The Turing Podcast

The Stats Gap

Join Ed and David as they speak to Ellen Pasternack, a PHD student in evolutionary biology at the University of Oxford. 

Ellen is a science writer for UnHerd and Works in Progress. In this episode, we’re going to chat about one of her most recent articles, "The Stats Gap", which explores the issues with statistical education for university scientists.

How much can we limit the rising of the seas?

Join Aoife and Sally as they chat to Dr Tamsin Edwards about how she uses AI to predict rising sea levels, following her Turing Lecture at the Royal Institution.

Tamsin is a climate scientist, specialising in the uncertainties of climate model predictions, particularly for ice sheets and glaciers. 
Within her research, she also uses information about past climates to improve predictions for the future.

In this podcast, we will be catching up with her as she answers some of the questions that the audience submitted at the Turing Lecture which did not get asked.

Watch Tamsin's full Turing lecture here: https://youtu.be/CbEKI_LfNWA

Where next for self-driving vehicles?

Join Aoife and Torty as they chat with Professor Sarah Sharples about the current state of technology and AI around driverless vehicles.

Sarah (chief scientific advisor for the department for transport) recently did a Turing lecture at the Royal Institution, discussing the topic.
In this podcast, she’ll be answering a range of different questions from the evening.

Footballers on Twitter: What is fair game?

This week we are joined by Manchester United women's footballer Aoife Mannion, Author and CEO of Glitch Seyi Akiwowo and Turing Researcher Pica Johansson to discuss online abuse suffered by football players and other athletes online. The Turing recently partnered with OfCom, who comissioned a report in relation to its upcoming role as the UK’s Online Safety regulator tracking abuse on Twitter against football players in the 2021-22 Premier League Season. You can read more on this report here: Tracking abuse on Twitter against football players in the 2021-22 Premier League Season | The Alan Turing Institute

Turing deployment at sea: identifying plankton in real time

In this episode, hosts Bea and Anneca are joined by Robert Blackwell, from CEFAS (Centre for Environment, Fisheries and Aquaculture Science), who tells us, among many other things, how an algorithm to detect different species of plankton developed in two weeks during a Turing DSG ended up being deployed six months later on a ship.

Machine Learning for Armed Conflict Mediation

This week we welcome Dr Miguel Arana-Catania and Professor Rob Procter from the University of Warwick, along with Dr Felix-Anselm van Lier from Oxford University. The episode discusses their recent work in using machine learning to analyze large-scale peace dialogue transcripts from the war in Yemen, with the aim to assist conflict mediators.

Living with Machines

This week the hosts are joined by David Beavan, a Senior Research Software Engineer and Dr Kasra Hosseini a Research Data Scientist, both of whom work in the Alan Turing Institute’s Research Engineering Group. The episode focusses on one of The Alan Turing Institute’s major research projects in the Digital Humanities known as “Living with machines”, which takes a fresh look at the history of the industrial revolution with data driven approaches. Find out more at https://livingwithmachines.ac.uk/

Data Science for Social Good: Predicting air pollution in a post-COVID world?

In this episode Christina catches up with two of her former collaborators, Prithviraj Pramanik and Dr. Subhabrata Majumdar. The three of them worked as volunteers at Solve for Good (a platform to connect social good organizations with volunteer data scientists to solve socially beneficial challenges). The team discusses their work with UNICEF to build a post-pandemic global air pollution model to help map child exposure to harmful air pollutants.

The right to privacy

This week Ed and Rachel speak with Geoff Goodell, Senior Research Associate in the Financial Computing and Analytics group at University College London, and associate of UCL’s Centre for Blockchain Technologies and the LSE systemic risk centre. Geoff is an advocate for privacy as a human right in the digital world, in particular with regard to digital identity systems. Recorded in mid-2021, this episode takes a deep dive into some of the important topics surrounding people’s identities in the online world, including both the technical and ethical considerations.

The Turing Podcast asks: Where is Bitcoin headed?

Ed & Rachel are joined by Dr Tim Hobson, Senior Research Software Engineer and resident Bitcoin enthusiast at The Alan Turing Institute! Tim offers his take on the phenomenon that is Bitcoin, the future of its adoption and how the underlying technology relates to his research interests.