Podcast appearances and mentions of jon gertner

In this episode of THE MENTORS RADIO, Host Dan Hesse talks with multi-award-winning writer Jon Gertner about what many believe was the most innovative institution—public or private—in the world, Bell Labs. It is the topic of Gertner's first book, The New York Times best-seller, The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation. Bell Labs' inventions and discoveries are too long to list, but include the vacuum tube, the transistor, the silicon chip, the solar cell, microwave and fiber optic transmission, UNIX, and for you TV fans, even the Big Bang Theory.  A seasoned science and technology feature writer with The New York Times Magazine, Jon's writing and book reviews have also appeared in The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times Book Review, and Wired Magazine. Additionally, Jon is the author of The Ice at the End of the World: Greenland's Buried Past and Earth's Perilous Future, and he is currently working on a book about NASA's long-running Voyager Mission, tentatively titled How to Build Something the Lasts Forever. Listen to THE MENTORS RADIO podcast anywhere, any time, on any platform, click here! SHOW NOTES: JON GERTNER: BIO: BIO: Jon Gertner BOOKS: The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation, by Jon Gertner The Ice at the End of the World: Greenland's Buried Past and Earth's Perilous Future, by Jon Gertner X: @jongertner

Our home of Oak Ridge, and indeed all East Tennessee, is a hotbed of innovation. To learn more about the history of innovation and how it has been cultivated in the past, I spoke on our podcast, AMSEcast, with Jon Gertner about his book, The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation. We discussed some of the amazing breakthroughs that Bell Labs produced - just to name a few, those included the transistor, semiconductors, integrated circuits, lasers, photovoltaic cells, fiber optic and satellite communications, even modern information theory. Jon shared how Bell Labs approached its work to produce such an incredible number of breakthroughs with real world applications.

We're joined by Jon Gertner (author of THE IDEA FACTORY: BELL LABS AND THE GREAT AGE OF AMERICAN INNOVATION) and Jimmy Soni (author of A MIND AT PLAY: HOW CLAUDE SHANNON INVENTED THE INFORMATION AGE) to discuss our favorite "house of magic" - Bell Labs! Can Bell Labs ever be recreated? What would Claude Shannon think of ChatGPT? What can we learn about "doing great things" from Bell Labs?Shownotes:Bell Labs - Wikipedia pageClaude Shannon - Wikipedia pageGet Back (Beatles documentary)The Idea Factory - Jon's book about Bell LabsA Mind At Play - Jimmy's book about Claude ShannonThe Ice At The End of The World - Jon's latest book about the melting ice sheet in GreenlandThe Founders - Jimmy's latest book about PaypalJon's websiteJimmy's website Charlie's short story about the "Voyager 3" space probe

In this episode of the Design30 Podcast I discuss four lessons I learned from the Bell Labs "Idea Factory". If you want to understand how good ideas are developed and incentivized it is imperative that you study the habits, beliefs, and actions of successful companies. As the R&D department of AT&T, Bell Labs created more innovative and world changing technologies than any other company in the world. It's probably a good idea to understand how they came up with all of these good ideas!Become a free subscriber to access and read all of my Substack articles (subscribe here: https://design30.substack.com).Show Notes -The Idea Factory by Jon Gertner: https://a.co/d/ci3nz9GBecome a free subscriber to access and read all of my Substack articles (subscribe here: https://design30.substack.com)."Design more. Despair Less." Trademark of Design30 LLC.Copyright 2022 Design30 LLC.

The search for aliens is shifting from looking for signs of life to scouring the cosmos for signs of technology. New York Times Magazine science writer Jon Gertner joins host Krys Boyd to discuss the search for traces of machines throughout the universe, and what happens if we actually find them. His article is “The Search for Intelligent Life Is About to Get a Lot More Interesting.” This episode originally aired on October 17, 2022.

The search for intelligence beyond Earth has long entranced humans. According to Jon Gertner, a regular contributor to The New York Times Magazine, this search has been defined “by an assumption that extraterrestrials would have developed radio technologies akin to what humans have created.”However, Mr. Gertner writes, “rather than looking for direct calls to Earth, telescopes now sweep the sky, searching billions of frequencies simultaneously, for electronic signals whose origins can't be explained by celestial phenomena.”What scientists are most excited about is the prospect of other planets' civilizations being able to create the same “telltale chemical and electromagnetic signs,” or, as they are now called, “technosignatures.”This story was written by Jon Gertner and recorded by Audm. To hear more audio stories from publications like The New York Times, download Audm for iPhone or Android.

The transistor; solar panels; the first telecommunications satellite; cell phone networks; UNIX code; information theory. All these and more were invented in one place: Bell Labs.Bell Labs was where the future, which is what we now happen to call the present, was conceived and designed. It was the research and development arm of AT&T, which had monopoly control of the American phone system for much of the 20th century, and had more than ten thousand employees in its heyday.Why is Bell Labs not a household name?How did the transistor chip come to be?Which genius rode a unicycle around the office while smoking a cigar?Our guest today is Jon Gertner, author of The Idea Factory as we explore the secret to Bell Labs' success.With thanks to AT&T Archives and History Center for the archive recordings.The episode was produced by Freddy Chick The senior producer is Charlotte Long For more History Hit content, subscribe to our newsletters here. If you'd like to learn even more, we have hundreds of history documentaries, ad-free podcasts, and audiobooks at History Hit - subscribe today! See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Jackie Vullinghs Jackie Vullinghs is affectionately known by most people as Jax. Far from her birthplace in the UK, she now finds herself as an investing partner at one of Australia's most successful venture firms Airtree. Despite winning most of the prizes there are to win growing up (1st class honours in History at Cambridge, 3 Cambridge Blues in Women's Lacrosse, the Bundy Scholarship for Academic Excellence, the Dunster Prize for History and the Sarah Springman Prize for simultaneous excellence in both academic study and university sport), these days she is much more impressed by behaviours than badges of success. And when it comes to being a great venture capital investor, she believes that there is one attribute that trumps all the others, more important that curiosity, analytical skills, sales acumen and operating experience. Jax believes that the one trait that trumps all others is agency. The ability to develop a plan and take action, without anyone's permission. Jax is driven by the joy of making connections - between ideas, and between people. She also loves seeing companies where growth is driven by raving fans who feel compelled to spread the word. Years ago that led to an obsession with direct to consumer and creator-led brands. Today, despite its volatility she is fascinated by how Web3 is allowing creators to reward fans with ownership in their communities and can't wait to see the emergent behaviour that evolves as a result. Links Jackie Vullinghs on LinekdIn Behaviour over badges - Substack newsletter The Dream Machine by M. Mitchell Waldrop Complexity by M. Mitchell Waldrop A Mind at Play: How Claude Shannon Invented the Information Age by Jimmy Soni and Rob Goodman. The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation by Jon Gertner. A Man for All Markets: Beating the Odds, from Las Vegas to Wall Street by Edward O. Thorp Endurance by Alfred Lansing Companies Grow Super - Super admin software eucalyptus - healthcare technology company

Jon Gertner, author of The Idea Factory:  Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation, joins us for a wonderful discussion of the world-changing technologies that Bell Labs helped create in the 20thcentury.

Between the end of the 1800s and until the 1950-60s, Bell Labs played a crucial role in developing the most critical innovations (from scaling the phone business to the first transistors), it revolutionized various industries. It opened the way to information theory and microprocessors. Therefore, giving birth to Silicon Valley.

There are a lot of components that make up a computer. It's amazing how the tiniest little chips can make the whole thing work. However, not many of us think about these today. We just expect our devices to work as they should. But did you know that only some decades ago, the innovations we enjoy today were essentially unthinkable? The pursuit of something better brought the tech space to where it is today. In this episode, Renée James and Jon Gertner join us to talk about what silicon is used for in computer hardware. They break down the history of semiconductors and transistors. They also lay down the various experiments and breakthroughs that occurred before the conception of the industrial and consumer products we enjoy today. If you want to know why and how silicon metal runs everything in tech, this episode is for you. Episode Highlights [01:18] A Little Girl's Journey to the Computer IndustryThe CEO of semiconductor company Ampere Computing, Renée James, grew up alongside the computer industry. Her exposure to tech began with her father, who used to work at HP. He built computers and motherboards. Renée went on to a storied career at Intel. Now, she leads her own semiconductor company. The material that has stayed constant throughout Renée's career is silicon metal. [03:10] What Silicon Metal IsSilicon metal is the hard, brittle crystalline semiconductor that makes up transistors. These, in turn, make up chips, which make up computers. In essence, what silicon metal is used for, is computers. Silicon metal production began before the 70s and 80s. It inspired the name Silicon Valley. [03:28] Bell Labs and AT&TSilicon metal started with Bell Labs, a company named after Alexander Graham Bell. Bell Labs produced the American Telephone and Telegraph  (AT&T) Company. The company later monopolized the telephone service in the US. AT&T created an R&D development laboratory in 1925 called the Bell Telephone Laboratories. It started as a means to create a national phone system.  The lab's monopoly was critical to its long-term growth and success. It allowed them to plan for innovations around communications. [05:24] Inventing Innovative TechnologiesBell Labs produced technology not so much because they had great ideas, but because they had problems to solve. They had to create a national communication system from scratch. Switching centers in the 1930s contained enormous banks of switches that connected people to each other. The idea of the transistor was to use a new material without moving parts. The transistor is the building block of all electronic products. It's an amplifier and switch that replaced vacuum tubes and electromechanical relays. Jon Gertner: “It made everything smaller, it made it faster, and it made it better.” The material that would make transistors work is silicon metal.  [07:40] SemiconductorsA material that would become critical for transistors is semiconductors. Semiconductors acted like conductors under certain circumstances. These became valuable for wireless radios. Silicon metal, alongside germanium, was also used as a semiconductor for radar sets. [08:08] Experimentation on Transistors and SemiconductorsSome experts guessed that semiconductors could be useful in the phone system in the late 1930s. William Shockley experimented in turning semiconducting material into amplifiers in the 30s and 40s. It proved to be very difficult. It took years of experimentation to get anywhere with silicon metal and transistors. Bell Labs clearly understood the need to manipulate materials for communication systems. Jon Gertner: “The backbone of electronics and the backbone of these vast interconnected communication systems, it's actually this sort of decades-long or almost century-long pursuit of understanding the kinds of materials we needed to create the system.” [09:36]...

C y UNIX son la base de la informática moderna. Muchos de los lenguajes de los que hemos hablado esta temporada están relacionados o al menos tuvieron alguna influencia de C. Lo increíble es que C y UNIX surgieron gracias a cuatro desarrolladores de Bell Labs que se aferraron a sus sueños y los crearon como un proyecto propio.   Bell Labs fue un centro de innovación de mediados del siglo XX. Jon Gertner lo describe como una "fábrica de ideas". Uno de sus proyectos más importantes en la década de 1960 fue ayudar a desarrollar un sistema operativo de tiempo compartido llamado Multics. La Dra. Joy Lisi Rankin explica que en ese momento hubo una exageración importante en torno al tiempo compartido: se le describió como algo que lograría que se accediera a la computación como si fuera un servicio público. Hubo equipos grandes que dedicaron muchos años a desarrollar Multics, pero el resultado no fue el esperado. Bell Labs se alejó oficialmente del tiempo compartido en 1969. Pero, como cuenta Andrew Tanenbaum, un pequeño equipo de héroes siguió adelante, y C y UNIX fueron el fruto de sus esfuerzos. En ese momento ni siquiera se imaginaban que su trabajo daría forma al curso de la tecnología.

Saya membahas buku The Idea Factory karya Jon Gertner. Buku ini membahas bagaimana sebuah perusahaan bisa menjadi sumber inovasi dan pendorong revolusi teknologi selama hampir 60 tahun. Jauh sebelum kita mengenal perusahaan teknologi inovatif seperti Apple, Google, atau Amazon, ada sebuah divisi riset yang mendorong revolusi teknologi bernama Bell Labs, bagian dari AT&T Company. Bell Labs boleh dibilang merupakan laboratorium terbaik untuk ide besar yang mengubah dunia. Berbagai penemuan pentingnya seperti transistor, laser, hingga telepon seluler mendorong kita berada di era modern.

How do we make sense of the ideas of the present, that might determine our lives in the future? How can we weigh the legitimacy of new technologies--and sort through what is hype, and what is not? Well, that's what Jon Gertner, a veteran journalist, editor, historian, and author, seems to have figured out. Jon is a contributing writer at The New York Times Magazine, and is best known for his work on science, technology, innovation, business, and society. His journalism and reviews also appear in Wired, The New York Times Book Review, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, and a number of other print and digital publications. Jon served as an editor for Fast Company, Money and The American Lawyer. Jon is a graduate of Cornell University and is on the faculty of Princeton where he teaches the McGraw Seminar on writing. His first book, The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation, was a New York Times bestseller. His latest book is The Ice at the End of the World: An Epic Journey into Greenland's Buried Past and Our Perilous Future. We'll be doing a deep dive on both of his books, as well as his approach to writing and journalism.

Jon Gertner is a journalist and historian whose stories on science, technology, and nature have appeared in a host of national magazines. Since 2003 he has worked mainly as a feature writer for The New York Times Magazine. He is the author of The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation and The Ice at the End of the World. A frequent lecturer on technology and science history, Gertner lives with his family in New Jersey.· jongertner.net· www.oneplanetpodcast.org · www.creativeprocess.info

“I don't think there is anything in our history that prepares us for what we have to do next. I think we have a lot of promising signs. It seems like the real work is still ahead of us. To me it feels that we're making this up as we go along, we've made a couple good steps, we know the problem really well. We know what to do or at least what is needed, but those questions of policy and politics and how to mobilise governments and align people, at least to me it seems like the world has gotten more contentious, maybe because of the pandemic, rather than more willing to align.”Jon Gertner is a journalist and historian whose stories on science, technology, and nature have appeared in a host of national magazines. Since 2003 he has worked mainly as a feature writer for The New York Times Magazine. He is the author of The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation and The Ice at the End of the World. A frequent lecturer on technology and science history, Gertner lives with his family in New Jersey.· jongertner.net· www.oneplanetpodcast.org · www.creativeprocess.info

Jon Gertner is a journalist and historian whose stories on science, technology, and nature have appeared in a host of national magazines. Since 2003 he has worked mainly as a feature writer for The New York Times Magazine. He is the author of The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation and The Ice at the End of the World. A frequent lecturer on technology and science history, Gertner lives with his family in New Jersey.· jongertner.net· www.oneplanetpodcast.org · www.creativeprocess.info

“I don't think there is anything in our history that prepares us for what we have to do next. I think we have a lot of promising signs. It seems like the real work is still ahead of us. To me it feels that we're making this up as we go along, we've made a couple good steps, we know the problem really well. We know what to do or at least what is needed, but those questions of policy and politics and how to mobilise governments and align people, at least to me it seems like the world has gotten more contentious, maybe because of the pandemic, rather than more willing to align.”Jon Gertner is a journalist and historian whose stories on science, technology, and nature have appeared in a host of national magazines. Since 2003 he has worked mainly as a feature writer for The New York Times Magazine. He is the author of The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation and The Ice at the End of the World. A frequent lecturer on technology and science history, Gertner lives with his family in New Jersey.· jongertner.net· www.oneplanetpodcast.org · www.creativeprocess.info

Host: Larry Bernstein. Guests include Sunil Gupta, C. Bradley Thompson, Terry Williams, Michael Hiltzik and Jon Gertner.

«Digital» es una de esas palabras que se pueden usar para lavar y para planchar. Se habla de nativos digitales, brecha digital, agencias digitales, cultura digital, etc., etc. Sin embargo, detrás de todo eso hay un concepto maravilloso y profundo. En este episodio nos preguntamos por el transistor, el lenguaje binario y las ideas que, juntas, explican por qué la revolución digital es una de las transformaciones más importantes de nuestra historia.  También anunciamos el lanzamiento de nuestra tienda, si quieren conocerla visiten www.tiendacosasdeinternet.com Con el apoyo de:  ▸ Oyentes como tú en Patreon. ▸ Compradores de la Tienda de Cosas de Internet. Notas del episodio:  La palabra «Digital» viene del latín «digitus» (dedo), y por muchos años el diccionario la definió como algo relativo a los dedos y no a la información.  Acá un video que explica la diferencia entre la información digital y la analógica usando el clásico ejemplo del reloj.  Acá un documental sobre Lucho Bermúdez y su legado musical. Pregunta para las personas que vivieron la década de los setenta: ¿«digital» era un término relevante para ustedes?  Laura consultó la investigación del periodista Jon Gertner, él se dedicó durante años a entender la innovación en Bell Labs y terminó escribiendo «The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation».  Mervin Kelly, a quien llamamos «el padrino» del transistor. ¿Cómo se mueven los electrones dentro del tubo de vacío? William Bradford Shockley, uno de los inventores del transistor.  Walter Houser Brattain, también inventor del transistor.  John Bardeen, el último en la triada de inventores del transistor.  En esta charla Jon Gertner cuenta varias anécdotas de la creación del transistor, incluída el encuentro entre Mervin Kelly y William Shockly que menciona Laura.  En 1953, Bell Labs publicó un documental anticipando la importancia que tendría la invención del transistor. No estaban equivocados. ¿Cómo funciona un transistor? Un fragmento de Shockley, Brattain y Bardeen recibiendo el Nobel de física. Este video es alucinante. El mismísimo Walter Brattain enseña una clase sobre la física detrás de los elementos semiconductores.  Cómo funciona el código binario, en una explicación de José Américo NLF Freitas para TEDEd.  Los computadores entienden el código que escriben los programadores gracias a otros programas que se llaman «compiladores», son como un traductor que indica que unos y ceros se deben modificar.

Show Notes(2:32) Ari discussed his undergraduate studying Physiology and Neuroscience at UC San Diego, while doing neuroscience research on adult neurogenesis at the Gage Lab.(4:39) Ari discussed his decision to pursue a Ph.D. in Neurobiology at Harvard after college and extracted the importance of communication in research, thanks to his advisor Chris Harvey.(7:16) Ari explained his Ph.D. thesis titled “Population dynamics in parietal cortex during evidence accumulation for decision-making” - in which he developed methods to understand how neuronal circuits perform the computations necessary for complex behavior.(12:59) Ari talked about his process of learning machine learning and using that to analyze massive neuroscience datasets in his research.(15:22) Ari recounted attending NIPS 2015 and serendipitously meeting people from DeepMind, which he lated joined as a Research Scientist in their London office.(18:59) Ari’s research focuses on the generalization of neural networks, and shared his work called "On the Importance of Single Directions for Generalization” presented at ICLR 2018 (inspired by Chiyuan Zhang’s paper and Quoc Le’s paper previously).(28:51) Ari explained the differences between generalizing networks and memorizing networks, citing the results from his work "Insights on Representational Similarity in Neural Networks with Canonical Correlation” with Maithra Raghu and Samy Bengio presented at NeurIPS 2018 (Read Maithra’s paper on SVCCA that inspired it).(35:16) Another topic that Ari focuses on is representation learning and abstraction for intelligent systems. His team at DeepMind proposes a dataset and a challenge designed to probe abstract reasoning, as explained in “Measuring Abstract Reasoning in Neural Networks" presented at ICML 2018 (learn more about the IQ test Raven’s Progressive Matrices and take the challenge here).(42:21) An extension from the work above is "Learning to Make Analogies by Contrasting Abstract Relational Structure" - presented at ICLR 2019. With the same authors (led by Felix Hill along with David Barrett, Adam Santoro, Tim Lillicrap), Ari showed that while architecture choice can influence generalization performance, the choice of data and the manner in which it is presented to the model is even more critical.(48:18) Ari discussed "Neural Scene Representation and Rendering” (led by Ali Eslami and Danilo Rezende) that introduces Generative Query Network (GQN), a framework within which machines learn to represent scenes using only their own sensors (watch the video and check out the data).(55:09) Ari explained the findings in "Analyzing Biological and Artificial Neural Networks: Challenges with Opportunities for Synergy?” published at the Current Opinion in Neurobiology (joint work with David Barrett and Jakob Macke).(57:04) Ari shared the properties of pruning algorithms that influence stability and generalization, as claimed in “The Generalization-Stability Tradeoff in Neural Network Pruning” led by Brian Bartoldson.(01:00:56) Ari went over the generalization of lottery tickets in neural networks, which is inspired by the lottery ticket hypothesis from Jonathan Frankle and Michael Carbin at MIT. The two papers mentioned are collaboration with Haonan Yu, Yuandong Tian, Michela Paganini, and Sergey Edunov (Check out his talk at REWORK Deep Learning Summit in Montreal 2019).(01:09:00) Ari investigated "Training BatchNorm and Only BatchNorm” which looks at the performance of neural networks when trained only with the Batch Normalization parameters (joint work with Jonathan Frankle and David Schwab).(01:12:12) Ari mentioned "The Early Phase of Neural Network Training” (presented at ICML 2020) that uses the lottery ticket framework to rigorously examine the early part of the training (joint work with Jonathan Frankle and David Schwab). (01:16:25) Ari discussed at length “Representation Learning Through Latent Canonicalizations" (presented at ICLR 2020). This work seeks to learn representations in which semantically meaningful factors of variation (like color or shape) can be independently manipulated by learned linear transformations in latent space, termed “latent canonicalizes” (joint work with Or Litany, Srinath Sridhar, Leonidas Guibas, and Judy Hoffman).(01:22:15) Ari summarized "Selectivity Considered Harmful: Evaluating the Causal Impact of Class Selectivity in DNNs" - which investigates the causal impact of class selectivity on network function (led by Matthew Leavitt).(01:25:26) Ari reflected on his career and shared advice for individuals who want to make a dent in AI research.(01:28:10) Ari shared his excitement on self-supervised learning, which addresses the need of neural networks to require expensive labeled data.(01:29:47) Closing segment.His Contact InformationWebsiteGoogle ScholarLinkedInTwitterGitHubHis Recommended Resources“Understanding Deep Learning Requires Rethinking Generalization” by Chiyuan Zhang“Singular Vector Canonical Correlation Analysis for Deep Learning Dynamics and Interpretability” by Maithra RaghuRaven’s Progressive Matrices IQ test"The Lottery Ticket Hypothesis” by Jonathan Frankle and Michael Carbin (Open-Source Framework)“Random Features for Large-Scale Kernel Machines” by Ali Rahimi and Ben Recht (NIPS 2017 Test Of Time Award)“beta-VAE: Learning Basic Visual Concepts with a Constrained Variational Framework” by DeepMindSamy Bengio (Research Scientist at Google AI)Aleksander Madry (Professor of Computer Science at MIT)Jason Yosinski (Founding Member of Uber AI Labs)“The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and The Great Age of American Innovation" by Jon Gertner

Show Notes(2:32) Ari discussed his undergraduate studying Physiology and Neuroscience at UC San Diego, while doing neuroscience research on adult neurogenesis at the Gage Lab.(4:39) Ari discussed his decision to pursue a Ph.D. in Neurobiology at Harvard after college and extracted the importance of communication in research, thanks to his advisor Chris Harvey.(7:16) Ari explained his Ph.D. thesis titled “Population dynamics in parietal cortex during evidence accumulation for decision-making” - in which he developed methods to understand how neuronal circuits perform the computations necessary for complex behavior.(12:59) Ari talked about his process of learning machine learning and using that to analyze massive neuroscience datasets in his research.(15:22) Ari recounted attending NIPS 2015 and serendipitously meeting people from DeepMind, which he lated joined as a Research Scientist in their London office.(18:59) Ari’s research focuses on the generalization of neural networks, and shared his work called "On the Importance of Single Directions for Generalization” presented at ICLR 2018 (inspired by Chiyuan Zhang’s paper and Quoc Le’s paper previously).(28:51) Ari explained the differences between generalizing networks and memorizing networks, citing the results from his work "Insights on Representational Similarity in Neural Networks with Canonical Correlation” with Maithra Raghu and Samy Bengio presented at NeurIPS 2018 (Read Maithra’s paper on SVCCA that inspired it).(35:16) Another topic that Ari focuses on is representation learning and abstraction for intelligent systems. His team at DeepMind proposes a dataset and a challenge designed to probe abstract reasoning, as explained in “Measuring Abstract Reasoning in Neural Networks" presented at ICML 2018 (learn more about the IQ test Raven’s Progressive Matrices and take the challenge here).(42:21) An extension from the work above is "Learning to Make Analogies by Contrasting Abstract Relational Structure" - presented at ICLR 2019. With the same authors (led by Felix Hill along with David Barrett, Adam Santoro, Tim Lillicrap), Ari showed that while architecture choice can influence generalization performance, the choice of data and the manner in which it is presented to the model is even more critical.(48:18) Ari discussed "Neural Scene Representation and Rendering” (led by Ali Eslami and Danilo Rezende) that introduces Generative Query Network (GQN), a framework within which machines learn to represent scenes using only their own sensors (watch the video and check out the data).(55:09) Ari explained the findings in "Analyzing Biological and Artificial Neural Networks: Challenges with Opportunities for Synergy?” published at the Current Opinion in Neurobiology (joint work with David Barrett and Jakob Macke).(57:04) Ari shared the properties of pruning algorithms that influence stability and generalization, as claimed in “The Generalization-Stability Tradeoff in Neural Network Pruning” led by Brian Bartoldson.(01:00:56) Ari went over the generalization of lottery tickets in neural networks, which is inspired by the lottery ticket hypothesis from Jonathan Frankle and Michael Carbin at MIT. The two papers mentioned are collaboration with Haonan Yu, Yuandong Tian, Michela Paganini, and Sergey Edunov (Check out his talk at REWORK Deep Learning Summit in Montreal 2019).(01:09:00) Ari investigated "Training BatchNorm and Only BatchNorm” which looks at the performance of neural networks when trained only with the Batch Normalization parameters (joint work with Jonathan Frankle and David Schwab).(01:12:12) Ari mentioned "The Early Phase of Neural Network Training” (presented at ICML 2020) that uses the lottery ticket framework to rigorously examine the early part of the training (joint work with Jonathan Frankle and David Schwab). (01:16:25) Ari discussed at length “Representation Learning Through Latent Canonicalizations" (presented at ICLR 2020). This work seeks to learn representations in which semantically meaningful factors of variation (like color or shape) can be independently manipulated by learned linear transformations in latent space, termed “latent canonicalizes” (joint work with Or Litany, Srinath Sridhar, Leonidas Guibas, and Judy Hoffman).(01:22:15) Ari summarized "Selectivity Considered Harmful: Evaluating the Causal Impact of Class Selectivity in DNNs" - which investigates the causal impact of class selectivity on network function (led by Matthew Leavitt).(01:25:26) Ari reflected on his career and shared advice for individuals who want to make a dent in AI research.(01:28:10) Ari shared his excitement on self-supervised learning, which addresses the need of neural networks to require expensive labeled data.(01:29:47) Closing segment.His Contact InformationWebsiteGoogle ScholarLinkedInTwitterGitHubHis Recommended Resources“Understanding Deep Learning Requires Rethinking Generalization” by Chiyuan Zhang“Singular Vector Canonical Correlation Analysis for Deep Learning Dynamics and Interpretability” by Maithra RaghuRaven’s Progressive Matrices IQ test"The Lottery Ticket Hypothesis” by Jonathan Frankle and Michael Carbin (Open-Source Framework)“Random Features for Large-Scale Kernel Machines” by Ali Rahimi and Ben Recht (NIPS 2017 Test Of Time Award)“beta-VAE: Learning Basic Visual Concepts with a Constrained Variational Framework” by DeepMindSamy Bengio (Research Scientist at Google AI)Aleksander Madry (Professor of Computer Science at MIT)Jason Yosinski (Founding Member of Uber AI Labs)“The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and The Great Age of American Innovation" by Jon Gertner

In this episode Matt Crawford speaks with best selling author and historian Jon Gertner about his book The Ice At The End Of The World. This is the story of the early exploration of Greenland's ice sheet and the scientific investigations that followed. Earth's largest laboratory might just hold the key to our future if we can only listen. As Gertner writes in the book, 'Ice is time solidified.' This book should be required reading for all, informative and very enjoyable, I highly recommend it.

On today's show author Jon Gertner talks about his book about Greenland titled: The Ice at the End of the World.

Today’s guest is David Keith, Professor at Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences and the Kennedy School, and Founder of Carbon Engineering.David has worked near the interface between climate science, energy technology, and public policy for twenty-five years. He took first prize in Canada's national physics prize exam, won MIT's prize for excellence in experimental physics, and was one of TIME magazine's Heroes of the Environment. David is Professor of Applied Physics at the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences and Professor of Public Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School, and founder of Carbon Engineering, a company developing technology to capture CO2 from ambient air to make carbon-neutral hydrocarbon fuels. Best known for his work on the science, technology, and public policy of solar geoengineering, David led the development of Harvard’s Solar Geoengineering Research Program, a Harvard-wide interfaculty research initiative. His work has ranged from the climatic impacts of large-scale wind power to an early critique of the prospects for hydrogen fuel. David’s hardware engineering projects include the first interferometer for atoms, a high-accuracy infrared spectrometer for NASA's ER-2, and currently, the development of pilot plants for Carbon Engineering and the development of a stratospheric propelled balloon experiment for solar geoengineering. David teaches courses on Science and Technology Policy and on Energy and Environmental Systems where he has reached students worldwide with an online edX course. He has writing for the public with A Case for Climate Engineeringfrom MIT Press. Based in Cambridge, David spends about a third of his time in Canmore, Alberta.In today’s episode, we cover:Overview of solar geoengineeringHow concentrated an area can it be deployed inSteps that go into testing it'History of solar geoengineeringPotential risks of deployment and potential risks of not doing the testingPotential for unintended consequencesHow hard it is to deployHow much research is needed (and for what) and how much it will costBridge versus longterm solutionWhere it fits into overall climate solutions portfolioWhat fossil fuel companies think of solar geoengineeringDavid’s advice for others looking to help facilitate research in this area and/or learn more about itLinks to topics discussed in this episode:David Keith: https://keith.seas.harvard.edu/people/david-keithGeoengineering: https://geoengineering.environment.harvard.edu/geoengineeringThe Planet Remade: https://www.amazon.com/Planet-Remade-Geoengineering-Could-Change-ebook/dp/B011PWUT8YCarnegie Climate Governance Initiative: https://www.c2g2.net/Vaclav Smil: http://vaclavsmil.com/Holly Buck: https://www.ioes.ucla.edu/person/holly-buck/Additional Reading:David Keith, “Let’s Talk About Geoengineering,” Project Syndicate, March 21, 2019.David Keith, “Toward a Responsible Solar Geoengineering Research Program,” Issues in Science and Technology, Spring 2017.James Temple, “What is Geoengineering—And Why Should You Care?” MIT Technology Review, August 9, 2019.Lizzie Burns, David Keith, Peter Irvine, and Joshua Horton, “Belfer Technology Factsheet Series: Solar Geoengineering,” Harvard Kennedy School Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, Technology and Public Purpose Project, June 2019.Jon Gertner, “Is It O.K. to Tinker With the Environment to Fight Climate Change?,” The New York Times Magazine, April 18, 2017.You can find me on twitter @jjacobs22 or @mcjpod and email at info@myclimatejourney.co, where I encourage you to share your feedback on episodes and suggestions for future topics or guests.Enjoy the show!

JON GERTNER – THE ICE AT THE END OF THE WORLD...with TRE's Giles Brown

Growing up, Sam Ginn of Vetspire realized that a few extra software tools didn't help his veterinarian mother get home any earlier. This week on the show, he joins Shawn & Ivan to talk about building a better practice management system from the ground up. Sam recommends The Idea Factory by Jon Gertner (amzn.to/370SQCT). Learn more about Vetspire at vetspire.com.

C and UNIX are at the root of modern computing. Many of the languages we’ve covered this season are related to or at least influenced by C. But C and UNIX only happened because a few developers at Bell Labs created both as a skunkworks project. Bell Labs was a mid-twentieth century center for innovation. Jon Gertner describes it as an “idea factory.” One of their biggest projects in the 1960s was helping build a time-sharing operating system called Multics. Dr. Joy Lisi Rankin explains the hype around time-sharing at the time—it was described as potentially making computing accessible as a public utility. Large teams devoted years of effort to build Multics—and it wasn’t what they had hoped for. Bell Labs officially moved away from time-sharing in 1969. But as Andrew Tanenbaum recounts, a small team of heroes pushed on anyways. C and UNIX were the result. Little did they know how much their work would shape the course of technology.That's all for Season 3. If you want to dive deeper into C and UNIX, you can check out all our bonus material over at redhat.com/commandlineheroes. You’ll find extra content for every episode. Follow along with the episode transcript. Subscribe to the newsletter for more stories and to be among the first to see announcements about the podcast. See you soon for Season 4.

L’invité de cet épisode de Génération Do It Yourself est un gars à part. Un scientifique, lauréat du prix Fields, directeur de l’institut Henri-Poincaré, professeur, auteur, et député. Cédric Villani c’est un ovni, un touche-à-tout compulsif, curieux de tout … y compris de podcast, raison pour laquelle il a accepté de participer au mien ! Il est entré dans les locaux de CosaVostra en lançant un bonjour comme on en reçoit peu. Tout de suite, toute la pression que je ressentais à l’idée de l’interviewer est tombée. Car si son univers est assez éloigné du mien plus “business”, Cédric Villani a parfaitement sa place dans ce podcast où je tente de vous faire découvrir le parcours de personnalités qui ont fait grand saut. Et le grand saut, ça il l’a fait ! Loin de moi l’idée (ou l’envie) de prendre une quelconque position politique, mais simplement de retracer l’aventure de cette personnalité hors normes. “C’est toujours dur de se présenter. Mais il y a trois moteurs qui me définissent : la curiosité, la liberté et mon rapport aux autres.” De son enfance à Toulon dans une famille de professeurs et d’artistes à son entrée à Normale, accompagné de son walkman pour se donner de la force - Cédric nous parle de son premier amour les mathématiques. Entre deux concepts qu’il vulgarise, il en profite pour encourager les jeunes filles à se tourner vers les sciences (un message que je ne peux que soutenir avec mes deux filles) et nous raconter comment il a dû, pendant 6 mois, cacher à ses enfants et ses parents qu’il était le lauréat de la médaille Fields. “Les mathématiques, c’est un monde merveilleux, plein de couleurs, de subtilités et de spécialités.”Mais n’allez pas croire que l’on parle seulement de maths ! Loin de là, on parle transmission de savoir, éthique, musique italienne, BD, organisation, sommeil (c’est un partisan des micros siestes) et, forcément, un peu politique aussi. Sa rencontre avec Macron, ses prises de bec avec Mélenchon, son temps à l’Assemblée, le rapport Villani et même la rémunération et le train de vie des députés, il ne passe rien sous silence et c’est un vrai bonheur ! “Les gens le sentent quand on est honnête. Ils savent dire si on est dans l’empathie ou juste dans la façade.” Un épisode passionnant, riche en enseignement pour lequel je le remercie lui ainsi qu’Ania Ould Lamara Kaci et Yemsel Bougherara ! Si vous voulez en savoir plus sur Cédric Villani, vous pouvez le contacter sur toutes les plateformes ou lui parle directement dans la rue si vous le croisez (“on a jamais fait mieux pour communiquer !”) ou lire ses livres : Immersion - De la science au Parlement Théorème Vivant - pour ceux qui possèdent un master 2 en mathématiques. Ode à l’imperfection Et dans un autre style, ses BD avec Edmond Baudoin, un illustrateur de génie : Rêveurs lunaires historiques : Quatre génies qui ont changé l’Histoire et Ballade pour un bébé robot. Ainsi que La parade colorée : conte photographique en partenariat avec l’incroyable Lisa Rose. Et si vous n’aviez plus de quoi lire car vous êtes comme ma Louise, il recommande : Le chef d’oeuvre de Romain Gary, les racines du ciel (c’est Yannick Jadot qui lui a conseillé). The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation de Jon Gertner.

On this episode of The Open Mind, we're delighted to welcome Jon Gertner, science writer for the New York Times Magazine. His first book “The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation” chronicled the exploits of a generation of scientists at the world's greatest laboratory. Gertner is here to discuss his newest book by Random House “The Ice at the End of the World: An Epic Journey into Greenland's Buried Past and Our Perilous Future.” He explores 150 years of exploration and investigation on the Greenland ice sheet, which he says has led to a profound understanding of our current climate crisis. In his investigation of Greenland, Gertner traveled to the island six times and interviewed scientists in Europe and around the United States. “In the Arctic he slept by glaciers, drank from melt water streams, joined with NASA teams, measuring the ice sheet and cruised through iceberg waters in the strange light of Arctic midnight.” 

The Pulitzer Prize winner discusses his new novel, and Jon Gertner talks about “The Ice at the End of the World.”

The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation was published in March, 2012 by Penguin Press. The paperback was released in February, 2013. In The New York Times, Michiko Kakutani called The Idea Factory “riveting,” and wrote: “Mr. Gertner’s portraits... Read More ›

Ch. 6 - The Idea Factory (Jon Gertner), The Chip (T.R. Reid), Crystal Fire (Michael Riordan)

April 14, 2016. A session from DPLAfest 2016 dedicated to the state of writing in the digital age. What does it mean to write a book, digital or print or both? What new technologies and processes are re-defining the role of the author? Panelists will touch upon these questions and more during this exciting discussion between three prominent contemporary authors. Speaker Biography: After stints in the editorial departments of Houghton Mifflin, the Knopf group, and Little Brown, Sarah Burnes became an agent in 2001. Joining The Gernert Company in 2005, she now represents adult fiction writers (Alice McDermott and Tony Earley among them), children's fiction writers (New York Times bestsellers Margaret Stohl and Pseudonymous Bosch), and journalists and critics (New York Times Magazine contributor Jon Gertner and Freeman's John Freeman). Speaker Biography: Virginia Heffernan writes about digital culture for The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Wired, Mother Jones, and The New Yorker. Her essays on digitization are regularly anthologized. Her new book, "Magic and Loss: The Internet as Art," will be published in June by Simon & Schuster. She works as an editorial strategist for startups and venture capital firms. Speaker Biography: Craig Mod is a writer and designer who splits his time between Tokyo and New York. Previously a product designer at Flipboard, he is also a TechFellow award recipient and a 2011/2012 MacDowell writing fellow. He is currently an advisor for Medium and Japan-based SmartNews. He has written for The Atlantic, California Sunday Magazine, Aeon, Virginia Quarterly Review, New Scientist, Contents Magazine, Codex Journal of Typography and other publications. He is the co-author of "Art Space Tokyo" and the Japanese essay collection, "Bokura no Jidai no Hon" ("The Books of our Generation"). Speaker Biography: Robin Sloan grew up near Detroit and went to school at Michigan State, where he studied economics and co-founded a literary magazine called Oats. Between 2002 and 2012, he worked at Poynter, Current TV, and Twitter. He is the author of "Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore," which started as a short story and is now a full-length novel. For transcript, captions, and more information, visit http://www.loc.gov/today/cyberlc/feature_wdesc.php?rec=7261

Featured Book:  Consciousness and the Brain, by Stanislas Deheane. Stanislas Deheane tackles the problem of consciousness, and tells us how his own research is helping to explain how that three-and-a-half pound lump of squishy gray mater inside your head does what it does. And on the nightstand:  Time Reborn, by Lee Smolin; and The Idea Factory, by Jon Gertner.

For the first time ever, Google has let a journalist into the secretive Google X labs where an eccentric team of big thinkers is hatching plans for the technology of tomorrow. We're talking about hoverboards, a space elevator and floating Wi-Fi hot spots for the developing world. The company talks a big game about chasing these "moonshot" ideas that could improve billions of lives. It's fanciful, it's ambitious, and it's a whole lot like AT&T's Bell Labs of a half-century ago. That iconic corporate research program brought us inventions — from the transistor to the computer coding language C — that form the backbone of just about every electronic device we touch. So we ask, can Google possibly pick up the torch? Well, maybe so.  In this episode, we consider if the conditions are right for the dawn of a new golden age of corporate invention. To help us along, researchers at Google X open up about their process, we consult archival tape from AT&T, and chat with Fast Company's Jon Gertner, the first journalist to visit Google X and author of the "The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation." For more Google X inside info, check out Jon's story in Fast Company or watch the video below that follows the X team through a day in the life of a wild idea. And if you like this New Tech City episode, why not subscribe to the podcast, or follow us on Twitter. 

Author or "The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation"

"The Idea Factory" is the definitive history of America's greatest incubator of technological innovation. In this first full portrait of the legendary Bell Labs, Jon Gertner takes readers behind one of the greatest collaborations between business and science in history.

"The Idea Factory" is the definitive history of America's greatest incubator of technological innovation. In this first full portrait of the legendary Bell Labs, Jon Gertner takes readers behind one of the greatest collaborations between business and science in history.

Bell Labs thrived from the 1920s to the 1980s, when it was most innovative and productive institution of the twentieth century. Long before America's brightest scientific minds began migrating west to Silicon Valley, they flocked to the Bell Labs campus in the New Jersey suburbs. At its peak, Bell Labs employed nearly fifteen thousand people, twelve hundred had PhDs. Thirteen eventually won Nobel prizes. How did they do it?  How can we learn from their successes, so we can do it here in Colorado?  New Your Times journalist Jon Gertner has written a book that provides some answers.  He calls it:  The Idea Factory - Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation.  Inside that book, you can learn how radar came to be, and lasers, transistors, satellites, mobile phones, and much more.   How on Earth's Shelley Schlender spoke with Mr. Gertner about his new book. Hosts: Tom McKinnon and Jim Pullen Producer: Tom McKinnon Engineer: Jim Pullen Executive Producer: Susan Moran

Author of "The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation"

Jon Gertner, the author of The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of Innovation, guides us through Bell Labs' fascinating history, the birth of new technologies and ideas, and the business of invention.