Stanford Radio

Guest Ted Lempert, a former member of the California State Assembly, discusses key ways parents and others can build coalitions that support children’s health, education, and welfare. Originally aired on November 20, 2021, on SiriusXM.

The Future of Everything with Russ Altman: E165 | Chelsea Finn: How to make artificial intelligence more meta An expert on AI and robotics says that the latest trend in her field is teaching AI to look inward to improve itself. In one of computer science’s more meta moments, professor Chelsea Finn created an AI algorithm to evaluate the coding projects of her students. The AI model reads and analyzes code, spot flaws and gives feedback to the students. Computers learning about learning—it’s so meta that Finn calls it “meta learning.” Finn says the field should forgo training AI for highly specific tasks in favor of training it to look at a diversity of problems to divine the common structure among those problems. The result is AI able to see a problem it has not encountered before and call upon all that previous experience to solve it. This new-look AI can adapt to new courses, often enrolling thousands of students at a time, where individual instructor feedback would be prohibitive. Emboldened by res

Full title: Headline: Rich Jarolovsky, Stanford Alum and Pioneering Journalist Talks Print vs. Digital and the quest for digital news that can be trusted. Description: What's the future of journalism? Are content aggregation sites the solution? Who can you trust? Journalist and digital media guru Rich Jarolovsky talks about industry growth and trends in the digital era. Originally aired on November 13, 2021.

It was the stuff of Silicon Valley dreams. Elizabeth Holmes dropped out of Stanford University to launch the blood testing disruptor Theranos and built it to a $9 billion valuation. But the tech adage “fake it until you make it” didn’t quite work for this medical device startup, and charges that the devices didn’t work mounted. Holmes and Ramesh Balwani, her onetime business and romantic partner, were indicted with 12 counts of wire fraud and conspiracy to commit wire fraud. In this episode, Stanford Law School Professor Robert Weisberg, a criminal law expert, discusses the trial, which began in September, the prosecution, the defense, and the larger implications of the case. Originally aired on SiriusXM on November 6, 2021.

Online education is experiencing a revival but pitfalls remain. Matthew Rascoff, vice provost for digital education at Stanford, explains what’s ahead. Originally aired on SiriusXM on November 6, 2021.

Eric Hanushek, who recently was awarded the Yidan Prize for his research in education, explains how research can bolster educational attainment globally. Originally aired on SiriusXM on November 6, 2021.

The Future of Everything with Russ Altman: E164 | Kayvon Fatahalian: How the pandemic changed the virtual world An expert in computer graphics tells how the rapid shift online brought on by COVID-19 has inspired a revolution in the tools of his trade. For experts in digital graphics and visual perception, like computer scientist Kayvon Fatahalian, the recent pandemic has been a call to arms. Fatahalian says he and others in the field felt an urgent responsibility to harness their background in computer graphics and interactive techniques to improve life for people across the globe. He says new, virtual tools have proved better than past, real ones in improving certain aspects of our everyday lives. His job as a computer scientist is to make those experiences more successful, more of the time. His role as a teacher is a case in point. While the virtual world is not a replacement for face-to-face interaction between students and instructors, Fatahalian notes there are many aspects of the live virtual lecture

Full title: Ivan Maisel, sports writer & Stanford alum tells the story of unfathomable tragedy – the loss of his son to suicide in the best seller, “I Keep Trying to Catch His Eye: A Memoir of Loss, Grief, and Love.” Description: It was a call that would alter his life forever. In his deeply emotional memoir, longtime ESPN writer Ivan Maisel reflects on the suicide of his son Max and delves into how their complicated relationship led him to see grief as love. Originally aired on SiriusXM on October 30, 2021.

The Future of Everything with Russ Altman: E 163 | Kuang Xu: How to make (and keep) genetic data private An expert in genetic privacy says there’s a fine line between one’s right to know and another’s right to not know. One underappreciated fact about the explosion in genetic databases, like consumer sites that provide information about ancestry and health, is that they unlock valuable insights not only into an individual’s past and future, but also for that individual’s entire family. This raises serious concerns about privacy for people who have never submitted their genetic information for analysis, yet share much the same code as one who did. Today’s guest, Kuang Xu, is an expert in how genetic information can and should be used. He says that the DNA problem weighs heavily on privacy experts in fields ranging from law and engineering to public health and criminal justice. The fundamental question is: Can we create methods for accessing genetic data while maximizing the privacy of all involved? The pro

The Future of Everything with Russ Altman: E 162 | Eric Appel: Gels are changing the face of engineering ... and medicine An expert in gels explains why these “Goldilocks” materials are the among the most promising areas of research today. Readers of Eric Appel’s academic profile will note appointments in materials science, bioengineering and pediatrics, as well as fellowship appointments in the ChEM-H institute for human health research and the Woods Institute for the Environment. While the breadth of these appointments does not leap to mind as being particularly consistent, the connections quickly emerge for those who hear Appel talk about his research. Appel is an expert in gels, those wiggly, jiggly materials that aren’t quite solid, but not quite liquid either. Gels’ in-betweenness is precisely what gets engineers like Appel excited about them. Appel has used gels for everything from new-age fire retardants that can proactively prevent forest fires to improved drug and vaccine delivery mechanisms for

Full title: Stanford Professor & alum Mehran Sahami talks about his co-written book, System Error - Where Big Tech Went Wrong and How We Can Reboot. A forward-thinking manifesto from three Stanford professors—experts who have worked at ground zero of the tech revolution for decades—which reveals how big tech’s obsession with optimization and efficiency has sacrificed fundamental human values and outlines steps we can take to change course, renew our democracy, and save ourselves. Originally aired on SiriusXM on October 2, 2021.

The Future of Everything with Russ Altman: E 161 | Lianne Kurina: How controlling confounders makes better epidemiology Public health studies are among the most challenging to get right, says this expert in epidemiology. But better design can yield greater confidence. As the world has learned through the recent pandemic, epidemiological studies can be complicated by many unanticipated factors. Lianne Kurina is an expert in the design of epidemiological studies who says that the key to greater confidence is better design. The gold standard, she says, is the randomized controlled trial—a study that compares groups that are ​essentially identical by every apparent factor but one— the vaccinated vs. the unvaccinated, for instance. In the case of COVID-19 vaccinations, Kurina stresses that investigators did an exemplary job of this. ​In situations where we can't use a randomized controlled trial, achieving ​a similar balance and specificity is far harder. Kurina says ​that researcher​s working with observation

In 2007, Erik Jensen, helped launch the Afghanistan Legal Education Project, a collaboration with with Stanford Law School and the American University in Afghanistan to build a high quality legal program for Afghan law students. Today, dozens of Afghan men and women count themselves as graduates—lawyers critical to building the legal infrastructure so badly needed in Afghanistan. But what will happen to the country—and those dedicated to law and civil society—under the new Taliban regime? In this episode, Jensen discusses the abrupt withdrawal of American forces from Afghanistan and the prospects of the still struggling country. Originally aired on SiriusXM on September 25, 2021.

Assistant Professor Chris Piech discusses how a Stanford project to teach computer coding to people stuck at home during COVID-19 went viral. Originally aired on SiriusXM on September 25, 2021.

How user generated content is changing the world of marketing. Originally aired on SiriusXM on September 18, 2021.

The Future of Everything with Russ Altman: E160 | Priyanka Raina: How computer chips get speedier through specialization Increasingly, the path to faster, more efficient computers is in chips that excel at specific tasks, says this expert in chip design. For decades, the general-purpose central processing unit—the CPU—has been the workhorse of the computer industry. It could handle any task—literally—even if most of those capabilities were unnecessary. This model was all well and good as chips grew smaller, faster and more efficient by the day, but less so as the pace of progress has slowed, says electrical engineer Priyanka Raina, an expert in chip design. Raina says that, to keep chips on their ever-improving trajectory, chip makers have shifted focus to chips that do specific tasks very well. The graphics processing unit (GPU), which handles the intense mathematics necessary for video and gaming graphics, is a perfect example. Soon, there’ll be a faster, more efficient chip for every task, but it’ll ta

Full title: Rich Kushel, Stanford alum and Senior Managing Director at BlackRock on how the world's biggest investor is modeling the economic effects of climate change. Description: BlackRocks's Asset manager BlackRock, makes climate change and environmental sustainability central to its multi-billion dollar investment approach. Originally aired on SiriusXM on September 4, 2021.

Western states are once again in severe drought with water in short supply. And California’s fire season is starting earlier and causing more devastation, with the Dixie fire, the second largest in the state’s history, still growing after destroying almost 750,000 acres. In this episode, a leading national water law expert Buzz Thompson joins us to discuss fires, water, and climate change. Originally aired on SiriusXM on August 28, 2021

The Future of Everything with Russ Altman: E159 | Biondo Biondi: : How to measure an earthquake through the internet New technologies that detect motion in the Earth’s crust are emerging in surprising places and reshaping our understanding of earthquakes … and much more. Most people know the seismograph, those ultrasensitive instruments that record every small shift in the Earth’s crust. But did you know that the very latest method for measuring earthquakes involves fiber optic cables that carry internet data around the world? Stanford geophysicist Biondo Biondi says that the waves of energy sent forth by an earthquake cause fiber optic cables to stretch and contract ever so slightly. Using precise mathematical algorithms, experts like Biondi can measure earthquake intensity, making every meter of fiber optic cable a potential seismograph and dramatically increasing the data experts can gather in a day. Biondi’s sensor arrays are so sensitive they can detect sinkholes, landslides and even the rumblings o

Full Title: Brooke Weddle, Stanford alum and partner at McKinsey & Co on surviving to thriving; adapting your business to create a winning post-pandemic business model. Beyond coronavirus: How McKinsey and Company helps businesses and organizations navigate to what's next. Originally aired on SiriusXM on August 21, 2021.