Latest Interviews

Yubin Park

Yubin Park

Aquarian Health, co-founded by CTO Yubin Park and medical experts Dr. Sriyam Vishwanath and Dr. Joyce Ho, is developing a personalized healthcare system that expands precision medicine to include financial incentives, service bundles, and care trajectories. The startup utilizes advanced machine learning to aggregate diverse data sources and solve critical implementation challenges like data bias and clinical mistrust, specifically targeting post-discharge placement and surgical route personalization. With a CMS bundled payment model for joint replacements approaching, the company aims to reduce system waste and improve patient outcomes through tools that simulate individual patient trajectories and operational realities.

DJ Kleinbaum

DJ Kleinbaum

Emerald Therapeutics operates the Emerald Cloud Laboratory, a fully virtualized facility in South San Francisco that enables global scientists to design and run automated experiments remotely by translating protocols into Wolfram language code. The platform distinguishes itself from traditional CROs by capturing comprehensive metadata and environmental variables to enforce strict ontological standards, thereby solving reproducibility issues through a "push-button" workflow. Currently transitioning from an internal tool to an external service, the ECL offers a dual-mode interface and aims to deliver results with a 48-hour turnaround while scaling capacity for public beta users.

Chess and the Art of War: Strategies That Win, from Grandmaster Magnus Carlsen

Magnus Carlsen, Erik Schatzker, Danny Rensch, DAN GALPIN, Rockwell Shaw, Frank Motek, Yascha Monk, Igor Tuchinsky, Steven Knapp, Toby Post, James Kuffner, Brett Bryan, Noaf Altari, Danny Kane, David Wall, Ari Milken, Bailey Milken, Eric Olives, Mike Tyson

World champion Magnus Carlsen demonstrated his elite cognitive endurance by winning most games in a rapid "sudden death" simul against ten opponents, including WorldQuant CEO Igor Tuchinsky and representatives from major tech and academic institutions. While adhering to a philosophy that prioritizes winning over artistic expression and relies on flexible physical optimization, Carlsen managed the extreme time pressure of ten-minute games by rapidly controlling the center and converting technical endgames. The event highlighted the intense mental strain of simultaneous high-level play, featuring a notable draw against David Wall that resulted from a clerical error where Carlsen mistakenly believed the game had concluded.

Theano Tutorial (Pascal Lamblin, MILA)

Pascal Lamblin, Hugo Larochelle, Andrej Karpathy, Richard Socher, Sherry Moore, Ruslan Salakhutdinov, Andrew Ng, John Schulman, Adam Coates, Alex Wiltschko, Quoc Le, Yoshua Bengio, Shubho Sengupta

This presentation details Theano, an eight-year-old symbolic expression compiler that enables high-performance deep learning by automatically differentiating mathematical graphs and compiling them into optimized C++ or CUDA code. The session demonstrates the framework's core capabilities, including graph manipulation for neural network backpropagation, GPU acceleration via shared variables, and sequence modeling through the `scan` operator, while showcasing practical implementations of logistic regression, convolutional networks, and LSTMs on datasets like MNIST. Addressing deployment challenges inherent in its tight Python integration, the discussion concludes by highlighting Docker containers as the standard solution for distributing models and outlines a roadmap for enhanced 3D convolution and cuDNN support.

Meat Makers: the artificial beef revolution

Professor Mark Post, Ethan Brown, Bill Gates, John, Simone, Greg Boland, Peter

Facing the $1 trillion global meat market and its environmental impact, cellular agriculture pioneer Mark Post and Beyond Meat's Ethan Brown are pursuing divergent strategies to decouple meat production from animal slaughter. While Post focuses on scaling lab-grown muscle tissue from stem cells, Brown employs plant-based extraction to engineer sensory profiles that mimic animal fat and texture for mass adoption. Despite facing distinct technical hurdles in texture, flavor, and price, both leaders aim to execute a food revolution comparable to the shift from horse-drawn carriages to automobiles.

The World If… malaria drugs stop working

Following the 2016 emergence of drug-resistant malaria strains in Southeast Asia that spread globally via human travel, African healthcare systems faced collapsing treatment rates and billions in annual economic losses. In response, scientists initiated 2020 and 2021 strategies involving genetically engineered sterile male mosquitoes and novel transmission-blocking vaccines in Mali to suppress parasite spread. While health officials emphasized that a multi-pronged approach combining diagnostics and vector control was essential to prevent further societal breakdown, the slow pace of these new interventions contrasted sharply with the escalating mortality of over 2,000 daily deaths.

How the Poor Can Save Capitalism: Rebuilding the Path to the Middle Class

John Hope Bryant, Paul Irving, Skip Reimer

John Hope Bryant challenges the traditional focus on political rights by defining poverty as a "disabling frame of mind" and advocating for financial literacy as the primary tool for economic empowerment. His newly launched Project 5117 aims to deploy 1,000 "Hope Inside" locations to provide financial counseling, entrepreneurship training, and job placements, with the specific goal of raising 700,000 individuals' credit scores into the mainstream banking range by 2020. By positioning financial education as a civil right and mobilizing corporate CEOs to hire students through the "B-minus business compact," Bryant seeks to transform the psychological state of despair into a catalyst for creating one million new startups annually.

Don't Wait for the Next War: A Strategy for American Growth and Global Leadership

Wesley K. Clark, Skip Reimer

General Wesley K. Clark promotes a comprehensive peacetime strategy centered on achieving energy independence through liquid hydrocarbons and biofuels to address five existential challenges including the rise of China and climate change. He argues that this approach, funded by a carbon tax, would boost GDP growth, isolate adversaries like Russia and Iran, and provide the economic foundation necessary to stabilize the Middle East without reinstating the draft. By shifting focus from partisan values to a unified national vision, Clark contends the United States can activate idle industrial capacity and establish a sustainable framework for global leadership.

2013GC Cyber Illusionist

Marco

Marco, self-described as a cyber illusionist, leverages magic to prototype future technologies by presenting "illusion glasses" that simulate augmented reality concepts independent of Google's Project Glass. He grounds his digital demonstrations in the esoteric symbolism of a standard 52-card deck, meticulously mapping suits to seasons, cards to lunar phases, and spot counts to the days of the year. After discussing the mathematical odds of skilled card handling, the performance culminated in a tangible trick revealing a real card to distinguish physical reality from simulated elements.

Son of a Gambling Man: My Journey from a Casino Family to the Governor's Mansion

Bob Miller, Joel Kurtzman, Mike Milken

On January 21, 2014, Harvard researchers Aris Aydin and Jean-Baptiste Michel will discuss *Uncharted Big Data as a Lens on Human Culture* alongside former Nevada Governor Bob Miller, who remains at the venue to sign copies of his autobiography. The event contextualizes Miller's career within the broader evolution of Las Vegas, tracing its transformation from a mob-influenced gambling hub into a globally recognized economic leader through the strategic visions of figures like Bugsy Siegel, Howard Hughes, and Steve Wynn. By detailing shifts in financing, regulatory oversight, and infrastructure, the session highlights how legal enforcement and corporate innovation drove Nevada's diversification beyond gaming into fields such as biotechnology, mining, and tech.

How tesla electricity can create wireless power

Nikola Tesla, JP Morgan, Josh Smith

Y-Tricity is reviving Nikola Tesla's wireless power concepts with a resonant magnetic system capable of delivering electricity through walls and charging multiple devices simultaneously, while Intel Labs researchers Josh Smith and Alanson Sample are developing the WARP project to harvest ambient radio frequencies from distant TV towers. These divergent approaches aim to eliminate disposable batteries by powering low-consumption sensors with continuous energy and enabling "drop-and-charge" functionality for portable electronics within household environments. By addressing safety standards and extending power ranges beyond traditional line-of-sight limitations, both initiatives seek to reduce electronic waste and integrate persistent power sources directly into consumer infrastructure.