The Turing Podcast

Being an Epidemiologist in 2020

This week on The Turing Podcast we're joined for a second time by Alan Turing Institute fellow Dr Peter Tennant of the Leeds Institute for Data Analytics, for a discussion about the scientific communities' response to the Covid19 pandemic. Peter is an expert not only in data science, but also Epidemiology and causal inference. The discussion took place in June when fewer of the UK’s lockdown restrictions had been lifted.

Data journalism in the Covid19 era

This week The Turing Podcast welcomes our second external guest interviewee: Tom Chivers. Tom is a science writer and journalist who has previously worked for the Daily Telegraph and Buzzfeed UK, but now writes for the online publication UnHerd. His writing often focusses on topics such as rationalism and Artificial Intelligence and he has authored a popular science book titled: "The AI Does Not Hate You: Superintelligence, Rationality and the Race to Save the World". In this episode, the discussion revolves around the media coverage Covid19 pandemic, Tom's experience as data-savvy journalist and the challenges of accurately reporting on rapidly evolving science, at a time when public hunger for information is high and misinformation abounds!

 

You can keep up with Tom’s writing here:  https://unherd.com/author/tom-chivers/ or follow him on twitter: @TomChivers

Antibody Certificates for COVID-19?

On the podcast this week, the hosts chat with Dr Chris Hicks and Dr David Butler, who work as post-doctoral researchers in security and cryptography at The Alan Turing Institute. In an episode that focusses on one of the projects the institute has undertaken to help tackle the pandemic, they discuss how to build a privacy-preserving system for issuing and verifying Covid19 antibody certificates, a technology that could be used to help with the easing of pandemic measures in some scenarios. If you’d like to learn more about this research, check out their paper here: https://arxiv.org/abs/2005.11833

The Future of Tech

In the last couple of decades, we've all been witness to the huge advances in personal computing and the astonishing rise of consumer technology. We now live on a planet that's more connected than ever before, with over 3.5 billion smartphone users, many of whom use social media on a daily basis. But where is consumer technology headed and what exciting developments are there on the horizon? In this episode of The Turing Podcast, the hosts speak to Daniel Rotar, CEO and Founder of ZONEofTECH: one of the largest UK based Technology YouTube channels, for a conversation that ranges from the latest developments in Augmented Reality (AR) technology and smartphone design to the intersection of AI research and consumer tech.

 

You can watch and subscribe to ZONEofTECH here: https://www.youtube.com/user/ZONEofTECH/

Amsterdam's 3D printed steel bridge and it's digital twin

In this week's podcast, the hosts speak with Dr Eric Daub, a Principal Research Data Scientist at The Alan Turing Institute, about his involvement in measuring, monitoring, and analysing the performance of the world’s largest 3D printed metal structure: a 12 metre-long stainless steel bridge crossing one of Amsterdam's canals.

AIrsenal: The Fantasy Football AI

This week's episode takes us back the pre-covid19 era, when premier league football was still a thing! Dr Nick Barlow of The Alan Turing Institute's Research Engineering Group chats to the podcast hosts about his side project "AIrsenal", a machine learning manager for Fantasy Premier League. You can find out more about the project and even contribute to the code via these links:

- https://www.turing.ac.uk/news/airsenal-difficult-second-season

- https://github.com/alan-turing-institute/AIrsenal/blob/master/CONTRIBUTING.md

Superbug evolution: understanding the spread of antimicrobial resistance

Viruses like SARS-CoV-2, which causes Covid-19, aren't the only problem we face globally when it comes to infectious disease. Bacterial pathogens are constantly evolving, presenting a challenge for the worlds healthcare systems as more of the antibiotics we rely on to kill bacteria fail on those that have evolved antimicrobial resistance. In this episode, we chat with Victoria Carr, a PhD student in Bioinformatics at the Centre for Host-Microbiome Interactions Kings College London and The Alan Turing Institute, who describes her research comparing antimicrobial resistance in mouth and gut microbes and developing software to find "mobile genetic elements" (DNA sequences that can change position within a genome) and their association with antibiotic resistance genes. Be sure to also check out Vicky's podcast about women in tech at  https://www.researcherscode.com/podcast

 

Image analysis in neurodegenerative disease

Image recognition and classification is a hot topic in AI research, and these tools are increasingly being utilised by biologists with the aim to classify and distinguish diseases. In this episode, Bea Costa Gomes, a PhD candidate and Turing enrichment student at The University of Manchester talks about her research into developing software that spots shape differences in the images of diseased brain cells, as well as her passion for Drosophila flies!

Cause & Effect

Remember back at school when you were taught that correlation doesn’t mean causation, that increased ice cream sales are correlated with sunnier weather but don’t cause the clouds to part? Peter Tennant, a fellow of the Alan Turing Institute based at Leeds Institute for Data Analytics explains why it’s important for scientists to become more confident in talking about causation, how "causal inference" methods are transforming the field of epidemiology and why AI isn’t typically best placed to make sensible assumptions about complex data. This episode was recorded before the Covid-19 lockdown began in the UK, but the topics discussed couldn’t be more relevant!

Astrophysics in the age of big data

Large datasets and modern machine learning techniques are fast changing the field of Astrophysics and our understanding of the universe. In this episode, we chat with PhD candidates Tarek Allam and Gordon Yip, whose respective research at University College London’s Department of Physics and Astronomy focuses on the classification of supernova light curves to help constrain theories of Dark Energy and the atmospheric composition of remote exo-planets.