Zhens' | Podcast on RSS.com

Zhens'

by Zhen Rong Yap and Zhen Wei Yap

Natural Sciences Technology

Season 2

Finding Truth in Atoms and Bits

Eito Miyamura (Twitter: @Eito_Miyamura) is the President of the Oxford University Blockchain Society and is exploring the intersection of AI and Blockchain. In this 1hr+ session, we discuss web3 and geopolitics, chips and AI, noise and truth. Tune in for a great session! Time stamps: 00:27 Hackathons all over the world 02:28 Oxford Blockchain Society and web3 18:44 Web3 - Geopolitics and War 24:37 Bits and Atoms - Long Live TSMC 31:26 What are universities? + Learning programming 40:02 Finding truth in a world of complexity 46:00 More AI content than content made by humans? 50:02 Misinformation - premise, argument and conclusion 58:48 Eclectic Eito, Japanese Nationalism, Masayoshi Son of Softbank 01:04:46 Inspirations - Doug Leone 01:07:25 HomeDAO / Oxford Crypto Village 01:009:59 Where to reach out?

The Intersection: Art of Podcasting, Immunology and Technology

Technology has not only advanced the field of science through new methods and inventions, but it has also made podcasting a more accessible and diverse platform for exploring a wide range of subjects. PhD candidate at University College London, Ursule Demael shares her love for biosciences. She topped her year at Oxford in biomedical science and runs the HOLOBIONT podcast. We discuss about T-cells in immunotherapy, biotech and her interests in podcasting. Links of interest: https://twitter.com/HOLOBIONT_ https://sites.google.com/view/www-holobiont-com/home Timestamps: 00:31 The New Year 01:08 Background 05:56 Direction of COVID-19 12:19 T-cells and Immunology 17:30 Holobiont Podcast https://open.spotify.com/show/3nGItqmYzJaostOe6imR2A 22:47 Computation and Biology 26:15 Interdisciplinary Research and Nucleate - Empowering Biotech Leaders https://www.nucleate.xyz/ 35:04 Why did you start the Holobiont Podcast https://anchor.fm/holobiont 39:57 Any other podcasters you listen to? 42:24 Who inspires you?

Season 1

Impossible Materials for Impossible Missions

How to do the impossible!? Dr. Scott Roberts is a materials technologist at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory in the Materials Development and Manufacturing Technology Group. He develops new materials, processing techniques, and technologies for the use in the aerospace field. He is as close to an inventor as it gets! Listen to a world class expert in bulk metallic glass, porous metal 3D printing and living life! Tune in for a great session! NASA JPL page: https://scienceandtechnology.jpl.nasa.gov/scott-roberts Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/scottroberts4/ Google Scholar: https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=LRw8nicAAAAJ&hl=en Consulting: http://metallicglassconsulting.com/about_us/scott_roberts/ Timestamps: 01:10 Love for cats 05:03 Working at JPL - inventing for space! 10:53 Inventing within the Materials Development and Manufacturing Technology Group (Impossible design specifications) Metallurgy Facility: https://scienceandtechnology.jpl.nasa.gov/metallurgy-facility 18:11 What is a technologist at JPL? 25:09 Can a metal also be a glass? Bulk Metallic Glass for robots: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2016/11/161129103309.htm Scott’s PhD: https://thesis.library.caltech.edu/8049/ 45:54 Flying your technology on space missions Bulk Metallic Glass Gears for Lunar Night Capable Actuators: https://www.hou.usra.edu/meetings/survivethenight2018/pdf/7019.pdf 50:49 NASA 2022 Spinoff - ultrasonic + additive manufacturing? Article: https://fabrisonic.com/fabrisonic-featured-in-nasa-spinoff-magazine/ 55:59 The impossible again! - Porous metal 3D printing Article: https://www.3dprintingmedia.network/nasa-jpl-team-shows-results-of-porous-metal-printing-pbf-process/ 01:05:35 The molecular replicator 01:07:30 Technology vs Climate Change 01:14:55 Science is sales 01:22:05 Love of national parks Utah National Parks: https://www.nps.gov/state/ut/index.htm 01:29:40 Exploring and appreciating cities 01:32:17 Best advice received 01:36:12 Next steps 01:39:44 To find Scott’s work and reach out

Design, Technology and Ukiyo-e

‘Reaching back through space and time to Ukiyo-e masters of the past.’ Bram Tan is an artist with an industrial design background. He enjoys thinking broadly about the world and how everything technological works. He also believes that artistic pursuit is an affirmation to oneself that the future WILL be positive and good. He makes Ukiyo-e prints with a 3D printer. Ukiyo-e is a genre of Japanese art which flourished from the 17th through 19th centuries. https://www.bramtan.com/ Timestamps 00:52 Summer in Paris Andrew Huberman on dopamine and the brain https://youtu.be/LG53Vxum0as 03:37 Design work - Ukiyo-e - Japanese Art 11:29 Connecting people to artists through space and time 19:20 Science nerd, art, and technology 28:02 What is industrial design? Original Apple computers 38:34 Designing the designer Grasshopper https://www.grasshopper3d.com/page/download-1 Algorithms for grasshopper https://www.food4rhino.com/en 52:16 Contact by Carl Sagan 54:48 Imagining the future! 01:04:43 Difference in living in Malaysia vs UK vs France 01:09:02 Bunker club trip to Poland for Ukraine 01:14:41 Truly realising the war 01:20:22 Discussion around power 01:25:20 War and Art 01:27:35 The Settlers of Catan 01:32:30 Where can people find your work?

Reinforcement Learning for medicine and life

Paul Festor is a PhD candidate in computer science at Imperial college, London working on applying reinforcement learning to sepsis. He is passionate about bringing AI and machine learning to the healthcare industry and helping to save lives. In this session, we discuss many topics from ancient civilisations to the pursuit of science to his experience doing a PhD, digging deep during the COVID-19 pandemic, and finding perspective. He also talks about his experience about how we are just a few key actions away from amazing experiences. Tune in for a great session! Research Group: https://faisallab.org/members/paul-festor Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/paul-festor/?originalSubdomain=uk Timestamps: 00:55 PhD Project 1:34 Sepsis 3:38 Reinforcement learning on data from ICU beds and sensors 5:06 Framing the reinforcement learning problem and difference with other machine learning methods 10:16 Gamification in healthcare 16:34 Sifting through ICU data 18:42 Motivation for the PhD 21:04 Pure and applied research Imperial College Professor Eric Laithwaite on superconductors: Magnetic River 1975 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OI_HFnNTfyU&ab_channel=ImperialCollegeLondon Professor Richard Feynman’s nanotechnology lecture: "There's P lenty of Room at the Bottom” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4eRCygdW--c&ab_channel=MuonRay 25:04 Other technologies 27:47 Most difficult part of a PhD / low income SWE? 33:03 Trends in machine learning academia 38:19 Bringing value to the world through data science, AI, and software engineering 39:51 French Tertiary Education system 48:33 Learning Reinforcement Learning by reinforcement 49:32 Thoughts about ancient and modern civilisations 55:32 Nihilism and appreciation of the adventure of life 01:01:57 Doing a PhD, getting stuck, and finding perspective 01:15:58 AI news - Oxford Union debates ethics of AI with an AI https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-59687236 01:24:14 Deepmind co-founder Mustafa Süleyman and Inflection AI on conversational AI https://techcrunch.com/2022/05/13/inflection-ai-led-by-linkedin-and-deepmind-co-founders-raises-225m-to-transform-computer-human-interactions/ 01:27:58 AI on mobile devices, productivity, app development 01:37:05 Impact in science communication and making AI and data science more accessible to doctors 01:51:47 Quantifying uncertainty 01:56:02 Piano in stations worldwide and planting seeds https://www.ted.com/talks/dotan_negrin_searching_for_the_key_of_life 02:05:48 Next steps 02:10:35 Where can people find your work and reach out to you?

Materials, Energy, and Consciousness

Sahasrajit Ramesh is a freelance consultant in business strategy and finance in the power sector, previously working at Aurora Energy Research. He topped his year in materials science at the University of Oxford and did his 4th year at MIT in computational materials. He writes a blog on personal growth and spirituality. He is also looking to launch a coaching business and online products related to spirituality and psychotherapy. He is a deep thinker that is not afraid to share his emotional experiences to help others. Tune in for a great session! 00:45 Working and living in London 02:09 Working at Aurora Energy Research 07:14 How do you think the energy market is going to change? 10:30 Thoughts on COP26 14:29 For purpose businesses e.g Olio 15:35 What is the future of energy? Hardware or software? 19:11 Web3, energy, and infrastructure 22:57 Materials Science at Oxford 30:00 Academics, research and culture at MIT vs Oxford 37:34 How did you top your year at Oxford? 40:21 What is your favourite material? 43:31 Spirituality coaching and psychotherapy 01:13:36 E-book on spirituality and the thoughts of benefitting financially from helping others 01:32:00 Self-doubt and world views 01:41:00 The myth of the specialist? 01:42:40 Navigating imposter syndrome and introspection 02:00:33 Blog on spirituality, consciousness, and introspection 02:04:17 5 day plan instead of 5 year plan 02:12:12 My journey into consciousness 02:15:02 Where can people find your work or reach out to you?

From Acting to Venture Capital

Michelangelo Valtancoli is an early stage VC investor at Stride.VC and previously the podcast host of Almost Founders, where he provided high quality, straight to the point information on being a founder, raising, and building. He placed top 10 in Bayes Business School and was an avid actor in Italy and Michigan, USA during his year abroad. In this 1hr+ session, we discuss acting entrepreneurship, venture capital, AI in the entertainment industry and approaches to acting. Tune in for a great session! Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/michelangelovaltancoli Are you raising pre-seed to series A? Send me your Pitch Deck: michelangelo@stride.vc VC and Founders 1:15 Early stage VC as a first job https://stride.vc/ 5:29 How would you describe VC (Venture Capital)? 8:04 Building vs VC - the contagious enthusiasm of founders 13:14 Working with and learning from big names in VC 19:31 Why go to VC after talking about entrepreneurship on Almost Founders? 25:15 Almost Founders podcast https://open.spotify.com/show/6EMNZGQ0jbyMJdAQRyFn40 30:44 Getting information - using twitter and finding ecosystems 34:41 Team interactions in EF and VC - how is VC and the startups ecosystem changing? https://www.joinef.com/ 42:49 Keeping on top of new changes and information + generalist vs specialist fund 52:52 Starting another podcast? 1:00:25 Gen Z vs previous generations 1:03:50 What motivates you to help out and work with students? 1:09:25 London vs Europe VC ecosystem 1:11:45 I am a VC t-shirt! Loving VC! Acting and the Entertainment Industry 1:12:46 Acting experience - does it make it easier to do podcasting? 1:16:58 Stepping into a character, body language, and most difficult character to play 1:27:35 Dissertation on AI affecting the entertainment industry 1:31:48 AI in collaborative storytelling, comedy and non-standard patterns of thinking (Deepmind) https://computationalcreativity.net/iccc21/wp-content/uploads/2021/09/ICCC_2021_paper_118.pdf 1:40:31 Getting back into the entertainment industry... but as a VC! Impact and motivations 1:42:48 Curiosity as motivation for creating impact 1:45:23 Michelangelo’s inspirations: Dad >> Matthew McConaughey (What is a son without his father? - Dune) 1:47:54 What are the next steps? 1:49:12 Where can people find your work?

Concept Engineer, Community Engineer, and Token Engineer

Jack Chong is the President of OX1 Incubator, the only ideation-to-seed stage incubator in Oxford which awards £50,000+ equity-free grants, and is a PPEist at Christ Church, Oxford. In this 1hr+ session, we discuss the entrepreneurial space in Oxford, London and Stanford, philosophy of technology, and the RICH brunch club. He's a builder and thinker at heart fashioning himself as a concept engineer, community engineering, and a token engineer. Tune in for a great session! Blog: https://www.jack-chong.com/ 0:55 Background on how we met 1:50 Jack’s journey from aspiring diplomat to tech founder and the hacker house https://www.jack-chong.com/aboutme/ 7:00 Tech scene in Jordan 7:46 On the FBI candidates in Jordan 9:01 Currently building in web3 and crypto! 10:26 Where do you see yourself in the ecosystem of deeptech, biotech and crypto scientists and engineers? 12:09 What is your theory of ideas people vs objects people vs people people? 13:48 What are the problems with stablecoin and building in it? 17:11 Mental models in tech and how to reduce noise to signal ratio 19:04 Signal to noise ratio on YouTube and Twitter 21:17 Researching topics for the blog - Pret Subscription, Great Man to Great Founder Theory https://www.jack-chong.com/blog/why-prets-subscription-model-is-great-consumers-but-terrible-for-business/ https://www.jack-chong.com/blog/the-great-founder-theory-musk-bezos-and-instagram/ 25:09 On the philosophy of technology. What does it mean? 29:07 Going to a deeper layer of abstraction 31:30 On a new Moore’s law? Improvements in space travel, software and biology 36:56 On Meta/Facebook and being quite meta 40:30 Corporate sector vs startups - why is everyone doing investment banking, consulting etc? https://www.jack-chong.com/blog/adventurers-imperialism-hongkong/ 47:09 What is it about startups and building that gets you excited? How do you think about money? 50:50 A Tale of Two Worlds: Stanford vs Oxford 52:55 Act against entropy: London RICH brunch club and OX1 Incubator https://www.ox1incubator.com/ 1:00:33 What is the RICH house in Oxford? https://www.jack-chong.com/blog/a-manifesto-to-build-the-rich-house/ https://cherwell.org/2021/11/17/oxfords-first-hacker-house-for-the-rich-by-the-rich/ 1:03:47 Next steps - concepts engineer, community engineer and token engineer 1:04:51 Where can people find your work and reach out to you?

Malaria Vaccines, Public Health, and Fencing

Why are malaria vaccines so hard to make? Lawrence Wang is an MD-DPhil candidate in vaccine research at Oxford, a medical school student at UC San Diego, and a NIH Oxford-Cambridge Scholar at National Institutes of Health (NIH) in the Intramural Research Program (IRP). In this 1hr+ session, Lawrence and I discuss everything from malaria vaccines to cytokine storms to benefits of doing an MD-PhD. He has written many articles on med school insider, has a public health paper out on the private sector drug shops and anti-malarials in Uganda, and fences foil on the Oxford blues fencing team. Tune in for an exciting session! 2:20 Malaria Vaccine and DPhil work 4:16 Monoclonal antibodies 8:53 How do you isolate antibodies? 13:02 £30,000 experiment - Berkeley Lights machine 23:23 Cytokine Storm! 35:53 Malaria vs Immune System 45:52 Current Malaria Vaccines 50:48 Chicken Pox and Dengue 51:42 Malaria trials on children 52:37 Scaling vaccine production 56:40 Recent thoughts on COVID-19 - other variants... 58:59 Benefit of doing an MD-PhD 1:01:05 Cost of £30,000 experiment - Berkeley Lights machine 1:02:14 Public health research on privately owned anti-malaria drug shops in Uganda - https://malariajournal.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12936-018-2454-7 1:08:18 Perceptions of vaccines in rural Uganda 1:10:33 Malaria and economics - https://www.abpi.org.uk/value-and-access/vaccines/economic-and-societal-impacts-of-vaccines/ 1:12:36 Med Insider Blogs https://medschoolinsiders.com/author/lawrencewang/ 1:15:21 Reflections on an MD-PhD 1:17:15 Year abroad at UCL - Infection and Immunity 1:21:31 Lawrence’s inspirations and role models - Bill Gates and Anthony Bourdain (Chef) 1:24:45 Fencing vs medical training + nutrition and injuries 1:36:37 Next steps 1:39:36 Where can people reach out to you? lawrencetwang@gmail.com

Feather, Transformers, and AI

In this 1hr+ session, Nihir Vedd, founder of feather-ai and a PhD candidate in Natural Language Processing at Imperial College London, and I discuss everything from transformers in machine learning to NLP in stand-up comedy to AI model marketplaces. Tune in for a great session! 0:46 RICH Brunch - https://cherwell.org/2021/11/17/oxfords-first-hacker-house-for-the-rich-by-the-rich/ 3:31 London PhD life - https://www.linkedin.com/in/nvedd/ 4:39 Natural Language Processing PhD project 6:26 Vision for Feature-ai and AI model marketplaces - https://www.feather-ai.com/ 15:10 AI model marketplaces and benefit to businesses and ads agencies 18:13 Inspiration for the feather name 22:04 Value of industry software engineering experience 31:36 Inspiration for the PhD project - child’s dream of a decision making machine 34:40 Discussion on natural language processing as a route to artificial general intelligence 41:27 Transformers - the machine learning type and the robot type! 47:55 Problems with Transformers 52:23 Problems with small datasets and machine learning 56:49 Research vs industry on machine learning model implementations and pipelines 1:01:58 Goals of OpenAI vs Deepmind 1:07:30 Deepmind effects on science - AlphaGo 1:08:07 Deepmind using NLP for collaborative storytelling and comedy and non-standard patterns of thinking https://computationalcreativity.net/iccc21/wp-content/uploads/2021/09/ICCC_2021_paper_118.pdf 1:14:21 Areas in deep learning 1:16:45 Why start a YouTube channel? - Transformers, Traction & Feather-ai https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCzzXdsl0U4E-pfMzG9oYKwg 1:20:08 Next steps and how to get in touch?

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