Open Transcripts

Realizing a Brain on a Chip

presented by Julie Grollier

If we want to continue increasing the performance of our computers, we need to rethink the way we compute. And our brains are wonderful proof that impressive computations can be carried out with a very low power budget.

The Factory of the Future Fits in Your Home

presented by Paul K. Wright

As we began this work in 1987, 1990, going through that period, 3D printers were pretty clumsy. But now they’re cheaper, they’re much more precise and much more accurate. So, [now] we can actually print the chemicals for a battery.

Traditional Medicine Reimagined Through Modern Systems Biology

presented by Lee Sang-Yup

Why are natural compounds better than synthetic chemicals to treat diseases? We have intensively analyzed all those known compounds in the natural products, and found that these compounds have higher similarity, especially structural similarity, to human metabolites.

Applying Neuroscientific Findings to Enduring Social Problems

presented by Keith Humphreys

When lower primates form a hierarchy, those at the bottom undergo a change in their dopamine system. This makes them more likely to consume drugs in an addictive fashion. Now, if this turns out to be true of our species, that would mean that human beings are particularly vulnerable if they’re in some way dominated or don’t have any power.

From Biomolecular Computing to Internet Democracy

presented by Ehud Shapiro

My main point is that Internet technology today does not support the right of assembly, and therefore it cannot and does not support democracy. The reason is that even though we can easily form groups on Google, Facebook, you name it, we don’t know who the people on the group are.

Reimagining Everyday Devices as Information-Delivery Systems

presented by Chris Harrison

What we’re trying to think about now is, take the sort of venerable light bulb and recast it as a computational appliance. So, how do we take something that’s been so remarkably successful and infuse it with computational abilities?

Looking to Ants to Better Understand Collective Behaviour

presented by Deborah Gordon

How can we extend what we are learning about how simple local interactions in ant colonies or in brains, in the aggregate, produce the collective behavior of the group and the way that it responds to changing conditions? How can we extend what we’re learning about collective behavior in other systems to begin thinking about collective behavior in human social organizations?

Engineering Thoughts and Memories

presented by Jack Gallant

In brain decoding, we take our model that we’ve developed of the brain (and this can be a model for anything, vision or language) and we reverse it. And instead of going from the stimulus to the brain activity, we go from the brain activity back to the stimulus.

The Automated Economy

presented by Illah Nourbakhsh

Instead of having our children become consumers of robotics technology, consumers of products, we’d have to train them to be producers, to realize that they can use robotic technologies to build something with their intuition, their creativity, and their sense of purpose, that has meaning to them. Then we’d have a technologically fluent society.

Manufacturing Dreams

presented by Dan Yang

We used to think that sleep is a passive process caused by reduced sensory stimulation so that our normal mental and physical activities can shut down. We held this belief since the time of Aristotle, and perhaps even before that. But now we know that this idea is completely wrong.