ACIT Science Podcast

In this episode, our host Manuel Brenner is joined by Alejandro Daniel Noel. Alejandro got his masters from TU Delft working with Acitive Inference and the Free Energy Principle, and is now a full time software engineer at Google in Zürich, specializing on machine learning engineering of language models for conversational AI.



We discuss the free energy principle, active inference, the role of uncertainty, latent variable models, language and tokenization, causality, diffusion models, DALL-E, paths towards AGI, JEPA, language and consciousness, attention, self-attention, and many more topics.

Stay tuned for more episodes: https://mailchi.mp/0346443b6ddf/acit-global-signup

In this episode, host Manuel Brenner is joined by Leonard Bereska.

Leonard Bereska is a PhD Candidate at University of Amsterdam, studying long term memory.

We discuss a dynamical systems perspective on neuroscience, how machine learning comes into play, and how this is connected to memory and models of memory in machine learning, AI ethics, consciousness, the role of noise, the connections between Bayesian models, ensemble methods and regularizations, companies and states as superhuman intelligences, dopamine, and many more topics.

Find Leonard's recent publications:
https://arxiv.org/abs/2206.13336
https://arxiv.org/abs/2207.02542

Stay tuned for more episodes: https://mailchi.mp/0346443b6ddf/acit-global-signup

Note: Audio quality will improve around the 12 minute mark.

In this episode, Ingo Fiedler from the Blockchain Research Lab joins Manuel Brenner for a conversation about blockchains and cryptocurrencies.

Ingo Fiedler is Affiliate Professor at Concordia University, Montreal,  and co-founder of the Blockchain Research Lab, a non-profit dedicated to Scientific Research on Blockchain Technology for the Benefit of Society.

We discuss blockchains, Bitcoin and Ethereum, proof of work and proof of stake, the current crash of Terra and Luna, key concepts behind algorithmic stablecoins, why the holy grail of a functioning stablecoin is so important, humanitarian aspects of cryptocurrencies and the increasing role they play in developing countries, central banking, fiat currencies and inflation, the work of the Blockchain Research Lab, NFTs, self-sovereign identities, the metaverse, energy consumption of cryptos, how cryptos could help fund renewable energy plants and many more topics.

The blockchain research lab: https://www.blockchainresearchlab.org/

ACIT Global: https://acit-science.com/

In this episode, host Manuel Brenner is joined by Jonathan Banks, international director the Global Super Pollutants program for the Clean Air Task Force.

This is the final episode of a 4-part miniseries that ACIT is hosting together with the CATF. The Clean Air Task Force (CATF) is a global non-profit organization working to safeguard against the worst impacts of climate change by catalyzing the rapid global development and deployment of low-carbon energy and other climate-protecting technologies through research, analysis, public advocacy leadership, and partnership with the private sector.

In this episode, we primarily discuss the super pollutant methane. We discuss where methane emissions primarily come from, its impact on the climate, and how reducing emissions could have significant effects on reducing global warming. We cover why incentives are surprisingly aligned around methane, the role the gas and oil industry plays, detecting leaks via cameras and satellites, an increasing awareness around methane emissions, and a strong increase in political action in recent years.

We end by discussing why methane is a source of hope for the climate sector since it promises short term impact with good incentives and without relying on uncertain technologies.

Stay updated with future episodes and other events ACIT is hosting: https://mailchi.mp/0346443b6ddf/acit-global-signup

Find out more about the Clean Air Task Force: https://www.catf.us/about/

In this episode, host Manuel Brenner is joined by Carlos Leipner, international director the Global Nuclear Energy Strategy for the Clean Air Task Force.

This is the third episode of a 4-part miniseries that ACIT is hosting together with the CATF. The Clean Air Task Force (CATF) is a global non-profit organization working to safeguard against the worst impacts of climate change by catalyzing the rapid global development and deployment of low-carbon energy and other climate-protecting technologies through research, analysis, public advocacy leadership, and partnership with the private sector.

In this episode, we discuss nuclear energy, recent technological developments and third and fourth generation reactors, the important role nuclear could play in developing a carbon free energy sector, scaling and streamlining production, nuclear for hydrogen production, Europe vs. Asia, the risks of nuclear and how to assess them in light of recent developments in Ukraine, how the Ukrainian war has changed uranium prizes and changed the landscape again, how nuclear waste factors in, how European is changing its attitude towards nuclear energy, and many more topics.

Stay updated with future episodes and other events ACIT is hosting: https://mailchi.mp/0346443b6ddf/acit-global-signup

Find out more about the Clean Air Task Force: https://www.catf.us/about/

In this episode, host Manuel Brenner is joined by Lee Beck, international director of global carbon capture strategies for the clean air task force.

In this capacity she lead the carbon capture strategy, program, and team, which is by now represented in the US, Europe, and the Middle East, and has tripled in size in recent years.

This is the second episode of a 3-part miniseries that ACIT is hosting together with the CATF. The Clean Air Task Force (CATF) is a global non-profit organization working to safeguard against the worst impacts of climate change by catalyzing the rapid global development and deployment of low-carbon energy and other climate-protecting technologies through research, analysis, public advocacy leadership, and partnership with the private sector.

In this episode, we go in depth into carbon capture and storage, what the state of technology is, how policy shapes incentives in the carbon capture space, how carbon capture connects to more ambitious climate goals and negative emissions, how carbon pricing has changed the landscape, what pilot projects are being built, how the US and Europe differ in mentality and how they can be complimentary, optimism and optionality, and many more topics.

Find out more about the Clean Air Task Force: https://www.catf.us/about/

Stay updated with future episodes and other events ACIT is hosting: https://mailchi.mp/0346443b6ddf/acit-global-signup

In this episode, Manuel Brenner is joined by Armond Cohen.

Armond Cohen is co-founder and Executive Director of the Clean Air Task Force, which he has led since its formation in 1996.

The Clean Air Task Force (CATF) is a global non-profit organization working to safeguard against the worst impacts of climate change by catalyzing the  rapid global development and deployment of low-carbon energy and other climate-protecting technologies through research, analysis, public advocacy leadership, and partnership with the private sector.

This is the first episode of a 3-part miniseries that ACIT is hosting together with the CATF.



In this episode, we discuss what the CATF is and how it works, current paradigms in the climate movement, the importance of optionality, why wind and solar will probably not be exclusive solutions to the issue of climate change, how to advance a carbon-free energy sector in developing countries without falling back to neo-colonial policies, optimism vs. apocalyptic thinking in the climate movement, politics and partisanship in the US and internationally and how they interact with innovation in the energy sector, what changes the endorsement of the CATF by the effective altruism foundation have made possible in recent years, and much more.



Find out more about the Clean Air Task Force:

https://www.catf.us/about/



Stay updated with future episodes:

https://mailchi.mp/0346443b6ddf/acit-global-signup

In this episode, Amal Ounali is joining our host Manuel Brenner for a discussion on international criminal law, European law, how national laws and international laws interact (and sometimes collide), human rights, discrimination, and many more topics.



Amal is studying for her Master of Law at the University of Geneva and is currently doing am exchange in the University of Utrecht, focusing on criminal law in a European and transnational context.



Find out more about ACIT under https://acit-science.com/

In this episode, host Manuel Brenner is joined by Rim Jasmin Irscheid. Rim is a doctoral candidate in the Music Department at King's College London, working on experimental music and 'world music' festival culture in Europe. Her research sits at the boundary between ethnomusicology and sociology.



We discuss the controversial history of the term "world music", the role music plays in narratives of integration and in the way Germany is dealing with its past, the instrumentalisation of narratives of other cultures, hallmarks of experimental music, the role of experimental music in Germany and the Middle East, making money in the modern music scene, organizing music festivals and the importance of life music, the role of Spotify and Youtube in today's music industry, affective musicianship, and many more topics.



Find out more about ACIT: https://acit-science.com/

In this episode, we are joined by Jasper Götting, PhD Candidate at the Institute of Virology of the Hannover Medical School, where his research focuses on the sequencing and monitoring of viruses.



We discuss what a virus is, the differences between RNA and DNA viruses, how we are all infected by Herpes viruses, and why this matters for organ transplants. We delve into flu viruses and corona viruses and some of their elegant and dangerous features, monitoring in the context of pandemics, virological weather forecasts, pandemic risk, manmade pandemics vs. natural pandemics, the risks of gain-of-function research, and the early warning center in Berlin.

We talk about Jasper's engagement in the Effective Altruism community and how this has shaped his career choices, about wild animal suffering, meat production, 80 000 hours, and many more topics.



The podcast is hosted by Manuel Brenner.

In this episode, we are joined by Noah Weber, CTO and Head of Machine Learning at Celeris Therapeutics and lecturer at FH Technikum Vienna.

We discuss the challenges of developing new drugs, protein degradation, the promises of AI in revolutionizing the field, the pipeline Celeris Therapeutics is developing, and how graph neural networks and geometric deep learning come in handy in modeling protein interactions.

We talk about AI transforming medicine at large, from genomic-based diagnostics to a completely new outlook on longevity.

We close by discussing general artificial intelligence, machine learning and statistics, reinforcement learning, AlphaGo, software development vs. fundamental research, and many more topics.

The podcast is hosted by Manuel Brenner.

Find out more about us on: https://acit-science.com/

In this episode, host Manuel Brenner is joined by Julius Berner. Julius is a PhD Student at University of Vienna, where his research focuses on the mathematical analysis of deep learning at the intersection of approximation theory, statistical learning theory, and optimization.

We begin by talking about deep learning and its relationship to machine learning and artificial intelligence. We then delve deeper into the mathematical theory behind deep learning, distinguishing between approximation, generalization and optimization, and discuss some of the most important results and insights of recent years.

We talk about scientific machine learning and how mathematics, computer science and physics can come together, Julius' research in partial differential equations, and how neural networks can help solve them.

We close by discussing a typical research day, the difference between working theoretically and practically, what motivates research on a daily basis, the importance of not knowing where things are going, how you come up with ideas through geometric intuition, and Julius' favorite books.

In this episode, we are joined by Marcel Moosbrugger, computer science PhD Candidate at Vienna University of Technology.

We talk about getting into coding and computer science, the advantages of being a researcher in computer science and implementing ideas quickly, the foundations of computing and mathematics, Gödel incompleteness, the halting problem and how it connects to free will and determinism, Marcel's work on the halting of probabilistic programs and its relationship to debugging, how formal methods are becoming increasingly important in making industrial applications like the Amazon Web Services smart contracts more secure, and how industry in science are working closely together on the frontier of AI.



The podcast is hosted by Manuel Brenner.

Today's guest is Thore Graepel, research group leader at Google Deep Mind and Chair of Machine Learning at University College London. We talk about intelligence, Thore's interest in games and what makes them so important for AI research, game theory and social dilemmas, the importance of seeing intelligence from a multi-agent perspective, the spectacular story behind AlphaGo, how self learning AI has changed chess and Go, how human creativity can be inspired by artificial creativity, predicting personality from Facebook data, the risks of AI, Thore's favorite books, and much more.

The podcast is hosted by Manuel Brenner.

Driek Deferme is a law PhD student at KU Leuven, investigating the role of time limitations in civil and criminal law. We talk about the origins of the law, the importance of time limitations, the role of evidence, the recent abolishment of time limitations around sexual abuse of minors, the moral values of our societies, criminal law and civil law, and the different responsibilities of legislators and judges. We discuss the daily life of a law PhD student, the upsides and downsides of doing a PhD and research in general, and we close by discussing our favourite books.

Today we are joined by Benjamin Bargetzi, Senior Account Manager at Google, psychologist, neuroscientist, and president and founder of ACIT.

We talk about Ben's career, his decision to go into the business world despite his passion for academia, what lessons he has learned in his successful career, what the differences between business and academia are, and what the two might learn from each other.

We then go into the overlap between business and psychology, what psychology can teach us about ourselves and our biases, how biases relate to the free-energy principle, and how the free-energy principle in turn might relate to dopamine.

We talk about philosophy, the influence and potential pitfalls of Friedrich Nietzsche, and the usefulness of engaging both in philosophy and science.

Finally, we talk about the history of ACIT, its vision, and ways to participate in ACIT. If you are interested in joining us, contact us through our website https://acit-science.com/ or reach out to us on LinkedIn.

The podcast is hosted by Manuel Brenner.

In this episode, we are joined by Györgi Buzsaki, Biggs Professor of Neuroscience at NYU. Györgi Buzsaki is one of the most respected neuroscientists working today, and his influential work on memory, sleep, neural syntax, and many other things, has been cited over 100 000 times.

He has also authored two fascinating books called "Rhythms in the Brain" and "The Brain from Inside Out", both of which are aimed at a neuroscientific, but also more general audience.

We talk about the inside-out perspective to the brain, brain rhythms, the importance of oscillations, what neurons see (and don't see), how everything in the brain scales logarithmically, neural diversity, the key features of potential artificial brains, how AI could be inspired by neuroscience, and many more things.

The podcast is hosted by Manuel Brenner.

In this episode, we are joined by Will Millard. Will has two Masters degrees in public policy and is now working on implementing several research projects for the London-based think-tank Centre for Education and Youth CFEY (https://cfey.org/). 

We talk about Will's motivation, the importance of education in general, different educational philosophies and the political dimensions of how they shape public policy, systemic problems in the education system, the big challenges schools face during the pandemic, merits and downsides of remote learning, and a outlook on how schools in the future might look like.

The podcast is hosted by Manuel Brenner.

In this episode, we are joined by Corrado Pezzato, Ph.D. candidate in self-adaptive robot architectures at TU Delft in the Netherlands.

We talk about teaching robots to plan for the future, the uncertainty of the world, behavior trees, the free energy principle, connections between neuroscience and robotics, information seeking, habits, the future of robotics, the dangers of AI, exploration and exploitation, what it means to be a scientist, and many other things.

The podcast is hosted by Manuel Brenner.

In this episode, we are talking with Marvin Däumichen, director of research and knowledge transfer for the MIND foundation, and Ph.D. candidate studying sociological implications of cannabis discourse on digital media.

We begin by chatting about the role online spaces play in shaping discourse around cannabis, the way state actors and educators need to take this into account, and what role drugs play in the development of values like personal responsibility.

This episode then connects to our previous episode on psychedelics with Moad ab del Hay and delves deeper into the current state of psychedelic science, with a focus on the work the MIND foundation is doing in advancing the scientific context for therapeutic use and the enculturation of psychedelics.

You can find out more about the MIND foundation under
https://mind-foundation.org/

The podcast is hosted by Manuel Brenner.

This is part 2 of our conversation with Moad Abd El Hay. Moad is a neuroscientist Ph.D. student at the Excellence Cluster CellNetworks in Heidelberg and founder of the UniMind network, a Europe wide initiative that organizes journal clubs on the scientific study of psychedelic substances at universities.

The second part of our conversation is relatively self-contained, and serves as an introduction to the topic of scientific research into psychedelic substances, from its history and its challenges to its potential, some of which is realized in what has been coined the "psychedelic renaissance".

The podcast is hosted by Manuel Brenner

This is part one of our conversation with Moad Abd El Hay, neuroscientist PhD student at the Excellence Cluster CellNetworks in Heidelberg and founder of the UniMind network, a Europe wide initiative that organizes journal clubs on the scientific study of psychedelic substances (psychedelic research will be adressed in part 2 of our conversation).

We explore Moad's work on temperature perception from a biochemical perspective, talk about why it is important for neuroscientists to start by studying simple systems, how heat receptors work and why they makes chilli peppers taste hot and menthol taste cold.

In the second half of the conversation we talk about some of the most pressing problems of modern science. We address the constant pressure to medicalize research, and how this interferes with foundational research. We talk about the problematic incentive structures in a broken publication system, power politics, and the lack of education in statistics, leading to p-hacking, small sample sizes and negligence of multiple comparisons.

The podcast is hosted by Manuel Brenner.

In this episode of the ACIT Science Podcast, we are talking with Marcel Schliebs, who is currently pursuing his Ph.D. in Political Data Science at the Oxford Internet Institute, working in the context of the Computational Propaganda Project.

We are discussing the influence of foreign actors in the 2016 and 2020 elections in the US and the spread of misinformation around the current Covid crisis. We talk about the rise of computational propaganda, which actors are involved, who is targeted (from the Western liberal democracies to the respective regime's political opponents), and what incentives bad actors might have for spreading fake news.

We talk about how technologies have transformed the ease with which misinformation is sown, how deep fake media might exacerbate the problem in the near future, and what steps the big tech companies, intelligence agencies, and governments can take and are taking against this.

We talk about the challenges of a data-driven approach to inferring causalities in the complex landscape of computational propaganda, and about
Marcel's future research topics.

The podcast is hosted by Manuel Brenner.

We talk about the psychological, philosophical and linguistic perspectives on taboos, how they relate to humor, why taboos and their respective breaking plays such a special role in our societies and subcultures, and how thinking about the importance of taboo breakings can help us understand dramatic misunderstandings within our societies.

We discuss how changes in the role the work of art plays in our societies has re-defined some elements of taboo breakings, how we tend to confuse the signifier and the signified, how the euphemistic treadmill keeps on introducing new taboo words, and how taboo breaking in politics relates to populism.

We chat about humor, the place of the jester and the carnival medieval societies and the connections to Marxism and class relationships.

We end by discussing the role of humor from an existentialist perspective, linguistics and Noam Chomsky, and the overemphasis that is often put on the role language plays in constituting reality.

The podcast is hosted by Manuel Brenner.

In this episode, we are talking to Ph.D. candidate Travis Greene from the Institute of Service Science in Taipei, Taiwan, about the philosophical, ethical, and judicial implications of modern data science, machine learning algorithms, and recommender systems.

We talk about the ethical responsibilities of individual data scientists, a wider perspective on the role of behavioral big data in our societies, and the moral dilemma associated with building potentially harmful algorithms.

We discuss the difference between American and European approaches to data privacy and protection, the GDPR, the recent court rulings around Privacy Shield by the European Court of Justice, how we could shape online rights around ideas of building our own narrative online, how recommender systems of the future should take ideas around human well-being and flourishing into account, and how they are related to religions in giving us closure in complex information environments.

We end the conversation by talking about how scientific work prospers from personal contact, conferences, and collaborations.

The podcast is hosted by Manuel Brenner.

In this episode, we are joined by Beatrice Ellerhoff, a Ph.D. student in  climate physics at the Institute for Environmental Physics in  Heidelberg.

We talk about her work in analyzing long term climate variations going thousands of years back, the different time scales involved in the climate, and why it is so important to understand them in order to predict future variance of the climate.

We talk about Beatrice's book "Mit Quanten rechnen" about quantum computing that she recently released in collaboration with Springer, and her work with the science communication platform "Many-Body Physics“.

We chat about why changing fields can be helpful and fun, how theoretical methods from completely different fields can resurface in current research, how jazz music relates to science (and also does not), and what the most interesting scientific question being pursued at the moment is.



The podcast is hosted by Manuel Brenner.

For our second episode, we are joined by Cambridge-based biochemistry Ph.D. candidate Niklas Freund.

We talk about the nuts and bolts of the genetic machinery at the heart of all living systems, about different layers of conceptualizing DNA, from the chemical to the biochemical to the biological, learn about the field of synthetic biology and the attempts to construct DNA with novel chemical ingredients like Xeno nucleic acids, and hear how researchers like Niklas are trying to teach polymerase to work for them based on fascinating, Nobel-prize winning lab techniques like directed evolution.



We address the current COVID crisis, what role PCR tests play in it, how genetics could shape medicine of the future, and what there is to fear and look forward to. We close by talking about what makes science so great and what makes it so difficult, the passion and emotion that young scientists should bring to the game, and what important lessons can be learned along the way.

In this episode, we are joined by Ella Crane and Alexander Schuckert, both of who are currently pursuing their PhDs in the fields of quantum computing and quantum simulation.

We get into the basics of quantum computing, the differences between quantum computers, quantum simulators, and classical computers, the potentially most useful applications of quantum simulators such as high-temperature superconductors and quantum chemistry, open-source packages such as IBMs Qiskit, the interaction between industry and universities, the pursuit of what is most interesting vs. the pursuit of what is most useful, and the most fascinating open questions that science has to offer.

The podcast is hosted by Manuel Brenner.