bubble boy but they’re the bubble cow or the bubble.
Ami Bhatt: Yeah, bubble mouse. All kinds of bubble animals.
Russ Altman: That’s probably easier than the bubble cow.
Ami Bhatt: Yes, but you know, even bubble fish have been generated. You can generate these animals without really any measurable microbes and what we know about them, surprisingly, is that their immune systems are really messed up. That observation actually suggests that the immune system is really dependent on microbial exposures in order to mature properly. We also know, interestingly, and this is more of a correlational relationship, that the immune system develops over the first three years of life. You know, that’s why a lot of kids and babies get their immunizations or vaccinations in that early period of time. That’s actually also when the microbiome develops. So we know that the vast majority of microbiome and immune system development happens in those first three years of life. That suggests that just like having, you know, a sparring partner, someone who urges you.
Russ Altman: Keeps you sharp.
Ami Bhatt: Yeah, absolutely. I think the microbes keep the immune system sharp and I think the immune system keeps the microbes sharp.
Russ Altman: Okay, so we should be rooting for a certain amount of healthy competition between the bacteria and the immune system and it’s part of developing this robust immune system. Taking that idea and combining with your earlier comments about there’s many healthy microbiomes, you’ve made a study of the cultural and geographic diversity of the microbiome including even in places like Africa where I imagine that the lifestyle, the diet, many things are different from the West Coast of the United States. Why are you doing that work and what are we finding?
Ami Bhatt: The reason we’re doing this work which is really trying to broaden our understanding of all of the different types of healthy and diseased microbiomes that exist around the world, is that we know, unlike human genetics, like your human genome doesn’t really change over the course of your life, we know that the microbiome can change over life and that the microbiome is pretty much controlled by your lifestyle and your environment. For example, if you, Russ, were to move to Greenland and take up a diet that was entirely of fish and seals, your microbiome would change dramatically. And that suggests that the variety of lifestyle choices and environmental exposures that people have can really affect their microbiomes and they affect their microbiomes way more than their personal genetics do.
Russ Altman: So it’s the environment that is playing a huge role. Even though I’m the same Russ, after six weeks in Greenland, I’m a different microbiome Russ.
Ami Bhatt: Absolutely, absolutely. So one of the challenges in research has been that we tend to, in my opinion, overstudy kind of the same people over and over, in part ’cause they’re convenient. Honestly, if I was to do a study of a thousand people’s microbiomes, it’d be a lot easier for me to do the study here at Stanford and just to recruit, you know, the incoming freshman class.
Russ Altman: It would be very diverse. It would be both Facebook employees as well as Google employees.
Ami Bhatt: There you go, yeah. And then throw in like a little bit of Apple just for the fun.
Russ Altman: There’s your diversity.
Ami Bhatt: We know that many of these people are gonna have very, very consistent lifestyles. And so we thought that it was really important to broaden our understanding of all of the different types of microbiomes that can exist in the world, both for the purpose of better enumerating what is normal, normal can be a variety of things, but also because, not only should genetic research be done all over the world, we wanna make sure that genetic researchers are being encouraged all over the world. We started this collaboration with a really impressive consortium called the H3 Africa Genomics Consortium. They do a lot of human genetic work and as you know, life originated in Africa, there’s a huge amount of human genetic diversity there and we, being kind of a one-trick pony said, “Hey, we should collect poop and we’ll sequence it and we’ll learn about the microbiomes of these individuals.” Thankfully we have collaborators who are game for that and we’ve been studying the microbiomes of individuals in urban township settings and rural areas and trying to understand how they’re similar and different to each other and similar and different to us.
Russ Altman: This is The Future of Everything. I’m Russ Altman, I’m speaking with Dr. Ami Bhatt about the microbiomes in Africa and fascinating because of the diversity and the history of Africa, it is possible that there will be more diversity of the microbiomes in Africa than there is in the rest of the world or certainly it will be more diverse than what we’re seeing in local areas as you described. And I also totally buy your argument that if there are gonna be in the future treatments of the microbiome, we really need to understand the range of normal so that we don’t start treating people in Africa with microbiomes that are irrelevant or even damaging.
So let me ask that, we hear a lot about when people migrate from one place to another, after a certain amount of time they start getting the diseases of the local milieu. So, you know, we hear about people from China who come to the U.S. They have a certain diet and lifestyle in China, and after a couple of generations, they start getting the same heart disease that has been plaguing all of the U.S. Could there be a microbiome connection to this? Is it that changing your geography is not just the lifestyle and the McDonald’s and dietary considerations, but that you’re also now being exposed to microbiomes that might change your disease risk?
Ami Bhatt: I absolutely believe so. One of the things that we don’t know is whether or not a healthy adult can actually acquire new microbes easily from the environment, but certainly the idea that changing someone’s lifestyle can change their microbiome is well established. There have been migration studies where immigrants have been studied over the course of time. I absolutely think this is related to disease.
One of the things I’m really fascinated about is this observation that my parents, for example. My parents came over from India to the United States for school. They were born and raised in India. They could eat all of the delicious street food that is there. But when we used to go back to visit when I was a kid, my parents would say, “Absolutely no street food for you,” and absolutely no street food for them, because we would get terrible diarrhea, to be honest. Why is that so? My parents have been exposed to that.
Russ Altman: They’ve grown up on it.
Ami Bhatt: Yeah, they’ve grown up on it. Presumably their immune systems have gotten used to it, so why could they suddenly not eat these foods anymore? And I really do think part of it might be that their microbiomes had shifted over time.
Russ Altman: Fantastic. This is The Future of Everything, I’m Russ Altman. More with guest Dr. Ami Bhatt about the microbiome and its significance for both health and disease, next on Sirius XM Insight 121.
Welcome back to The Future of Everything, I’m Russ Altman. I’m speaking with Ami Bhatt about the microbiome. And in the last segment we had a great discussion about health and disease and immune system. People like to manipulate their microbiome and there’s been a lot of popular press about yogurts and probiotics. Is that all real? How should people think about the opportunities for manipulating or improving their bowel health by ingesting foods that modify it?
Ami Bhatt: I think it’s natural for us to wanna improve our bowel health. I think almost every one of us has done this. By the time we’re an adult, we know that there are certain foods we don’t tolerate, certain foods that actually work out better for us. I think many people learn, for example, in their 20s and their 30s that they don’t tolerate lactose anymore, for example.
Russ Altman: Right, so milk is out.
Ami Bhatt: Milk is out. And probiotics are an interesting opportunity for us to try and change that microbiome.
Russ Altman: Can you tell me what is the definition of a probiotic? Because I think there’s even confusion about that. It sounds great. Pro, biotic, I mean what could be wrong with it?
Ami Bhatt: Yeah, it’s a fantastic thing, but, it is actually a moving target, also. So, the idea of a probiotic is it’s live microbial therapy. Right? It’s a compound, not a compound, but organisms that you can ingest or put on you if they’re skin probiotics.
Russ Altman: Oh, so there are skin probiotics?
Ami Bhatt: There are skin probiotics now, too. So you can ingest or put these things on you and that they will somehow improve your health. They can come in a variety of “flavors.” On one extreme, while fecal microbiota transplantation is not technically considered a probiotic, it is one of the most complex live microbial therapies we can administer.
Russ Altman: Yeah, it’s a definitely cousin idea because you’re introducing bacteria on purpose to help.
Ami Bhatt: Exactly. Most probiotics come in either pill form, so you can go to, often like the natural foods store and you’ll find an area where they have a bunch of bottles that are labeled with different complicated Latin and Greek names. Those are probiotics. Alternatively you can have things like foods that actually contain live bacteria or sometimes fungi.
Russ Altman: On purpose.
Ami Bhatt: On purpose. Turns out, this has actually been an important part of cooking for millennia. Bread, for example, is obviously fermented by yeast. In the classical way, it was not just fermented by yeast but also by bacteria that are present in the air and on the grains of wheat.
Russ Altman: I believe that’s part of the sourdough magic is that it’s not just the yeast but a complex. My son teaches me about the complex bacteria required for high-quality sourdough.
Ami Bhatt: Absolutely, so we consume bacteria in these ways. Of course, when we bake bread, the bacteria die but there are things like yogurt. Yogurt is made by actually culturing milk with bacteria, and we can buy live active culture food.
Russ Altman: Now, will yogurt automatically come with bacteria or is it a special type of yogurt that would have bacteria? ’Cause I know that people often think, “I love my yogurt, it’s giving me good probiotics.” I don’t know if that’s true.
Ami Bhatt: The majority of commercial yogurts that are available, the bacteria have been killed. So if you want to go to the store and buy a live active culture yogurt, meaning a yogurt that still has living organisms in it, you’ve gotta look for that. They usually say, “live active culture,” and if you turn the container around to the back, you can actually see the names of the organisms that are included.
Russ Altman: The list of Latin names. Lactobacillus and things like that.
Ami Bhatt: Exactly, exactly. Also if you make it at home, of course, you would also be live active culture. So there are other types of foods that are live active culture. Sauerkraut, kimchi, in fact, almost every culture has some sort of fermented food that’s an important part of their culture and their cuisine.
Russ Altman: Yes, we’re overloading the word culture. Every culture has their favorite bacterial culture. Here’s the big question. Is there evidence for health benefit?
Ami Bhatt: This is really where it gets kind of tricky. It gets tricky because there have been some big studies done on pills, like probiotic pills, used in the medical setting to do things, specific things, like, prevent antibiotic associated diarrhea. For example, many of our listeners have probably gone to the doctor, gotten an antibiotic for a bacterial infection, and have been told by either their doctor or friend, "Hey, eat some yogurt while you’re having this." In that concept there is, we know that antibiotic is killing a lot of the bacteria in your gut, maybe some of these bacteria from the yogurt will fill in the gaps, and prevent you from having the diarrhea that’s associated with having low diversity microbiomes.
Russ Altman: And does that indeed happen?
Ami Bhatt: You know, so, there are studies that say it does, there are studies that say it doesn’t. And I think really, the jury is out. It’s a really complicated topic. As a physician, I would say, there is really limited evidence for the utility of probiotics in the health setting, and in disease management.
Russ Altman: So as a physician, it kind of falls into the, well, I don’t think it’s doing any harm, so I’m not gonna tell you not to do it, but I wouldn’t bet the farm that it’s gonna solve the problem.
Ami Bhatt: Absolutely. And I would say in some extreme circumstances of health, like, you know, for example, there have been studies showing that, immunotherapy, which is a type of treatment that’s used to treat cancer patients, immunotherapy may depend on what the microbiome contains. We know that there may actually be risks associated with taking probiotics when you’re on an immunotherapy agent.
Russ Altman: So that’s a big deal, because now we’re talking about risks. Can you tell me a little bit more about that?
Ami Bhatt: Yeah.
Russ Altman: Sounds like it’s new.
Ami Bhatt: It’s really new. I think none of these data are published yet. But at conferences, at scientific conferences, people have been talking about observations that cancer patients on immunotherapy who are taking probiotics, may actually respond worse than those who are not. Which really begs the question of, you know, could we potentially be doing harm by giving people probiotics.
Russ Altman: So that’s something we’ll have to keep a close eye on. And I’m sure that oncologists will pay close attention, because they don’t wanna undermine their treatments by saying, “Oh, it can hurt,” when in fact, maybe it can hurt. So that’s an important one.
Ami Bhatt: Absolutely.
Russ Altman: This is The Future of Everything. I’m Russ Altman, I’m speaking with Dr. Ami Bhatt, about the microbiome. And I wanted to move to the issue of the microbiome over time and in aging, folks, which we all are. I think you made a reference to this, that it doesn’t stay the same. What do we know about the process of aging? And is there things that elderly people should be thinking about in terms of their microbiome? I was struck when you were talking about the immune system, you were very convincing that people have a good sense of how their bowel is doing when you ask them. I’m not sure people have a good sense of their immune system when you ask them in the same way, maybe they do. So it’s all confounded together in my mind as the aging process, the immune system, what do we know about that? And what should people be thinking about as they age?
Ami Bhatt: Yeah, so it’s interesting, there’s been a lot of focus on the microbiome and the immune system in early life, lots of studies on those first three years. And what we think is that, for the adult period, people to tend to be pretty stable in both of those things until later on in life, and our group and others are actually starting to study, the microbiome of aging individuals. From animal studies, it’s actually been demonstrated in the African killifish fish model.
Russ Altman: Killifish?
Ami Bhatt: Killifish. Yeah. These are really cool, short lived fish. They’re actually the, I believe the shortest live vertebrate animals.
Russ Altman: So what are we talking?
Ami Bhatt: Months.
Russ Altman: Months of life.
Ami Bhatt: Months of life.
Russ Altman: So they really have to go for it.
Ami Bhatt: Yeah, they gotta go big, go big and then they have to go home. So, an interesting study was done, where they took poop from young fish, and then transplanted it into old fish. And they actually find that the old fish can swim faster when they have young poop in them.
Russ Altman: Am so glad you’ve mentioned this, ’cause I’ve heard about these kind of studies, and also like old mice giving their poop to young mice, and vice versa. So yeah, so what’s going on there?
Ami Bhatt: You know, it suggests that there is something within the gut microbiome of these young individuals that can actually alter the biology of these animals, older animals, either through their immune system.
Russ Altman: They are swimming faster. Swimming faster. The older fish. So now we just have to figure out what would that mean for a human, and when do I ask for my young colleague’s, well, I don’t even wanna say it. How do we approach this issue? And do we think that there’s a real hope now for therapies? I mean, are people now thinking about a future, where in addition to the pills that you’re getting from your doctor, they’ll be interventions to try to spruce up your microbiome?
Ami Bhatt: Yeah, I think that there is a great opportunity here. In part because we know that there is this association between the alteration of the microbiome and diminishment of the immune system. I think in the future, although there are no data to support this yet, that older individuals will get things like, microbial therapies or fiber cocktails that will help keep their microbiome healthy, and maybe prevent them from getting things like shingles, you know, a reactivation of a viral infection, maybe that’s related to our gut microbiome, who knows?
Russ Altman: And you’ve made a really important point here, it’s not just introduction of the bacteria, but you need them to be happy, so to speak, and to live. And so you mentioned fiber, because that might be one of the substrates upon which these bacteria live, in order to stay in your bowel after they’ve been introduced.
Ami Bhatt: Absolutely. We can’t just put them there, we’ve got to feed them as well. And so, since fiber is what a lot of these healthy microbes eat, then we’ve got to feed them.
Russ Altman: So when we think about high fiber diets, part of the reason we’re recommending this to patients is not just for the bulk and to help them the musculature of their bowel, it’s also to have a good relationship with the underlying microbiome.
Ami Bhatt: Absolutely.
Russ Altman: Thank you for listening to The Future of Everything. I’m Russ Solomon. If you missed any of this episode, listen anytime on demand with the Sirius XM app.
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Russ Altman: Today, on The Future of Everything the future of Silicon Valley. Periodically, in human history every now and then there is an unusual mix of opportunity, capital, talent, technology in a geographical region that concentrates this and creates perhaps an unusual period of creativity, invention and sometimes great impact on a global scale. Far beyond, what you might expect from that local geography.
I like to think about the Italian Art Renaissance in the 15th and 16th century, focused in Florence. So, removed from Rome, the seat of Italian power and the church power. The Medici family and others provided capital. There was a network of business connections there was a good supply of marble, and paint supplies. And, things were advancing, and then a few masters Giotto, da Vinci, Michelangelo emerged from this pool of kind of opportunity as masters. They integrated the lessons from the past, they added their own vision and there was this revolution in art that seemed to advance from static 2-D depictions, mostly of bible scenes to dynamic three-dimensional art that many people, even today are captivated by. Books have been written about Florence.
Why then? Why there? We’re not gonna do that today. But I love that it is related to the Bubonic plague. And the fact that one-third of European people died from this terrible disease. But that took pressure off the farmers who could then produce extra food. Yadda yadda yadda.
Now, we have the growth of Silicon Valley. Now, I don’t wanna push this too hard. This was not an art, and it’s not clearly about art, or about cultural things. But there was digital technologies and there’s a somewhat parallel story.
Removed from the seats of power in Washington D.C and New York. The power and influence. There was this West Coast place which actually even 50 years ago was mostly fruit farms. But companies arose, Hewlett Packard, Intel. There was this University, Stanford University. Disclaimer: I’m an employee of Stanford University that provided a growing technological work force in both engineering and science. These masters weren’t artists — far from it. Although, well we could discuss that. But they were industrialists. You had Hewlett and Packard, you had the Gordon Moore, and the Intel founders. Steve Jobs and then of course Jerry Yang from Yahoo!, Sergey Brin, Larry Page. And recently now we know about the founders of Facebook, Uber, Twitter, etc. A remarkable concentration of talent, opportunity, technology. Creating a singularity, you could argue that in this area that was just a fruit farming area.
So, Silicon Valley perhaps has helped usher in an era of AI, machine learning and the gig economy. Now, as I said I don’t want to oversell this analogy and let’s also remember what happened to Florence. It did not maintain its preeminence in art. Wars and important changing trade patterns reduced the available capital, reduced it as the center of the world in many ways. The reformation changed the religious dynamics. The Catholic church had various reactions against humanism. The pendulum and perhaps the luck of Florence ran out. And Florence became once again a local geographic region. It’s great to visit, it’s great to eat there but it is not really particularly, the center of anything right now.
What does the future hold for Silicon Valley?
John Markoff is a fellow, former fellow at the Stanford Center for Advanced Study and Behavioral Sciences. He’s a current fellow and research affiliate at the Human-centered Artificial Intelligence Institute at Stanford. He has been a science writer at the New York Times for more than 20, 30 years. He’s covered the general computer industry, Silicon Valley in particular during this time that I just described of great innovation and disruption both in good and bad ways.
John, you have written that Silicon Valley may be over optimistic, both at the rate of expected future progress, and also the benefits that that progress will bring to society. Perhaps it’s peddling some things. How do you see this manifesting? And is it a byproduct of hyperbolic marketing, purely? Or does it indicate potentially the beginning of the end for this period of Silicon Valley flourishing innovation.
John Markoff: Boy, I love your analogy to Florence. Because I think about that a lot and I think about it particularly in the context of fragility. How fragile is the Valley. Nothing lasts forever. Clearly the arc of technological innovation in the last couple of centuries has been from east to west. There’s always the implication that it may continue to go west perhaps to China. You know, the question of where Silicon Valley came from is a really interesting one as well — you brought that up — what’s new, I mean I always thought there’s a lot of serendipity. I mean Shockley came here —
Russ Altman: Right.
John Markoff: — famously because his mother was here. What if his mother had been in Iowa?
Russ Altman: Exactly.
John Markoff: And then there’s this wonderful thing that David Brock who’s the staff historian at Computer History Museum recently discovered, Shockley didn’t come here to build the transistor. He created a transistor company, but when he left Bell labs in the early 50s he was super — there was an automation phase. It’s kind of an interesting thing considering where we are today.
Russ Altman: Yes, yes.
John Markoff: An automation fad, and he came here to build a robot. He got money from Beckman, who was his investor. And it devolved down, first, into a company whose first intent was to build a company to build a robot eye. Because he wanted to build an automated factory. So, Silicon Valley’s roots are actually in robotics and AI. Which I think is not known, largely.
Russ Altman: No, that is not generally appreciated.
John Markoff: And it’s just a wonderful sort of — it devolved down into transistor company and then of course the traders left and they went to Fairchild.
Russ Altman: Right, right.
John Markoff: And all of that happened. But then — so, I guess you know when I was a reporter in 2006 I was spending a lot of time in Europe. And it looked like innovation in mobile software was moving to Europe. Nokia, and Sion were there.
Russ Altman: Yes.
John Markoff: And I had this sense, that the ball was moving overseas in that direction. And then the iPhone happened. In 2007, the mobile platform came to the Valley.
Russ Altman: You’re right, we all had Nokia phones in 2005, 2006.
John Markoff: At some point. That’s right.
Russ Altman: And it was like where the heck is Nokia. Why don’t I see signs on it when I drive down 101.
John Markoff: Yeah. Absolutely.
Russ Altman: It was not a thing from Silicon Valley.
John Markoff: So, the way I think about it, there are a couple things. It’s really interesting to me to think about where the next IT platform might come from. Will it come from Silicon Valley? It’s not guaranteed. I mean, there’s lots of speculation it might be augmented reality, it might be speech. There clearly will be something after, if you walk down the street in San Francisco half the population is looking at the palm of their hand.
Russ Altman: Yes.
John Markoff: That can’t be the end of user interface. There has to be something after that. So what’ll it be?
John Markoff: The sooner — the other thing I have to say is the visionaries are almost always wrong. It’ll surprise us. It’ll come out of left field. It might come from China.
Russ Altman: So what about this idea, where does it, where does this idea come from that the marketing from Silicon Valley in terms of the pace of progress has been a little bit misleading and perhaps the data doesn’t support —
John Markoff: Yeah.
Russ Altman: The looking back at how fast things have been and how fast they’re going to be.
John Markoff: I can’t tell you in my career how many press releases I’ve gotten that have the word “revolution” in them.
Russ Altman: Yeah.
John Markoff: And in fact I think the reality of Silicon Valley is there have been a couple of big ideas. Personal computing, networks, ubiquitous computing, and then there’s been a lot of great engineering. This is an engineering center. But big ideas that actually break paradigms only come along, every once in a while. We had a free ride for 50 years on Moore’s law. What I would argue is because not only did things get exponentially faster, but cost fell exponentially as well. And that drove the creation of new markets at regular intervals. It was kind of a free ride.
Russ Altman: Very interesting.
John Markoff: Computing, went through these different stages, mobile phones in a sense happened because of cost and other related factors. Not because of brilliant innovation often.
Russ Altman: This is The Future of Everything. I’m Russ Altman, I’m speaking with John Markoff about innovation in the last couple of decades.
How much of it, I guess, how much of it was designed and deserves credit, so let’s — and, how much of it was free luck and a free ride. So let’s dig a little bit deeper. So Moore’s law, in what sense — First of all for those who are not familiar Moore’s law is the general idea that computing every 18 months, computing power roughly doubles. In a remarkable turn of events for the last 20 or 30 years, that actually has been true. There is a profound concern now that engineers will not be able to maintain that. And that that will lead to putting the brakes on a lot of things. I guess what you mean by we’ve, they’ve been lucky and been getting a free ride is that they didn’t have to worry about being particularly clever in their software or even in their hardware because they could count on Moore’s law giving them vastly greater computer power very soon.
John Markoff: Yeah.
Russ Altman: But what is the world like when that flattens out?
John Markoff: Well —
Russ Altman: Is that the concern?
John Markoff: Yeah. That’s the concern, so basically the cost of Silicon stopped falling at an exponential rate around 2015 because we’d hit that wall we all knew was coming. And that’s not to say it’s over; there may be some way around or some new acceleration. But for the moment things have slowed down dramatically. So we’re in this new era.
And I had this wonderful moment about two and half years ago it was actually Engineering School Industrial Partners Program here. Everybody was wringing their hands about how we’d hit the wall. I ran into this Harvard computer architect and he was just wild with enthusiasm. Because he said “Now it’s our turn.”
Russ Altman: Interesting.
John Markoff: You’ll make, and that’s in fact what we’ve seen. What we’ve seen is new architectural designs most of them in terms of chips that do AI kinds of algorithms better but that’s where the innovation has been. So, that is — we’re not saying that innovation is over but it’s not in the lock step acceleration model of Moore’s law. It’s based on human ingenuity.
Russ Altman: And this could be one of the changes that opens up the world and allows other places, other institutional structures to kind of take over in the innovation leadership.
John Markoff: Absolutely, for example lets hypothetically, everything in AI is now about big data. So that argues that those with most data win. Google, Amazon, Apple, China.
Russ Altman: Yes.
John Markoff: As in a nation-state. But what if there is an algorithmic that break through that works off of small data. That changes the entire playing field.
Russ Altman: Right.
John Markoff: So it could — there’s interesting stuff happening in AI approaches that may not be based on the current state of the art neuro-nets and deep learning.
Russ Altman: Fantastic. So okay, so you’ve written a lot about, you know I love — I love that you’re a journalist. I should say as a disclaimer to anybody listening I am not a journalist. My mother sometimes calls, My mother is only person I know, for sure listens to this show. Hi mom, I know you’re listening. She’ll call me every now again and said “You let that guy off the hook. You’re a bad journalist.” And I had to say mom, I’m an enthusiast. I’m not a journalist.
But as a journalist, I love you’re trained to look at situations and kinda cut the B.S. from what’s really happening. And you’ve looked for example at AI and jobs. What’s your impression, there are a lot technologists saying Well, don’t worry about this, we’re gonna everybody will adapt. And they’re forging ahead.
John Markoff: Yeah.
Russ Altman: When you look at it from your journalistic trained eye, what do you see as the reality?
John Markoff: Okay. Couple of things. I had to come around to that view. I was part of that, in fact I helped create that current sort of period of anxiety that we’re in about jobs and technology. I began writing about the impact of AI and white collar around 2010, 2011. And I was in that camp. Then I had an important sort of interaction with Danny Kahneman, who is the behavioral economist.
Russ Altman: Very famous.
John Markoff: I was on this rant about how automation would come to China and It would lead to disruption because of the loss of jobs. And he stopped me and he said you don’t get it. He said, in China they’ll be lucky if the robots come just in time. And I said what do you mean? He walked me through the demography of modern China. I began looking around the world. And all of sudden I realized that the most important things happening in the world today are demography not technology.
Russ Altman: Ah.
John Markoff: All over the world except for Africa and the Middle East, the world is aging at a rapid rate. And he’s really right. The issue is care and dependency. So I changed the question I asked as a journalist. I used to ask when will there be self driving cars? Not anymore. I ask when will there be an robot that can safely give a shower to an aging human? And nobody has a good answer.
Russ Altman: This is The Future of Everything. I’m Russ Altman, I’m speaking with John Markoff who just changed the question. This is great. So, demography is driving technology is kinda the core concept that you just alluded to.
John Markoff: Yeah.
Russ Altman: Does that change our level of optimism? Should we now think, well, self-driving cars and AI for care of elderly? I think what you implied is not only should we be rooting for that we need for it to come soon or we for example might not have the work force to —
John Markoff: That’s right
Russ Altman: — to take care of our parents and ourselves in the next 20 to 30 years.
John Markoff: Absolutely. I mean Rod Brooks, who’s a pioneering roboticist, says with a bit of humor, that self-driving cars will be the first elder care robots. Which actually may be true. And if you think about that, if self-driving cars did show up, they could give people who are sort of bound to home new mobility. And that would be a very great thing.
Russ Altman: I Just had a very good friend say that their parents are driving and they don’t think they’re safe, and how people all over, certainly all over the country and probably all over the world, are trying to decide how do you have these tough conversations about many issues —
John Markoff: Yeah.
Russ Altman: — where there is a very important and difficult loss of autonomy associated with aging. You want to obviously support the elderly in a caring, loving way. But, they can be a danger to themselves and to others.
John Markoff: Yeah.
Russ Altman: And this is not a solved problem. And its only getting worse.
John Markoff: The world is gonna look so different in a half century. Already, more people in the world as a whole are older than 65 , than under five. By the middle of the century the number of people over 80 globally will double and will go up seven fold by the end of the century. That’s the most important factor in the world.
Russ Altman: So as you look at this, do you now worry so now I’m flipping my perspective a little bit. Do you worry that with this challenge to Moore’s law and the difficulty in getting that next doubling every 18 months that this is happening at kind of a perfect storm of just when we need Moore’s law the most, because were not, we do not have robots to help take care of my parents.
John Markoff: Exactly.
Russ Altman: Or to drive them around. I need them to exist soon. And now at the same time were having some technological resets. Is this a potential crisis?
John Markoff: Well, I think that the — there is a crisis, I think, in elder care. We do have to think about that as a society. The other question about markets and sort of the work force. The work force is not gonna change as fast as some people worry because of this slowing down. How many job categories, census job categories, have gone away in the last three decades? One. Elevator operators. The kind of rapid change. In 1995 when Jeremy Rifkin wrote the End of Work, the American economy grew more than it ever had grown in history in the next decade.
Russ Altman: Right.
John Markoff: The whole thing about jobs going away here we are in a full employment economy. We’ve had a half century of the micro-processor and a decade of deep learning. So something else is going on. It’s a more, and I think what the deal is, it’s very easy to point to jobs that might go away. It’s much more difficult to look at jobs that might be created. We have a very difficult time understanding what the future is gonna look like.
Russ Altman: I hate to be Mr. Renaissance, but I have spent time in Florence. And in fact the thing I was saying about the Bubonic plague. The farmers said we’re in big trouble now because there’s nobody to eat our food but they did not suffer because this middle class emerged of merchants, and people who created jobs and industries and guilds that didn’t even exist a hundred years before. There was plenty of economic churn to support these folks. It’s an exactly the example that you’re referring to. Actually amazingly good things in many ways happened when you had some free time.
So I’ve often wondered is the AI, robotic revolution if it ever happens. Is that actually gonna free up people to do things that we’ve had on our to-do list for a long time, that really society needs.
Fantastic. We should now talk about the work force. You referred to that a little bit. What is the challenge in training young people for the future that is hard to predict?
John Markoff: Boy, let’s see if there are good examples. You know, the nature of education has changing in interesting ways. Sebastian Thrun and others at Stanford predicted that were gonna have this new kind of education and universities would go away. Universities don’t appear—
Russ Altman: The MOOC, the massive —
John Markoff: That’s right, online classroom. And MOOCs exist now, and universities are still thriving. The visionaries are always wrong.
Russ Altman: We don’t know.
John Markoff: Yeah.
Russ Altman: This is The Future of Everything. I’m Russ Altman, more with John Markoff about the future of technology and computing, next on SiriusXM insight 121.
Welcome back to The Future of Everything. I’m Russ Altman, I’m speaking with John Markoff, about technology, history of technology and computation and the future of technology and computation. John, you’re currently working on a biography about Stewart Brands, who was associated with the he was a Stanford graduate student and he’s associated with the Whole Earth Catalog. I think you believe this to be a critical, kind of historical moment in time. So tell us about the Whole Earth Catalog, Stewart Brands, and why we should care.
John Markoff: Yeah, okay. First of all, Stewart was a Stanford student. He studied biology here in the 1950’s. He’s associated with a couple of very important events, that were instrumental in creating what I think of as a California perspective or world view, ideology. One of them was the Whole Earth Catalog. Before that there was something called the Trips Festival. Which was the most visible and most successful of these things that Ken Kesey organized called the acid tests.
Russ Altman: Ken Kesey was a famous LSD guy.
John Markoff: He participated in these experiments in Menlo park. They were financed by the CIA. Then the drug kinda leaked out into the surrounding community. And people like Stewart began experimenting with it. Some formally, and some recreationally. My generation experienced LSD as a recreational drug. But it was part of a cultural shift. And the Trips Festival which happened in January of 1966 in San Francisco at the Longshoremen’s Hall. It was organized by Stewart was important because it was the moment that the 10,000 hippies in the Bay area realized that there were 10,000 hippies. It created a community. There was a direct line to Haight-Ashbury and to the counter culture. It also led directly —
Russ Altman: Into the summer of 1968.
John Markoff: Summer of love, that’s right. All of that grew out of that moment, in a very direct sense. They hired to help organize it, this guy who had been a publicist for the Mime Troupe by the name of Bill Graham.
Russ Altman: Pretty famous guy.
John Markoff: He became famous, Bill Graham at that moment realized that there was money in music and the day after the Trips Festival he went out and leased the Filmore. So it led also directly to the San Francisco music scene. So it was the spark. So dial the clock forward a couple of years—
Russ Altman: What, just one quick question. What did they do at the Trips Festival? Was it a discussion, was it music?
John Markoff: It was all — it was several things. Stewart showed this multi-media slide show he’d produced called “America Needs Indians.” Which was important in the creation of the American environmental movement of the 1970’s. He showed that for the last time. But then a couple of rock groups like Big Brother before Janice, the Grateful Dead, not the Warlocks, let’s see who else played — three different rock groups played. And it was really the sort of the moment that you know the rock, the San Francisco rock concerts —
Russ Altman: By any chance was it Jefferson Airplane?
John Markoff: No, Jefferson Airplane wasn’t there they played before at the Family Dog —
Russ Altman: Okay they were a favorite of mine.
John Markoff: Favorite of mine too. As a matter of fact, I used them to title a book that I wrote. Yeah, so all that sort of happened the culture sort of emerged. But by that time, Stewart who was the bridge between the beat culture, which had been in North Beach in the 50’s and early 60’s and hippe culture. He was done with that. He moved down the peninsula he came down here to help organize an education conference festival that never really happened. And after that failure, this is sort of Silicon Valley cultural thing about fail fast. He had a mentor his name was Dick Raymond, who had something called the Portola Institute was just up the road here in Menlo park and Stewart got this idea, and it was largely because his friends were going off to communes. That he would create a catalog, perhaps a little bit like the Sears robot catalog.
Russ Altman: Which was a dominant thing in the 60’s and 70’s.
John Markoff: That’s right there was no Google.
Russ Altman: I remember spending hours in the Sears catalog.
John Markoff: That’s right. And there was no Google. How could you find interesting things? So he came up with this notion of a catalog of tools. And his idea was a truck store, that he would drive around to the communes. And he would sell them stuff they need. Well, he did that about two times and then he realized that communes had no money. So that wasn’t gonna work. So he pivoted, in a classic kind of Silicon Valley way
Russ Altman: This is great.
John Markoff: And he created this catalog that went from 1,000 copies in the fall of 1968, to winning the national book award in 1972. It really became the bible of my generation. And I can’t tell you how many people I’ve run into, that said you know I saw something in the catalog, and my life took a right hand turn, or a left hand turn. That it really changed people’s lives.
Russ Altman: This is The Future of Everything. I’m Russ Altman. I’m speaking with John Markoff about the Whole Earth Catalog. Okay so tell us more. How did it impact the world? Does it connect at all to the Silicon Valley that then emerged?
John Markoff: Okay, it’s super complicated. And I’m now writing Stewart’s biography, I’m trying to —
Russ Altman: Take your time because we have at least four minutes.
John Markoff: So in 1962, Stewart’s had just gotten out of the army and he was visiting the computer center at Stanford. And he saw something that really stuck with him. He saw these two kids sitting in front of a graphical computer display. Remember they didn’t exist at that point.
Russ Altman: This is very experimental.
John Markoff: Having what he thought of as an out of body experience and what they were doing is they were playing a game called Space War. Which was the first video game. That had been invented by at MIT and had been imported to Stanford and I would argue that that was the first inkling of a something called “cyber space.” Stewart saw it first. And he kept that in the back of his mind. In 1972 he shut down the Whole Earth Catalog, and he was sort of becoming a journalist. He wrote this really important article for Rolling Stone which dealt with the two laboratories on both sides of Stanford campus. One was the Stanford Artificial Intelligence laboratory and the other was Xerox Park, which had just opened. And that was the first window, that people like me had that there was this thing called the internet coming and there was this thing called personal computing coming. Stewart saw it first. And he alerted the world to it. So he was sort of playing the role of a journalist at that point. But you sort of dial the world even farther forward and he set up this thing called The Well in 1985 in Sausalito, and there too, it’s complicated. Because there was this explosion of what do you call it sort of digital utopianism. And he was part of that digital utopian movement.
Russ Altman: So he bought in.
John Markoff: Absolutely.
Russ Altman: So he moved from the counter culture, beats, hippies he came literally south 20 miles started seeing computers, starting thinking about the future and that is a direct connection then. And does that spirit? Maybe you’ve written this, and I apologize. I’ve read that the Whole Earth Catalog embodied a spirit that is still traceable to current Silicon Valley utopianism.
John Markoff: Yeah.
Russ Altman: Is that an overstatement?
John Markoff: It is a debated statement. There are two recent books this is where Stewart becomes kinda Rashomon. Franklin Foer’s “World Without Mind” — so there’s a Zeitgeist shift that’s happened. In 2016 Silicon Valley went from being able to do no wrong, to being able to do no right.
Russ Altman: It was an amazing turnaround.
John Markoff: Just turned. And the two books that best sort of capture this are Foer’s book. And he goes right back to Stewart and sort of — Stewart is patient zero. I think he gets it wrong.
Russ Altman: Okay that might’ve been what I —
John Markoff: And then there’s Johnathan Taplan’s book. It’s called “Move Fast and Break Things.” Very similar book, but he has a more sophisticated understanding of what happened. He goes back to the digital utopians and Stewart was one of them. But there was a second wave and those are the digital libertarians. And it went from utopianism to libertarianism and I think that’s the sort of arch. Stewart started as sort of sympathetic with Ayn Rand but he ended up in the middle of the 1970’s working in Jerry Brown’s administration — first administration. And he came away with this sense of the value of good government. So it’s just wrong to think of Stewart as a complete libertarian.
Russ Altman: I see.
John Markoff: That’s not what he is.
Russ Altman: So there’s another trail that says were gonna build this utopia. And you guys are preventing us from doing it. We are now libertarians because we want to be able to just build it.
John Markoff: Yeah.
Russ Altman: He wasn’t necessarily part of that strand —
John Markoff: No.
Russ Altman: But responsible, maybe, I don’t wanna overstate it, responsible use of — what would be the word — stewardship of this technology in an advancing —
John Markoff: He was very optimistic but Stewart was always someone who saw nuance and paradox. He is seen as the person who said information wants to be free. That’s not what he said. At the first hackers conference —
Russ Altman: Aha.
John Markoff: What he said was, information wants to be free and information wants to be very expensive. That’s Stewart. Understanding the nuance —
Russ Altman: That’s interesting because that information wants to be free you can trace directly to statements of the Google founders and the Facebook founders. That’s one of their mantras.
John Markoff: Yeah.
Russ Altman: And as we know, they have not always been led well by that mantra. And they’ve gotten themselves into very sticky, thorny situations because you need to moderate that with other considerations.
John Markoff: And Stewart is an optimist. He was particularly an optimist about technology having an important role and impact on the world. There’s this arc — the first sentence of Whole Earth Catalogs was “We are as gods, and we might as well get good at it.”
Russ Altman: Wow.
John Markoff: So 20 years ago with Danny Hillis, who’s this computer scientist, he set up this organization called the Long Now foundation to build a clock. A mechanical clock to run for 10,000 years as a demonstration of long-term thinking. It’s almost finished. Jeff Bezos picked up the tab, it exists. It’s in Texas.
Russ Altman: So were building it. Is it a pendulum?
John Markoff: It is not a pendulum — is it a pendulum? Let me think. Is it a pendulum? Yes. It’s a pendulum.
Russ Altman: It’s a physical device. It’s not like an atomic clock. We’re not counting cesium vibrations.
John Markoff: No, it will run from air flow and being wound by people for millennia. We hope. But Stewart now has got this de-extinction group called Revive and Restore. Which is sort of him trying to sort of deliver on that original vision of we are as gods. This notion of sort of humans and technology. And they’re trying to bring back the woolly mammoth. Or more importantly —
Russ Altman: These are like the seed banks and the DNA banking so that we can track species that are either extinct or going extinct.
John Markoff: Or modifying species like Coral to make them more resilient in endangered niches in the environment.
Russ Altman: It’ll be a great book. It’s coming out I’m sure as soon as you can finish it.
Thank you for listening to The Future of Everything. I’m Russ Altman, if you missed any of this episode listen any time on demand with the SiriusXM app.
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Computers are everywhere and humans are engaging with them in nearly everything they do. Knowing this, the question becomes: How do we design a world around us so that technology makes life better, not worse? James Landay, an expert in human-computer interaction, says the key to thoughtfully integrating humans with digital technology is to put people first.
This perspective draws on a philosophy known as human-centered or user-centered design. Within this approach, the first priority is to understand the problem vexing a particular population by observing, interviewing, and working with that population. Only once the problem is clear does the development of a solution begin. Typically, engineers and technologists have done the opposite. They’ve worked to develop the coolest technology they can think of, and then once it’s ready look around for a way to use it.
With human needs at the forefront, Landay’s research focuses on finding ways to use artificial intelligence technology to augment human performance. His current projects range from leveraging technology to encourage positive behavior change, to enabling kids to stay engaged in their education, to helping professionals stay healthy while feeling more connected to their co-workers and workplace.
Tune in to this episode of The Future of Everything to hear more about how Landay draws on user-centered design to develop technology that supports human needs. You can listen to The Future of Everything on Sirius XM Insight Channel 121, iTunes, Google Play, SoundCloud, Spotify, Stitcher or via Stanford Engineering Magazine.
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Biomedical data scientist Sylvia Plevritis is an expert in computational modeling of cancer risk and treatment options hidden in the remarkable quantity of data available today. Rarely is a tumor made up of a single mutation, she says, but more commonly of a mix of different mutations. Such heterogenous tumors may require complex combinations of drugs to produce the most effective treatments. That’s where computers can help.
Using mathematical simulations, Plevritis is helping patients and their doctors understand the genetic makeup of a given cancer for the purpose of identifying drug combinations that stand a better chance of success. Some of the models Plevritis works with can be run in an hour or less and yet return invaluable guidance that can save a patient’s life.
Plevritis says these computational approaches can even help those without cancer understand their inherent genetic risks to assess whether and when additional screening or risk-reducing interventions are warranted.
Join host Russ Altman and biomedical data scientist Sylvia Plevritis as they dive into the promising intersection of computers and cancer care. You can listen to The Future of Everything on Sirius XM Insight Channel 121, iTunes, Google Play, SoundCloud, Spotify, Stitcher or via Stanford Engineering Magazine.
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Political scientist Jeremy Weinstein has worked at both the White House and the United Nations. In both jobs, he encountered the ethical and policy concerns that new technologies can present to policymakers. As one example, he points to the fierce debate between Apple and national security experts over end-to-end encryption and the challenges investigators faced in accessing data on the iPhones of the perpetrators of a terrorist attack in San Bernardino in 2015.
He wants universities, like Stanford, to educate a new breed of engineer that he refers to as a “civic-minded technologist.” These engineers would consider ways in which technological advances could serve the public good, while also thinking critically about the impacts of new technologies on society.
In this spirit, Weinstein and two Stanford colleagues, Rob Reich and Mehran Sahami, have begun teaching a new course on the ethics and policy of technology to a large number of undergraduate CS majors. He says it’s critical that these nascent technologists learn from the start to think about the larger implications of their work – even before they write a single line of code. This is because code itself is not value neutral, and technologists must be able to recognize what values are being encoded in the programs they write as well as the competing values that might be traded off. This kind of preparation, he says, will help us as a society to more effectively realize the benefits and minimize the potential harms inherent in new technologies.
In his own research, Weinstein is applying his unique perspective to challenges of global poverty and human migration, where, he says, advances in artificial intelligence and machine learning are changing our understanding of two of society’s fundamental problems.
Join host Russ Altman and political scientist Jeremy Weinstein for an in-depth look at the ethical and political implications of technology. You can listen to The Future of Everything on Sirius XM Insight Channel 121, iTunes, Google Play, SoundCloud, Spotify, Stitcher or via Stanford Engineering Magazine.
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When Stanford’s Paul Yock was a young interventional cardiologist, he was frustrated by the complex, two-person process required to deliver life-saving stents. So, he invented a better way. His Rapid Exchange stenting and balloon angioplasty system, one of several inventions Yock is known for internationally, can be managed by just a single operator, making procedures like stent placement faster and safer. Yock is a man of many talents. He is a doctor, a professor of bioengineering and of mechanical engineering, and an innovator who combines these many interests to solve problems in healthcare.
He says that the aha moments work beautifully when they come, but they are too often based in luck. For the rest of us, there is a better and more consistent path to transformative medical tools he calls the biodesign process. It starts, first, with a deep understanding of the medical need. The next step is brainstorming and iteration, preferably by non-hierarchical, multidisciplinary teams of doctors, engineers and business people. Diversity of insights and expertise leads to better inventions, Yock says.
Join host Russ Altman and physician-inventor Paul Yock for an exploration of innovation as a process that can be learned and repeated. You can listen to the Future of Everything on Sirius XM Insight Channel 121, iTunes, SoundCloud and Stanford Engineering Magazine.
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Margaret Brandeau may carry a business card that reads Professor of Management Science and Engineering, but her expertise is in using complex systems models to solve challenges in public health policy. For instance, she recently created a sophisticated computer model of the national opioid crisis, which led her to the stark –and surprising – conclusion that it may take a short-term rise in deaths to ultimately reduce them.
She didn’t come to that conclusion lightly, but made no less than 10 models of drug-user behaviors to analyze interventions. Nonetheless, each model led her to the same basic conclusions. First, policies are needed that lead to cutbacks in the number of prescriptions of opioids for pain management. Second, fewer prescriptions of opioids for pain management will cause some individuals to turn to more-deadly heroin. Third, because of this unintended consequence, it is essential to also scale up treatment for opioid-addicted individuals. But her fourth finding was the most sobering of all: No one of these policies will suffice; they must all be combined if we are to curb the opioid epidemic – and the epidemic is not likely to abate significantly anytime soon.
Mathematical modeling is an art, Brandeau says, but it’s a powerful art that is only going to grow in influence. Her advice for those looking to solve big problems – from reducing sodium intake to battling the return of measles – is to start out simple. Know what question you want to answer and create a model that captures just the most salient elements of the problem. Things will flow from there.
Join host Russ Altman and mathematical modeling expert Margaret Brandeau for a deep look at the many ways algorithms are changing our understanding of and approaches to the challenges of public health. You can listen to the Future of Everything on Sirius XM Insight Channel 121, iTunes, SoundCloud and Stanford Engineering Magazine.
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By last count, there are 5,000 genetic diseases in the human body.
A few are merely annoying, but far more are devastating and without cure. In the last decade, much popular attention has been focused on the potential for stem cells and gene therapies to cure these once-intractable diseases. While the promise is clear, Tony Oro cautions patience.
Oro is a dermatologist and associate director of the Center for Definitive and Curative Medicine at Stanford. He is a leading expert in the scientific and ethical dilemmas such therapies raise. He and many others say cures are close at hand, but there is still much to be determined before these therapies can be pronounced both effective and safe.
Join host Russ Altman and medical ethicist Tony Oro for an inspiring but cautionary look at the promise of stem cell and gene therapies. You can listen to the Future of Everything on Sirius XM Insight Channel 121, iTunes, SoundCloud and Stanford Engineering Magazine.
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Brain cancers are known to be elusive and clever killers, but Michelle Monje, associate professor of neurology and neurological sciences, is helping to find new treatments through a better understanding of how healthy brain cells develop and how cancers often hijack those very same processes in order to grow themselves.
Monje says that the last decade has seen tremendous progress in our understanding of how cancers thrive and in the development of new drugs and therapies to kill the killers. Unfortunately, many chemotherapy drugs powerful enough to kill cancers also cause lasting impairment of the patient’s cognitive abilities, a condition known among doctors and patients as “chemobrain.”
Monje is on the hunt for more effective and safer treatments for brain cancer. One exciting development, she says, is a quickly evolving field known as immunotherapy, which harnesses the body’s own immune system to recognize and to kill cancers. She’s also exploring a new drug that can help specific brain cells, known as glia, counteract the harmful effects of chemobrain.
Join host Russ Altman and brain cancer expert Michelle Monje for an inspiring look at new and safer treatments for brain cancer. You can listen to the Future of Everything on Sirius XM Insight Channel 121, iTunes, SoundCloud and Stanford Engineering Magazine.
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The current process for diagnosing autism requires no less than 10 hours of intensive doctor-to-patient observation.
It is expensive and time-consuming, says autism expert Dennis Wall, an associate professor of pediatrics and of biomedical data science at Stanford. Wall is developing new ways to tackle the problem.
He says advances in machine learning, a branch of artificial intelligence focused on training computers to perform important medical tasks, stand to shake up the field. He’s developing computer models that can spot autism by watching just a few minutes of video of a child at play in their natural home environment.
With these technologies, diagnosis happens in as little as four minutes. In addition, Wall says, scoring can be done by non-experts, rather than highly trained psychiatrists, lowering the costs further. He thinks such AI models could reduce bottlenecks and get kids with autism into treatment sooner, a key to maximizing the treatment’s effect.
Beyond diagnosis, Wall says that digital technologies together with AI are also changing therapeutics. For example, he’s developing augmented reality applications, one for Google Glass, that can help autistic kids better recognize and learn emotional cues – anger, joy, sadness – in the faces of others, a particular challenge for those with autism. Another that goes beyond the wearable form factor to even more ubiquitous technologies – your phone – is an app that can teach social skills through fun but poignant AI-enabled games, such as charades, where imitation advances the child’s social skills as the AI engine tracks progress automatically.
Join host Russ Altman and autism expert Dennis Wall for a peek into the rapidly changing world of autism diagnosis and treatment. You can listen to the Future of Everything on Sirius XM Insight Channel 121, iTunes, SoundCloud and Stanford Engineering Magazine.
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Mechanical engineer Xiaolin Zheng really likes to burn things, but she is more like a modern-day Prometheus than a pyromaniac. She uses combustion to create minute nanoparticles of various metal oxides that have many practical and valuable uses in today’s world.
For instance, she has created nanoparticles that can turn water into hydrogen peroxide using only energy from the sun. Hydrogen peroxide is a powerful disinfectant that kills microbes and removes other pollutants from water. Zheng imagines creating inexpensive, portable, solar-powered water purifiers to help the two to three billion people in the world who lack access to plentiful potable water.
Join host Russ Altman and Xiaolin Zheng for a fascinating look at the benefits of combustion. You can listen to the Future of Everything on Sirius XM Insight Channel 121, iTunes, SoundCloud and Stanford Engineering Magazine.
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In safety engineering, ergonomic differences between men and women are important. Conventional seat belts do not fit pregnant women properly and motor vehicle crashes are the leading cause of fetal death related to maternal trauma. Analyses of sex differences have led to the development of pregnant crash test dummies that enhance safety in automobile testing and design.
In medicine, osteoporosis has been conceptualized primarily as a women's disease, yet after a certain age men account for nearly a third of osteoporosis-related hip fractures. Tragically, when men break their hips, they tend to die. We don't know why. Analyzing the interaction between sex and gender in osteoporosis has led to new diagnostics for men, and the search for better treatments is underway.
In these and many other cases, historian Londa Schiebinger points out that if we don't consider sex or gender analysis, past bias may be perpetuated into the future, even when governments, universities and companies have implemented policies to foster equality.
The big question now, she says, is: How can humans automate processes that also contribute to creating a fair and equal society? Schiebinger highlights examples of efforts where computer scientists are working to create mathematically rigorous definitions of fairness in order to develop and optimize algorithms that guarantee fairness. There is much work to be done, but as Scheibinger sees it, there is a big opportunity for these algorithms as well as the robotic systems they will enable to challenge and eventually reconfigure gender norms.
Join host Russ Altman and historian of science Londa Schiebinger for a closer look at how to employ methods of sex and gender analysis as a resource to create new knowledge and stimulate novel design. You can listen to the Future of Everything on Sirius XM Insight Channel 121, iTunes, SoundCloud and Stanford Engineering Magazine.
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Stanford radiation oncologist, Billy Loo, says that a new generation of radiation therapy technology called PHASER will be so fast that it can even compensate for the patient moving during treatment.
High-energy X-rays will be fired so quickly, like a flash photograph, that motion is frozen and radiation can be more precisely focused on tumors. His research team is also finding that such ultra-fast “FLASH” radiation kills cancer cells through new biological mechanisms while causing less damage to healthy tissues.
Loo says that while radiation benefits two-thirds of U.S. patients, half of patients with cancer around the world lack access to these curative technologies. To address issues of access, the Stanford Radiation Oncology and SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory team is designing PHASER to be a mobile unit that will fit in a standard cargo shipping container and can be powered by solar energy.
Join host Russ Altman and radiation oncologist Billy Loo for a discussion of advances in radiation therapy that are giving new optimism to cancer patients and others. You can listen to the Future of Everything on Sirius XM Insight Channel 121, iTunes, SoundCloud and Stanford Engineering Magazine.
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Carlos Bustamante is an expert in genomics—the study of genetic variation and its effects on the living world. He says genomics holds tremendous promise but, so far, virtually all sequenced DNA comes from European blood lines and this presents a problem.
Without greater diversity in the genomic data that is collected, he notes that we cannot fully reap the benefits of this knowledge, particularly in areas such as healthcare.
"Genomics is the new oil," Bustamante says, of the opportunities that lie ahead. It's being used for everything from studying rare diseases to developing more effective drugs. Before its potential can be fully realized,however, genomics will have to address its diversity problem. The more genetic variants that are represented in the genomic data collected, the better equipped we'll be to understand and improve human health.
Join host Russ Altman and geneticist Carlos Bustamante for a peek into the wonders of genomics.
You can listen to the Future of Everything on Sirius XM Insight Channel 121, iTunes, SoundCloud and Stanford Engineering Magazine.
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Why do well-off public schools often demand that parents supplement school programs with personal contributions? Why do many rare diseases receive the lion’s share of donor attention and money? Is basic science being driven by the whims of big donors?
These are questions that keep Stanford political philosopher Rob Reich up at night. Reich says that philanthropy is at an ethical crossroads in which the heart often leads the head in determining which causes get showered with money while other, perhaps more deserving, ones go without.
Join host Russ Altman and Rob Reich for a look at the promise and peril of philanthropy and what can be done to make it serve rather than subvert democracy.
You can listen to the Future of Everything on Sirius XM Insight Channel 121, iTunes, SoundCloud and Stanford Engineering Magazine.
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Of the many nations that have implemented some measure of digital democracy, none perhaps has had more success than Estonia. Toomas Ilves, a Distinguished Visiting Fellow at the Hoover Institution, would know: He served as president of the Baltic state for two terms. Ilves says that all Estonians have verifiable digital identities and they use them to vote, sign legal documents, order prescription medication, file taxes and more online.
Estonian digitization began with schools and banking in the 1990s. Online voting followed in the early 2000s. Today, a third of Estonians vote online. Faith in the system is high, Ilves says. The country has a single voter registry and voters can confirm – and even change – their votes right up to the deadline. Estonia’s latest effort is a comprehensive genome project that will fuel a new era of personalized medicine.
Join host Russ Altman and former Estonian President Toomas Ilves for a broad conversation about the challenges and the promise of digital democracy.
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In hospitals across the world, the unmet need for end-of-life palliative care threatens to overwhelm the few doctors who are equipped to adequately provide counseling that can help patients die on their own terms. There are just too many patients and too few doctors.
Stanford’s Nigam Shah, an expert in medical informatics, says that such scenarios may soon become a thing of the past. Artificial intelligence, founded on tens-of-thousands of data points gathered from millions of patients, is flipping such age-old scripts to change how and with whom care conversations happen. It is but one example of the many ways AI is reshaping medicine, but these major advances are not without ethical concerns, Shah says.
Join host Russ Altman and Nigam Shah for in-depth look at the growing influence of “data-driven medicine.”
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The worlds of academic economics and ride sharing are not so far removed – just ask Stanford labor economist Paul Oyer. When Oyer wanted to study the gig economy, he didn’t do it from afar; he became an Uber driver.
Oyer says lessons from the gig economy hold deep lessons for the job market for more traditional jobs. Uber’s surge pricing, for instance, is more than a payment structure – it entices Uber drivers to work odd hours or at times of peak demand. He says Uber is constantly reworking its payment structure to ensure that the company and its drivers’ interests are aligned to reduce workforce turnover.
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It’s nothing we haven’t already heard – the news you read is being shaped by the ubiquitous presence of social media. So-called “fake news” spread by bots and social media may continue to influence American elections and, ultimately, democracy.
Alex Stamos, the former chief security officer at Facebook and an adjunct professor with Stanford’s Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, explained at a recent live taping of “The Future of Everything” that the emergence of social media has made everyone a potential publisher. “We will never go back to the era in which a small number of people control the flow of information,” Stamos says.
While social media can be credited with democratizing the dissemination of information, these platforms have also become a hotbed of false and misleading content spread by domestic and foreign actors. Solving the “fake news” problem is extremely difficult, Stamos explains. “It turns out that regulating social media actually means asking social media companies to regulate people’s freedom of speech.” The danger here, Stamos emphasizes, is that this regulation will be done in a way that benefits the short-term interests of a company and does not uphold basic human rights.
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The next job search you conduct will likely be shaped by artificial intelligence. In the age of LinkedIn and Monster.com, job hunters can count on their resumes being screened by non-human intelligence. So what does this mean for the future of hiring?
At a recent live taping of the Stanford School of Engineering podcast “The Future of Everything,” Adina Sterling, an assistant professor of organizational behavior at Stanford Graduate School of Business who studies labor markets, said that roughly three-quarters of the job applications received by major companies will be touched in some way by artificial intelligence. Because these hiring bots look for very specific criteria, qualified applicants may be screened out early in the process if their resumes don’t contain “the right buzzwords to get through the filters. It’s just as likely today as it was 20 years ago that a diamond in the rough will be overlooked,” she said.
While the use of artificial intelligence allows for gains in efficiency for both job seekers and potential employees, there is the danger that AI algorithms will embody and perpetuate existing bias. Sterling noted that she has been encouraged to see that companies are moving with a lot of caution in the area of AI and hiring. There is a recognition that machines can’t do this work on their own and that, at a minimum, a supervised AI hiring process is necessary.
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Earthquakes come in species, says Greg Beroza, professor of geophysics at Stanford and an expert in seismology.
There are, of course, the well-known sudden shocks, but there are also “slow earthquakes” that transpire imperceptibly in contrast to the obvious temblors, but which can measure 7 on the Richter Scale or more — a major quake by any standard.
Beroza knows about slow and other species of earthquakes because of a recent explosion in the availability of seismic data recorded by an expansive network of sensors throughout California and elsewhere around the world. One hundred times each second, 24 hours a day, every day, each of these sensors records seismic data. What they reveal is reshaping our understanding of earthquakes. The goal, he says, is not necessarily to predict earthquakes — an ideal that may never be achieved — but simply to understand them better. Beroza says that data can help prepare us for “The Big One.” Join host Russ Altman and earthquake expert Greg Beroza for a deeper look at the evolving and expanding science of seismology.
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Like clockwork, every time a large natural disaster hits and wipes out billions in built infrastructure, public officials, developers and private citizens cry, “never again.”
And every time, equally like clockwork, very little gets done, says Stanford civil engineer Anne Kiremidjian, one of the world’s foremost authorities on constructing buildings that can withstand major natural disasters.
She says there are technologies available that could move us toward stronger, safer buildings, but a lack of political and economic will is holding us back. What’s needed, Kiremidjian says, is the culture of resilience that has helped certain major metropolitan areas bounce back from disaster stronger than ever. That spirit is lacking in other cities and the result is months or even years of recovery. Join host Russ Altman and civil engineer Anne Kiremidjian for a look inside cities that are built to last.
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While Alzheimer’s disease has cut short too many lives and devastated more families than can be counted, its root causes and effective treatments have eluded researchers for decades.
But, says Stanford bioengineer Annelise Barron, new science indicates that many Alzheimer’s cases are coincident with viral or bacterial infections in the brain, pointing to possible new approaches to treatment or prevention.
Barron says that one human protein in particular, LL-37 — which she refers to as a “Ninja protein” that protects against infections — can bind with and detoxify A-beta, the protein that forms the harmful plaques in the brain that are the hallmark of Alzheimer’s. Inducing LL-37 could be a way to prevent Alzheimer's.
Join host Russ Altman and Alzheimer’s sleuth Annelise Barron for a hopeful look at the latest science of Alzheimer’s disease.
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While climate change is likely to bring rising sea levels, more frequent and stronger storms, as well as vanishing glaciers and coral reefs, experts say there are other lurking impacts that could have a more lasting effect on human behavior and health.
Marshall Burke is a professor of Earth System Science and a fellow at Stanford’s Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies who says that recent research shows rising global temperatures will lead to more wars, higher crime rates and greater infant mortality.
On a positive note, he points out that such predictions are starting to seep into cost-benefit calculations and that present-day mitigation could be felt sooner and more deeply than presently thought. Burke says that, in the new math of climate change, the benefits of investment vastly exceed the costs, but we must act soon.
Join host Russ Altman and climate change expert Marshall Burke for a broader look inside the unanticipated effects of climate change and what we can do today to prevent them from becoming reality.
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Riana Pfefferkorn is a digital security expert and Cryptography Fellow at the Stanford Center for Internet and Society. She says that we are living in the “Golden Age of Surveillance,” in which the growing ubiquity of data-rich smart devices has produced a fundamental tension between the rights of users to protect their personal data and the needs of law enforcement to investigate or prevent serious crimes.
She says draft legislation in Australia could have major privacy and security implications across the globe, including in the United States. If passed, the bill would require tech companies that do business in Australia to design their devices (such as smartphones) and communications services (such as encrypted messaging apps) to include digital backdoors allowing law enforcement to access data. The bill is raising concerns among privacy and computer security experts who argue that, in the wrong hands, such backdoors could lead to troubling breeches of personal privacy and data security.
Join host Russ Altman and guest privacy expert Riana Pfefferkorn for a glimpse into the future of digital privacy.
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Professor David Magnus, director of the Stanford Center for Biomedical Ethics, says that artificial intelligence and machine learning are reshaping the landscape of medical care, but the underlying algorithms and the overarching challenges of how to employ the data are begetting new and vexing ethical questions.
Magnus explains that concerns begin with who designs, builds and pays for the algorithms and whether the ultimate goal of AI is better outcomes for patients, or better bottom lines for providers. The ethical dilemmas only grow from there as experts consider what data is incorporated, how it is gathered and what short cuts medical decision makers might take when interpreting the lessons AI reveals.
The good news, Magnus says, is that medical AI offers many profound positive benefits, but to realize them successfully the profession must grapple now with the ethical dilemmas in order to avoid pitfalls.
Join host Russ Altman and guest bioethicist David Magnus for a sobering look at the future of artificial intelligence in medicine.
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While well-known mapping apps have transformed the daily commute through better information, Stanford electrical engineer Balaji Prabhakar is exploring ways to digitally incentivize people to improve their driving habits.
He calls it “nudging,” and says that small shifts in commute times — just 20 minutes earlier or later — can make a considerable impact on the day’s congestion in highly trafficked urban areas, like San Francisco.
A few years ago, Prabhakar made headlines with a Stanford-only study that used small monetary incentives backed by larger lottery-like rewards to reduce peak-hour commuting on campus. He later undertook a similar but much larger effort in Singapore to promote off-peak train travel. In four years, participation in Singapore grew from 20,000 to 400,000 users.
Join host Russ Altman and guest Balaji Prabhakar for a look at the very latest ways science is improving the daily grind for millions of commuters across the world.
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Am I saving enough for retirement? Will I outlive my money? Can I count on Social Security?
These are but a few of the nagging questions most every American grapples with when contemplating retirement.
Gopi Shah Goda of the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research (SIEPR) says that the migration from once ubiquitous and relatively secure pension programs to today’s self-directed retirement plans are producing anxiety and indecision in retirement planning precisely at the worst time, and it could spell a coming crisis. Throw in a teetering Social Security system and it’s no wonder so many Americans do not know when — or if — they will ever truly retire.
Join host Russ Altman and economic policy expert Gopi Shah Goda for a look at the true state of U.S. retirement planning.
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While cryptocurrencies Bitcoin and Ethereum gather the lion’s share of headlines, few know that these “killer apps” are just the first generation of products based on a relatively new ledger-like technology called blockchain.
Founder of the Center for Blockchain Research at Stanford, Dan Boneh says that blockchain is generating a swell of excitement among coders and computer scientists not witnessed since the earliest days of the internet. While the true killer apps are still to come, Boneh says it is never too early to contemplate what blockchain is, where things might be headed and what the consequences might be on a personal, financial and societal level.
From cryptokitties to mining bitcoin, host Russ Altman and guest cybersecurity expert Dan Boneh explore the state of blockchain as we know it.
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Sarah Billington began her career in civil engineering studying concrete, a remarkable material that has literally shaped the world as we know it.
Concrete is one of the most-consumed materials on Earth — second only to water, but this one material alone is also responsible for 6 percent of carbon dioxide emissions in the atmosphere.
That cold realization and a dispiriting morning meeting spent in a bunkerlike concrete-walled room led Billington to alter her research focus. She now studies how we can construct buildings designed to enhance human health and well-being. As a part of their research for the Stanford Catalyst for Collaborative Solutions, Billington and James Landay are co-leading efforts to better understand how buildings could be central contributors to our sense of fulfillment in life. From artistic, behavior-nudging digital displays to spaces that inspire a sense of belonging and creativity, tune in as host Russ Altman and Sarah Billington discuss a new and more holistic approach to building design.
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Over the last three-quarters of a century, global corporations have lost sight of their broader role in society and now are focused almost exclusively on serving their shareholders.
That reality has had dire consequences for the workers of the world who are, quite literally, dying for a job, says guest Jeffrey Pfeffer, a professor of organizational behavior at Stanford Graduate School of Business.
Pfeffer says the workplace is the fifth leading cause of death and that as many as 1 million people worldwide die each year from overwork. The biggest culprits are long hours and micromanagement that leave workers both exhausted and unsatisfied.
Pfeffer insists that breaking the deadly cycle rests in encouraging companies to be as good at stewarding human capital as they are at financial capital. It all begins by getting a better handle on the problem through more research. Because, Pfeffer says, you can’t improve what you don’t measure.
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Populism can be a powerful force in a democratic society.
But according to Anna Grzymala-Busse, a Stanford professor of political science and senior fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, once in power populists often implement authoritarian policies that threaten the very foundations of democracy itself.
Grzymala-Busse says that the antidote to authoritarianism is to defend democratic norms, to speak out and to vote. She discusses the issue in this episode of The Future of Everything radio show with host Russ Altman.
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From Bitcoin theft to the embarrassing revelations in the Sony Pictures hacking to the recent assault on the U.S. election, the threats of international cyberattack are growing in both number and consequence.
As our technology steadily becomes more cloud based, these threats will only grow and could be soon be directed at fundamental institutions we all trust and rely upon, including the electrical grid and our financial systems.
Our guest in this episode of The Future of Everything radio show is Andrew Grotto, the William J. Perry International Security Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute (FSI) and a reserach fellow at the Hoover Institution, both at Stanford. Grotto was senior director for cybersecurity policy in both the Obama and Trump administrations. He says that successfully counteracting these looming threats is among the most serious and challenging issues of the present day. Grotto cautions that it is not just a technical challenge anymore, but a matter of national security that will require American resilience, leadership and a return to the basic norms of civil discourse.
Join Russ Altman and Andrew Grotto for a clear-eyed look at the challenges of cybersecurity in the era of cloud computing. Listen here on the latest episode of The Future of Everything radio show.
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Beginning in the 1980s, medical doctors started treating pain with increasing amounts of opioid medications.
That shift was driven in part by an effort by the profession to be more humane to those in serious pain, but also by misinformation and aggressive marketing by the pharmaceutical industry, which wrongly convinced doctors that their drugs were both safe and not addictive.
According to Anna Lembke, an associate professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences, those changes wrought the current opioid crisis in which millions are addicted to heroin-like medications and many more are dead from overdoses caused by unregulated, immensely powerful street drugs.
Lembke tells Altman their profession is slowly reckoning with a long-simmering problem of their own making by questioning the indiscriminate prescription of opioids and by championing new approaches to dealing with addiction, including more behavioral dependencies like those to sex and gambling.
A prescription for addiction is on the table in the latest episode of The Future of Everything radio show with host Russ Altman.
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When Stanford’s Martha Crenshaw, senior fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies and an expert on terrorism, is asked if she thinks terrorism is evolving, growing more widespread, violent and shocking by the year, she has one response: It’s complicated.
She says that many of those trends are true, but they are driven both by the intense motivation of the terrorists and by their ability to broadcast images and messages across the world in a flash. This ability to communicate, she says, is both a tool to shock opponents and to recruit adherents. When combined, the result is a more-violent violence.
The obvious question soon follows: How can we fight terrorism? Crenshaw says that it is unlikely that terrorism will ever end, but one path to reducing its influence lies in resolving many of the civil struggles that make it a compelling option for so many organizations throughout the world.
Join host Russ Altman and terrorism expert Martha Crenshaw for a wide-ranging look at terrorism today, on The Future of Everything radio show from Stanford School of Engineering.
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Can an expectant mother’s exposure to air pollutants or even extreme temperatures impact her unborn child’s earning potential 30 years later?
Can paid family leave improve workforce attachment for new mothers?
According to Maya Rossin-Slater, economist and an assistant professor of health research and policy at Stanford School of Medicine, the answer to these and other questions is “yes.” She says that research on these topics can provide policy makers with more comprehensive information on the costs and benefits in their decision-making, which is especially important for policies that have disproportionate effects on the less affluent.
Rossin-Slater says, for instance, that just 14% of Americans have access to paid family leave from their employers and the numbers grow starker the further down the economic ladder a new parent happens to be. The consequences are hurting not just future generations of Americans, but also American businesses, she says.
On this episode of The Future of Everything, host Russ Altman and Rossin-Slater discuss the many ways public policy decisions can affect families and America’s poor.
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It may not be widely known, but before he launched Apple, Steve Jobs lived for a year on a commune.
The fact that he became one of the wealthiest capitalists in America, however, should not surprise anyone who knows anything about the antecedents of Silicon Valley, says Stanford’s Fred Turner, professor of communication and history.
The truth is that there is a strong countercultural thread running through the fabric of today’s digital world. From “phreaking” scams of the long-distance telephone system to the Whole Earth Catalog, those who sought to disrupt society often found comfort in computers. For proof, one need only consider the Utopian ideals that led to the ascendancy of the internet itself — universal, free and limitless. Seen in that light, Facebook is about as communal as it comes. Nonetheless, while all that freedom has made many people very rich, very fast, it has not come without a cost to our social consciousness and our social fabric, says Turner.
In this episode of The Future of Everything radio show, Russ Altman and Fred Turner look at the somewhat surprising communal roots of today’s social, digital world. Tune in, if you dig.
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From Oculus Rift to Samsung VR, the era of virtual reality is right around the corner, if not already upon us.
But what are the psychological impacts of VR and what are the best uses of this much-hyped technology — the “killer apps,” as they say?
Jeremy Bailenson is a professor of communication at Stanford and author of the new book, Experience on Demand. He has been studying virtual reality and its effects on humans since 1999. Back then, his dream was to create virtual office spaces that might absolve people of the need to commute every day. These days, he studies how to make virtual reality even realer and which uses are closest to becoming the indispensable apps that could turn VR from a curiosity to a must-have in every home and office.
From exploring the subtleties of virtual donuts to the most effective ways to teach, Bailenson says the best uses of VR may not be those that leap immediately to mind. Join The Future of Everything host Russ Altman and Bailenson for a grand tour of the very latest in virtual reality.
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Much has been made of the use of personal data gathered from social media and other channels to target voters during the 2016 U.S. Presidential election, but what reasonable expectations should we have in age of ubiquitous and “free” connectivity?
That question is the research focus of Stanford’s Michal Kosinski, a professor of organizational behavior in the Graduate School of Business. Kosinski has a doctorate in psychology and applies his interests to study how algorithms leverage our electronic footprints — our digital posts, photos, likes, purchases, travels, searches and so forth — to predict, or even manipulate, how we will behave. He says that, given 200 of your ‘likes’ on Facebook, a computer algorithm is better at predicting how you will behave than your spouse.
While Kosinski says that 99% of such data analytics are used in good and positive ways, the remaining 1% is causing a lot of handwringing around the world. In this episode of “The Future of Everything” radio show, host Russ Altman and Michal Kosinski for a deep discussion of life is like in what Kosinski refers to as the “post-privacy world.”
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As the global population approaches 10 billion and the effects of climate change continue to alter familiar agricultural patterns, the world is already witnessing a transformation in how and where it gets its food.
Even diets are changing as people move away from traditional animal proteins, like beef and pork, to fish and vegetable sources.
Stanford’s Roz Naylor, the director of the Center on Food Security and the Environment, says those shifts could lead to a world that looks a lot different than today. For instance, Naylor says that aquaculture, better known as fish farming, is now the fastest growing sector of the global food industry. And, thanks to changes in the industry, rapidly growing Africa stands to become a hotspot for agricultural entrepreneurs.
On this episode of “The Future of Everything” radio show, Naylor discusses these and the many other ways in which the business of feeding the world is changing right before our eyes.
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It’s been said that sewers were one of the major advances in human history and the Clean Water Act of 1972 was one of the most successful environmental laws ever enacted in this country.
Despite it all, America’s current waste treatment infrastructure is aging rapidly and poorly equipped for the needs of the 21st century and beyond. Such is the estimation of Stanford civil and environmental engineer, Craig Criddle, one of today’s leading thinkers about what words "waste treatment" means to society today.
He says our waste management system is messy, expensive and grossly inefficient energy-wise. On this episode of Stanford Engineering's Future of Everything radio show and podcast, Criddle and host Russ Altman explore how engineers are working on new approaches that see ‘waste’ not as waste at all, but rather as a raw material that can produce more energy than it consumes and create cleaner water for agriculture and other non-potable applications.
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The bacteria of the human digestive system have been likened to tiny factories that ingest raw materials — food — and processing them into finished products — nutrients — that our bodies can absorb and use.
In fact, many of the complex carbohydrates and proteins critical for life cannot be absorbed unless first digested by bacteria. Yes, we may all be stardust, but not, it seems, before we are microbial excrement.
Scientists refer to this complex community as the “gut biome,” a stew of hundreds, perhaps thousands of species of bacteria that live in the human gastrointestinal tract. Like many communities, not all inhabitants are there for good. Sometimes, things go awry. Understanding what happens then, and how to correct things when they do, is the life work of Stanford’s Michael Fischbach, associate professor of bioengineering.
Fischbach says that many afflictions, from Crohn’s to cardiovascular disease, may be caused by dysfunction or imbalances in our microbial communities. The solutions, ranging from the severe, such as scorched-earth antibiotics that kill everything in sight, to the creative, such as fecal transplants from healthy guts to ill, are reshaping our understanding of life and medicine.
Join Fischbach and host Russ Altman, professor of bioengineering, as they delve into the gut biome on this episode of Stanford Engineering's Future of Everything radio show.
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While billions scroll their merry ways through Facebook and Twitter each day, behind the scenes are legions of reviewers scanning photos and video to prevent graphic content from making the newsfeeds of unsuspecting users.
Elsewhere, the faceless armies of the gig economy are making movies, building homes, driving Uber and working piecemeal to caption innumerable images for people too busy to do it for themselves.
Welcome to the future of crowdsourcing. While the collective actions of those on the frontlines of crowdsourcing save millions of others from drudgery and from psychological trauma, the ascension of automation is raising questions that human society has never had to deal with before. These are the “wicked problems” — questions in which success cannot be determined with certainty or where multiple, mutually exclusive goals must be delicately balanced to create an optimal outcome.
These are questions that Stanford's Michael Bernstein, an assistant professor of computer science and an expert on Human-Computer Interaction (HCI), grapples with on a daily basis. What is the optimal organizational structure for such crowdsourcing communities? What are the ethical implications of the gig economy? And, who are the right people to answer these questions?
On The Future of Everything radio show, host Russ Altman and Bernstein discuss those question and explore what our increasingly automated future will look like.
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One of the tradeoffs of modern medicine is that technology that allows physicians to save more lives also drives them closer than ever to the frontlines so they can administer care as quickly as possible.
They do so at great personal risk, says Stanford pediatrician Paul Wise.
Wise began his career caring for children during Guatemala’s brutal decades-long civil war and recently returned from service during the siege of Mosul, which forced out ISIS but took a tremendous toll on Iraq’s second-largest city.
His latest project is using custom apps to gather malnutrition data in rural Guatemala to bring care to the most-needy kids and to drive policy changes at the national level within that nation's Ministry of Health.
In the Future of Everything radio show, Wise and host Russ Altman explore the challenges of wartime pediatrics.
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Heart attacks, burns, strokes, disease and just plain-old aging can devastate human tissues.
But, emboldened by new understandings about the building blocks of life, engineers are applying their unique skill sets to creating replacement parts for the body.
It sounds like magic, says host and bioengineer Russ Altman, but it’s anything but. From synthetic mortars holding the biobricks of life together to new heart muscle, brain matter and skin tissue, bioengineering is on the precipice of a new age.
In this episode of The Future of Everything podcast and radio show, Altman and Sarah Heilshorn, associate professor of materials science, discuss the technical and ethical challenges of engineering new human tissues.
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As the digital world grows, the sheer amount of video and audio in our lives has become overwhelming.
It is easy to shoot and record, but few have the patience to endure the tedium of editing all that content into cogent stories. But, says Maneesh Agrawala, Forest Baskett professor of computer science, all that is about to change.
Agrawala is director of the Brown Center for Media Innovation at Stanford and says that advances in software and in artificial intelligence are making the editing of sound and images more like editing words with a word processor. Soon, the drudgery of the rough cut will be relegated to the past, empowering the storytellers to tell more, and better, stories.
In this episode of The Future of Everything radio show and podcast, Russ Altman and Agrawala talk about the coming age of multimedia editing.
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For years, cancer treatment was confined to three flawed strategies. You could cut it out with a scalpel, you could burn it out with radiation, or you could kill it with chemicals. “Today, we are amid a renaissance in cancer treatment,” says Stanford bioengineer Jennifer Cochran. “We are creating designer proteins and using them to deliver drugs or to harness the immune system to help stop this killer dead in its tracks.”
On this episode of The Future of Everything radio show, Cochran and host, fellow bioengineer Russ Altman, explore the very latest in the science of cancer treatment.
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Manu Prakash is a bioengineer, a physicist and an inventor, who has developed a $1.50 foldable microscope and the 20-cent “paperfuge” that are democratizing biosciences in parts of the world where resources are scarce and electricity is nonexistent.
Prakash’s passion flows from his deep love and understanding for how physics operates in the microscopic realm, in which bacteria, parasites and viruses thrive.
In this episode of The Future of Everything, he joins fellow bioengineer Russ Altman for an expansive discussion of the passions and the payoffs of the physics of our biological world from how certain biological systems self-assemble to the way inanimate droplets of water on a glass slide communicate with one another.
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From weaponized anthrax to killer strains of bird flu, we often hear only the worst of the worst when it comes to the microbes who share our world.
The truth, however, is far from horrific. Bacteria do far more good for us than bad, and most viruses are harmless.
In this episode, host Russ Altman, professor of bioengineering, talks to infectious disease expert David Relman about his studies of one very specific microbiome—the mouths of dolphins—which have revealed many types of bacteria previously unknown to science.
Relman offers a sobering (and encouraging) assessment of risks and benefits of getting to know the microbial world. The discussion that touches on everything from biosecurity to microceuticals to do-it-yourself fecal transplants.
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As a founding member and former chair of the Department of Bioengineering, possibly no one has enjoyed a better purview on the recent remarkable advances in biotechnology than Stanford's Russ Altman.
From genome editing to synthetic biology to cloning, the ethical challenges of the field are almost as great as the therapeutic upsides, and advances often outpace our ability to contend with the ethical aftermath.
Listen in as host Russ Altman and policy expert and bioengineer Megan Palmer, of the Center for International Security and Cooperation at Stanford, discuss the challenges that arise when biotechnology is used to solve one problem, but creates others in the process.
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The vast distances and extreme conditions of outer space make the prospects for remote control of exploratory vehicles extremely challenging, if not impossible. Stanford professor of aeronautics and astronautics, Marco Pavone, says the solution is to apply what we’ve learned about autonomous vehicles here on Earth to the mysterious reaches of space.
From vehicles that hop to swarms of robots to Gecko-inspired grippers, Pavone and host Russ Altman explore how autonomy is shaping the future of space exploration.
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On the eve of the 200th anniversary of the first publication of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, medical doctor and bioengineer Russ Altman and Stanford anesthesiologist Audrey Shafer reflect on the enduring relevance of the book many call the first science fiction novel.
From artificial intelligence to stem cells, climate change to organ transplantation, Frankenstein’s monster seems more relevant than ever before as a mirror on the moral and ethical implications of modern science and its creations. Learn more on this episode of the Future of Everything radio show.
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Living in quake-prone California, Russ Altman is no stranger to the impending threat of natural disaster, but watching a devastating hurricane season in full force, he's wondered whether there’s anything society can do to better prepare for — or even lessen— the impact of severe storms.
Geophysicist and engineer Jenny Suckale says that, while there is much we do not know about the future, there are ways we can work with — and not against — nature to defend ourselves from disaster. All it takes, she says, is a better Plan B.
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As a bioengineer, Russ Altman has long marveled at intersection of biology and engineering that is modern robotics. Recently, he found himself wondering: what’s the next big thing in this intriguing field?
Mechanical engineer Allison Okamura says that robots that incorporate the sense of touch — either to understand the world around them or to provide better feedback to humans — are stretching boundaries in a variety of areas, including in operating rooms and disaster zones.
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If you’ve ever flown coast to coast or around the world, perhaps you wonder, as “Future of Everything” host Russ Altman did recently, whether engineers know how to design small drones for purposes like delivering goods and/or performing services in urban airspaces.
But as Stanford mechanical engineer David Lentink explains, the physics of flight change unfavorably when aircraft get small. That's why his lab studies nature’s aviators: small birds, including some migratory species that weigh less than a cell phone. Their tiny frames pack enough energy to fly from Alaska to New Zealand, nonstop. Learn more about his research on the Future of Everything radio show.
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From his perch at Stanford, nestled in the heart of Silicon Valley, Russ Altman wonders whether the silicon-based electronics of which we Earthlings are so proud have the right stuff to help us explore the extreme environments of space?
Not really, says Debbie Senesky. She works at the intersection of aerospace and electrical engineering to develop new semiconductor materials that can survive the heat of Venus, where the surface temperatures are enough to melt lead. Learn more about her research on the Future of Everything radio show.
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In the Future of Everything radio show, Stanford’s Russ Altman and Euan Ashley discuss wearable technology, data and the extraordinary challenges when diagnoses elude physicians and their patients.
Ashley is a professor of medicine (cardiovascular) and by courtesy, of pathology at the Stanford University Medical Center. Listen to more episodes of the Future of Everything with host, bioengineering professor Russ Altman.
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In the Future of Everything radio show, Kwabena Boahen discusses the evolution of computers and how the next big step forward will be to design chips that behave more like the human brain.
Boahen is a professor of bioengineering and electrical engineering, exploring in his lab how these chips can interface with drones or with the human brain. “It's really early days,” he says.
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Getting lost seems to be a thing of the past, thanks to the ubiquity of Global Positioning System.
Our phones and devices simply tell us where to go — and how long it will take to get there. But what are the risks? In the Future of Everything radio show, aeronautics and astronautics professor Per Enge discusses the accuracy of the system, how to keep the signals safe, and how systems will continue to improve. Listen to more episodes of the Future of Everything with host, bioengineering professor Russ Altman.
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In the Future of Everything radio show, Amy Zegart explains just how worried we need to be about cyber threats.
Among the threats: the security of our nation and the safety of our children. “The cyber threat landscape is changing at the speed of cyber,” she says. “And our responses are changing at the speed of government. So there's a velocity problem.”
Zegart, co-director of Stanford’s Center for International Security and Cooperation and Professor of Political Science (by courtesy), is also the Davies Family Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution and directs the Cyber Policy Program.
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Getting a good night’s rest can be a struggle for many. Yet good “sleep hygiene” is critical to normal brain function and remaining healthy. Listen to bioengineering professor Russ Altman discuss the importance of rest with Emmanuel Mignot, the Craig Reynolds Professor of Sleep Medicine at Stanford School of Medicine. He discusses the phenomenon of narcolepsy in humans and dogs and some of its “bizarre symptoms,” how to get more rest and how sleep disorders impact our lives in ways we might not even recognize.
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In the Future of Everything radio show, Pamela J. Hinds, professor of management science & engineering, discusses how multinational companies can get the most from a work force operating across borders and time zones.
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What’s most likely to go viral? Where do online trolls come from? How do recommendation engines work? What do fitness apps tell us about the world?
In the Future of Everything radio show, Jure Leskovec, Stanford associate professor of computer science and Pinterest chief scientist discusses the power of social media.
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In the Future of Everything radio show, bioengineer Russ Altman and food entrepreneur Pat Brown discuss the creation of a better meat.
Brown, a Stanford professor of biochemistry, emeritus, devoted years to formulating meat from plant products that tastes and feels just like the real thing. Here’s how.
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In the Future of Everything radio show, Stanford’s Russ Altman and John Dabiri discuss renewable energy and technologies that are inspired by nature.
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Jennifer Dionne, an associate professor of materials science and engineering, talks about improving solar cells, creating invisibility, and how light could be used for less invasive medical procedures and cancer detection.
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The Future of Everything with Russ Altman: "Adding to the Senses with guest David Eagleman" David Eagleman, an adjunct associate professor in the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, discusses sensory addition through wearable technology. Originally aired on June 3, 2017, on SiriusXM. Recorded at Stanford Video.
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On the Future of Everything radio show, bioengineering professor Drew Endy discusses what's next for the bio-economy.
The question, he says, is, how do we get smarter at designing living systems? And the opportunity? “To focus attention on the fundamental tools by which people tinker and observe how biology is working.”
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At a live taping of The Future of Everything, a SiriusXM radio program hosted by Stanford bioengineering professor Russ Altman, two Stanford engineering professors discussed their contributions to two of the tech world’s most cutting edges: artificial intelligence and autonomous vehicles.
Computer scientist Fei-Fei Li and mechanical engineer Chris Gerdes spoke about their work pushing the boundaries of what machines can do, and the many ways that our lives will be impacted by interactions with technology in the very near future – if not today.
Li outlined some of the major advances that have pushed AI research forward in the years since she entered the field in 2000, a period in which data collection and computing power flourished and “started to converge in a way that most people didn’t expect.” After touching on her seminal work in automated image classification, Li moved on to some of her current projects “using AI to play the guardian angel role in health care.” For instance, she’s working on how sensors installed in senior living facilities can balance care with independence, and track living behaviors such as motion patterns, social activity, nutrition intake and sleep patterns – all of which could help early detection of things like dementia. “This is why I call it a guardian angel. It’s quiet, it’s continuous, it doesn’t interrupt your life, but it’s there for you and providing the help when needed.”
As a leader in the field of self-driving cars, Gerdes said he’s confident that we can soon give cars the skills of the very best human drivers, and maybe even better than that. The bigger issues, he said, have more to do with designing public policies for self-driving cars and asking questions like whether we program automated vehicles to do what humans do or what the law says. And we can’t afford to put these questions off. “The proliferation of this technology will be much faster than people realize,” Gerdes said. “The real risk is how do we make sure that it’s accessible, affordable, sustainable transportation for everyone.”
Li and Gerdes agreed that the question is less whether artificial intelligence and smart machines will happen, but rather what we need to do to responsibly prepare for them. “With the speed of technology improving, the age of humans and machines coworking and coexisting together has begun,” Li said. “And this is more reason to invest in more basic science research, from technology to laws to moral philosophy and ethics to really give us guidance in terms of how humans can coexist with machines.”
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In the Future of Everything radio show, Stanford bioengineers Russ Altman and Christina Smolke discuss advances in our ability to create medications and the implications it could have for billions of people worldwide in the not-too-distant future.
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In the Future of Everything radio show, Oussama Khatib, a computer scientist and director of the Stanford Robotics Lab, discusses a future in which robots and humans work together to solve some of the most difficult challenges facing humanity.
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In the Future of Everything radio show, Stanford bioengineer Russ Altman and chemist Carolyn Bertozzi discuss the biology of sugars on human cells and their role in potentially revolutionary cancer treatments. She also discusses cutting-edge new ways to detect HIV, type 1 diabetes, and other diseases early.
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Forget WebMD, a new technology will soon make it possible to bring a diagnosis lab into your bathroom.
On the Future of Everything radio show, Stanford's Russ Altman and electrical engineering professor Audrey Bowden discuss patient empowerment and the future of medical diagnostics.
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From sports injuries to bicycle accidents, we're hearing a lot about concussions. On the Future of Everything radio show, Russ Altman talks to bioengineer David Camarillo about head injuries, how to measure neurological damage, and what we can do protect our brains.
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The Future of Everything with Russ Altman: "Bendable Electronics with Zhenan Bao" Stanford Chemical Engineering Professor Zhenan Bao discusses innovations in bendable electronics, and how they will be used in the next generation of cell phones and even help amputees regain their sense of touch.
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In the Future of Everything radio show, Stanford bioengineer Russ Altman discusses the future of journalism, fake news, and how to become an informed media consumer with Janine Zacharia, a Stanford lecturer in journalism.
Zacharia was Jerusalem Bureau Chief and Middle East Correspondent for the Washington Post from December 2009 through April 2011, and previously chief diplomatic correspondent for Bloomberg News.
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We’re entering a different world when it comes to procreating. In this episode of the Future of Everything radio show, Stanford Bioengineering Professor Russ Altman talks with Stanford Law Professor Hank Greely, author of The End of Sex and the Future of Human Reproduction, about the medical, legal and ethical implications of giving parents greater control over the baby-making process.
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In this episode of The Future of Everything, bioengineering professor Russ Altman talks with electrical engineer Andrea Goldsmith about the high-powered wireless networks we must build for widespread autonomous vehicles, smart garbage pick-up, and battery recharging.
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In the not too distant future, our ability to measure very tiny things will change the way we fight diseases ranging from cancer to the common cold.
In the Future of Everything radio show, Stanford bioengineering Professor Russ Altman discusses how we will arrive at that point with Marc Salit, an adjunct faculty member in the Department of Bioengineering, who leads the Genome-Scale Measurements Group at the US National Institute of Standards and Technology.
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Keeping our private information away from hackers and spies is a growing concern for many Americans.
In the Future of Everything radio show, Stanford bioengineering Professor Russ Altman discusses how to keep our data safe with Jennifer Granick, Director of Civil Liberties at the Stanford Center for Internet and Society at Stanford Law School.
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En liten tjänst av I'm With Friends. Finns även på engelska.