The Turing Podcast

Covid lockdowns: which policies worked best?

This week on the podcast, the hosts are joined by Sören Mindermann & Mrinank Sharma who are PhD students from Oxford University. Mrinank works as part of Oxford's Future of Humanity Institute, whilst Sören is a member of Oxford Applied and Theoretical Machine Learning Group and the episode focuses on the research they've recently had published on inferring the effectiveness of government interventions against Covid-19, during the first wave of the pandemic in 2020. You can find the research article for this work here: https://science.sciencemag.org/content/371/6531/eabd9338

In conversation with Sue Black

In this episode the hosts were joined by Professor Sue Black to discuss her inspirational life story and career, as well as the initiatives she has set up to encourage more women into the tech sector and her hopes for the future.

Sue Black is a Professor of Computer Science and Technology Evangelist at Durham University, has set up initiatives such BCS women and the social enterprise Tech mums, to encourage more women into computing and has received an OBE for ‘Service to technology’. She was also instrumental in the campaign to save Bletchley Park.

Mapping the UK's Solar Power

This week the hosts chat with Dr Dan Stowell, senior researcher at Queen Mary University of London and fellow of The Alan Turing Institute, about his work on addressing climate change via creating high-coverage open dataset of solar photovoltaic installations in the UK.

It also happens to be research that podcast host Ed was involved in as you'll hear!

You can check out the paper on this topic, published in Nature Scientific Data here: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41597-020-00739-0

Robert Winston on science & the public in the Covid era

On this episode of the podcast, we are joined by Lord Robert Winston to talk about engaging with the public about the science of combatting Covid-19. Professor of Science and Society and Emeritus Professor of Fertility Studies at Imperial College London, Robert has also had an incredible career in television, presenting the BBC’s The Secret Life of Twins, Child of Our Time and the BAFTA award-winning The Human Body. 

Professor Winston runs a research programme at the Institute of Reproductive and Developmental Biology at Imperial College that aims to improve human transplantation. He has over 300 scientific publications about human reproduction and the early stages of pregnancy. He is also Chairman of the Genesis Research Trust – a charity which raised over £13 million to establish the Institute of Reproductive and Developmental Biology and which now funds high quality research into women’s health and babies.  

AlphaFold & Beyond: How AI and Data Science are Revolutionizing Biology

This week the hosts are joined by Professor Tim Hubbard, who is Head of the Department of Medical & Molecular Genetics at King’s College London, and Associate Director of Health Data Research UK in London, as well as being the Head of Genome Analysis at Genomics England. They discuss the recent success of Deep Mind's AlphaFold protein structure prediction software at the CASP14 competition and other developments from the worlds of health data science and genomics.

 

 

The Dark Triad: Modelling Psychopathy

On the first episode of season 2, we are joined by Alexander Tokarev, a very recent PhD graduate from the University of Manchester. Alex does research in Organizational Psychology, Personality Psychology, and Psychometrics. With a strong mathematical and statistical background, he applies these to psychology. He is here to tell us a little bit about modelling personality traits, in particular the ones known as the dark core. 

 

Sound effects courtesy of Brand Name Audio

The Privacy Collective

Ever wondered what you were signing up to when you click the “Accept all cookies” button that seems to appear on every new website you visit? In the final episode of The Turing Podcast Series One, the hosts are joined by Dr Rebecca Rumbul to talk about The Privacy Collective, an organization that supports compensation claims arising out of the misuse of personal data on behalf of the general public, and how they're involved in with the largest data privacy case against GDPR breaches in history. To learn more, check out their website here: https://theprivacycollective.eu/en/

Project Odysseus: Capturing city activity to help exit lockdown

This week on The Turing Podcast, the hosts chat with James Walsh, a research assistant at The Alan Turing Institute, and Funmi Kesa, a PhD student at the University of Warwick, and hear about their work on “Project Odysseus”, one of The Alan Turing Institute’s key research projects in response to the COVID-19 Pandemic. By capturing activity in London to better understand 'busyness', the research aims to aid effective policy-making strategies for exiting lockdowns.

Reproducible data science: How hard can it be?

The ability to reproduce the research that other scientists have done to see whether the same results are obtained (or the same conclusions are reached) is an integral part of the scientific process, but are we doing it right and how difficult is it to do? This week, Ed is joined by Dr Kirstie Whittaker and Dr Sarah Gibson for a discussion about the reproducibility of scientific research, why this is such an important topic and what The Alan Turing Institute is doing to promote best practices in reproducible data science. Kirstie is the Programme Lead for Tools, Practices and Systems at The Alan Turing Institute and Sarah is a Research Software Engineer at the Institute who is also a fellow of the Software Sustainability Institute. Check out some of the projects mentioned in the interview such as The Turing Way at https://the-turing-way.netlify.app/ and Binder at https://mybinder.org/

Digital Identity: Can we trust it?

Today, September 16^th, is International Identity Day! To mark the occasion, the hosts are joined by Carsten Maple, who is Professor at the University of Warwick and Fellow of The Alan Turing Institute, for a conversation about the trustworthiness of digital identity systems, some of the related work going on at the institute and other “open” initiatives in the digital identity research space. Identification has come a long way since the 1990s when paper-based registries and documents, such as hardcopy passports, were the only option for fully verifying a person’s identity. The last decade has seen the proliferation of digital identity systems, both national and commercial, meaning that identities can be verified and checked securely, cheaply and at scale. Will digital identity systems will achieve fair and just outcomes for citizens? That remains an open question!