Réka Albert
Jeremy Blackburn
Deepak Dhar
Mirta Galesic
Joaquín Goñi
Sarah Muldoon
Zoran Obradovic
Alessandro Vespingani
David Sloan Wilson
Watch at: vimeo.com
Category: Talks
Inaugural Lecture of Professor Taha Yasseri
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“The Human in the Machine: navigating the myths and realities of AI towards a future where we shape technology responsibly”, Inaugural Lecture of Professor Taha Yasseri, Workday Professor of Technology and Society (2023), 01 April 2025, Faculty of Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences.
Watch at: www.youtube.com
Sara Imari Walker: An Informational Theory of Life
Physicist and astrobiologist Sara Imari Walker proposes a new paradigm for using physics to deepen our understanding of what we recognize as life. Assembly theory is a framework that uses the physics of molecular complexity to open a new path to identify where the threshold lies for life to arise from non-life, drawing in insights from new discoveries on the nature of historical contingency and time itself.
Watch/read at: longnow.org
Gabriele Scheler: From Verbal Thought to Neuron Computation | Brain Inspired
Gabriele Scheler co-founded the Carl Correns Foundation for Mathematical Biology. Carl Correns was her great grandfather, one of the early pioneers in genetics. Gabriele is a computational neuroscientist, whose goal is to build models of cellular computation, and much of her focus is on neurons.
We discuss her theoretical work building a new kind of single neuron model. She, like Dmitri Chklovskii a few episodes ago, believes we’ve been stuck with essentially the same family of models for a neuron for a long time, despite minor variations on those models. The model Gabriele is working on, for example, respects the computations going on not only externally, via spiking, which has been the only game in town forever, but also the computations going on within the cell itself. Gabriele is in line with previous guests like Randy Gallistel, David Glanzman, and Hessam Akhlaghpour, who argue that we need to pay attention to how neurons are computing various things internally and how that affects our cognition. Gabriele also believes the new neuron model she’s developing will improve AI, drastically simplifying the models by providing them with smarter neurons, essentially.
We also discuss the importance of neuromodulation, her interest in wanting to understand how we think via our internal verbal monologue, her lifelong interest in language in general, what she thinks about LLMs, why she decided to start her own foundation to fund her science, what that experience has been like so far. Gabriele has been working on these topics for many years, and as you’ll hear in a moment, she was there when computational neuroscience was just starting to pop up in a few places, when it was a nascent field, unlike its current ubiquity in neuroscience.
We discuss her theoretical work building a new kind of single neuron model. She, like Dmitri Chklovskii a few episodes ago, believes we’ve been stuck with essentially the same family of models for a neuron for a long time, despite minor variations on those models. The model Gabriele is working on, for example, respects the computations going on not only externally, via spiking, which has been the only game in town forever, but also the computations going on within the cell itself. Gabriele is in line with previous guests like Randy Gallistel, David Glanzman, and Hessam Akhlaghpour, who argue that we need to pay attention to how neurons are computing various things internally and how that affects our cognition. Gabriele also believes the new neuron model she’s developing will improve AI, drastically simplifying the models by providing them with smarter neurons, essentially.
We also discuss the importance of neuromodulation, her interest in wanting to understand how we think via our internal verbal monologue, her lifelong interest in language in general, what she thinks about LLMs, why she decided to start her own foundation to fund her science, what that experience has been like so far. Gabriele has been working on these topics for many years, and as you’ll hear in a moment, she was there when computational neuroscience was just starting to pop up in a few places, when it was a nascent field, unlike its current ubiquity in neuroscience.
Listen at: braininspired.co
Engineering a swarm – with Sabine Hauert
Swarms in nature, including birds, social insects and cells, coordinate in huge numbers to achieve common goals. Their behaviours are self-organised, emerging from the interactions of every agent with their local environment. For the past 20 years, swarm robotics has taken inspiration from nature to make large numbers of robots work together to achieve common goals. With progress in swarm hardware and AI, the field is now ready to translate these swarms from laboratory to application. Join swarm engineering expert Sabine Hauert as she explores the mechanisms to make ‘swarms for people’, in applications ranging from nanomedicine to environmental monitoring and logistics. The next step is to make swarms easy to design, deploy, monitor, control, and validate towards making swarms that are, and should, be trusted. — Sabine Hauert is Professor of Swarm Engineering at University of Bristol. She leads a team of 20 researchers working on making swarms for people, and across scales, from nanorobots for cancer treatment, to larger robots for environmental monitoring, or logistics (https://hauertlab.com/). Before joining the University of Bristol, Sabine engineered swarms of nanoparticles for cancer treatment at MIT, and deployed swarms of flying robots at EPFL. She is on the board of directors of the Open Source Robotics Foundation and is Executive Trustee of non-profits robohub.org and aihub.org, which connect the robotics and AI communities to the public.
Watch at: www.youtube.com
