If Gabe Otte '11 hadn't had a Cornell advisor who steered him down a more challenging path and hadn't had some chance conversations with Nobel Prize-winning chemist Roald Hoffman, he might be squirreled away in a lab somewhere. Instead, he's the CEO of Freenome, a start-up just awarded 5.5 million in venture capital for its product, a data-driven blood test that can detect various types of cancers in their earliest stages and recommend the best treatments. Otte came to Cornell planning to study computer science, but a freshman-year advisor encouraged him to choose another major. "I had been coding and programming since I was nine years old," Otte said, so he elected to study chemistry and computational biology, using his knack for computer science to do his homework. "I fell in love with chemistry when I took organic chemistry," he said, adding that he developed his own computer program to do computations related to the synthesis of molecules.

Today we are honored to have on the pod one of the co-founders of Unbounce, Oli Gardner. Most of our listeners should know that Unbounce is matchnode landing page platform of choice. We just got back from their call to action conference in Vancouver where we had a chance to speak and had a great time. Happy to have you on the pod today, welcome Oli. BRIAN: Cool, well most of our listeners as I said should be familiar with Unbounce but can you give a brief overview for anyone who hasn't heard of Unbounce? Basically the goal of it is to empower marketers to do their own work without relying on technical people like developers to IT so you can build publish and a/b test landing pages without the help of IT or technical people. It's loaded with templates that are mobile responsive.

There's no doubt Stephen Hawking is a smart guy. But the world-famous theoretical physicist recently declared that women leave him stumped. "Women should remain a mystery," Hawking wrote in response to a Reddit user's question about the realm of the unknown that intrigued him most. While Hawking's remark was meant to be light-hearted, he sounded quite serious discussing the potential dangers of artificial intelligence during Reddit's online Q&A session: A superintelligent AI will be extremely good at accomplishing its goals, and if those goals aren't aligned with ours, we're in trouble. Hawking's comments might seem unrelated.

Editor's note: Dallas police actively guided an explosive-laden robot to kill gunman Micah Johnson when negotiations broke down after he opened fire on police and others July 7. This interview on Think -- which was recorded before the ambush took place -- focuses on the questions raised by computers and robots programmed to kill without human supervision. You may have seen it earlier this year when a company called Boston Dynamics posted a video of a humanoid robot that can walk on two legs, even over uneven terrain. Seeing a machine balance on bumpy, snowy ground in a New England forest is mesmerizing. But watching the robot get knocked to the ground by a human tester, then get up all by itself and keep going is somehow profoundly unsettling.

In this talk, I will introduce the audience to the emerging area of computational social science, focusing on how machine learning for social science differs from machine learning in other contexts. I will present two related models -- both based on Bayesian Poisson tensor decomposition -- for uncovering latent structure from count data. The first is for uncovering topics in previously classified government documents, while the second is for uncovering multilateral relations from country-to-country interaction data. Finally, I will talk briefly about the broader ethical implications of analyzing social data. Hanna Wallach is a Senior Researcher at Microsoft Research New York City and an Adjunct Associate Professor in the College of Information and Computer Sciences at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.

Thune Seeks Answers from Elon Musk on Autopilot Technology Inquiry prompted after tragic death of driver using Tesla's autopilot mode July 14, 2016 WASHINGTON – U.S. Sen. John Thune (R-S.D.), chairman of the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation, seeks answers from Elon Musk, chairman and chief executive officer at Tesla Motors, following the recent death of a driver while using the autopilot mode on a Tesla Model S. The autopilot feature allows the vehicle to automatically steer, change lanes, and manage speed. In Sen. Thune's letter to Musk, he seeks to determine whether the technology performed as intended and Tesla's actions to educate consumers on the benefits and limitations of the technology. The full text of the letter is below: Dear Mr. Musk: I write to you today regarding the recent news of a fatal crash involving a Tesla vehicle. I seek information regarding the actions Tesla Motors has taken thus far, as well as future actions planned in response to this accident. In particular, I am interested in the company's efforts to ensure the Autopilot technology was deployed safely in this instance.

Dr George Beaton is a partner in beaton and a senior fellow in Melbourne Law School, Australia. His published works include NewLaw New Rules – A Conversation About the Future of the Legal Services Industry (2013) and Remaking Law Firms: Why & How (2016). You have been a pioneer in research into NewLaw, what place does technology have in NewLaw? Is it central to its development? Just 18 months ago when I wrote Fresh thinking on the evolving BigLaw–NewLaw taxonomy little mention was made of the role of technology in NewLaw or BigLaw business model firms.

Everyone has heard of Kaggle, but have you heard of London-based Google DeepMind? Their researchers build deep learning algorithms to conquer everything from Pong and the ancient game of go to blindness caused by diabetic retinopathy. If the latter sounds particularly familiar, you may be recalling the Diabetic Retinopathy Detection competition which ran on Kaggle from February 2015 to July 2015. In this blog post, I interview Jeffrey De Fauw who came in 5th place in this competition using convolutional neural networks and is first author of Google DeepMind's study spearheading efforts to automate analysis of ophthalmic images using machine learning in order to help clinicians diagnose sight-threatening diseases. He explains how he got started on Kaggle, how it led him to his current role at DeepMind, and what he's learned along the way.

This week, a relatively young cybersecurity company called Darktrace announced that it has raised an additional 65 million ( 50 million) at a suspected valuation of over 400 million ( 308 million). No other UK tech startup has announced a funding round anywhere near that size since the UK voted for Brexit. We caught up with Mike Lynch -- the billionaire founder of enterprise software firm Autonomy and Darktrace's first big name investor -- to find out why he decided to put his money into the company. "The reason I liked it was that it was a completely new approach," said Lynch during a phone call with Business Insider on Wednesday. "Most of what's out there in cybersecurity is based on knowing what you're looking. So things like anti-virus and that sort of stuff or trying to build a big wall around the outside of your company, a boundary. "The problem is that the world's moved on and the attacks no longer have signatures.

Event[0] is a game about a stranded astronaut talking to an artificial intelligence to help them get back to earth. Like Firewatch before it, much of this solitary adventure is centered around conversing with your colleague. Unlike Firewatch, your colleague is a computer recalling 2001's HAL. Also unlike Firewatch, you get to manually type in the questions you'd like to ask. There's no prescribed dialogue trees here, folks.