Episode 11: Jack Haworth

12/05/21 • 65 min

Put your headphones on and take some time out to listen to this episode. Your ears are in for a treat! Thanks to Adam at Overtone Productions, we're bringing you outstanding sound design in the final episode of this series.

Inventive Podcast is all about mixing fact and fiction - featuring engineers whose work is transforming the world we live in and award-winning writers who transform their stories. We have another first for you in this episode as we feature sublime poetry from Katrina Porteous interwoven with presenter Trevor Cox's interview with electrical engineer Jack Haworth. Jack works with robots designed for extreme environments at the clean-up of the Sellafield nuclear site.

When he was at school, Jack thought he was going to university to study business and become the next Alan Sugar. But he took the long road into engineering instead. On the graduate scheme at Sellafield, he's working with machines that go where human beings can't - inspecting outdoor areas for radiation and highly radioactive nuclear cells. But what about the darker side of robotics? Will they put people out of work or even take over? And what made him choose an industry with such a bad reputation?

Katrina doesn't have any qualifications in science – not even a GCSE! But she's worked for many years with scientists and she believes the distinction between the arts and sciences is an extremely unhelpful one. It's all about imagination – for engineers and artists, it's all about imagining new worlds.

Katrina's poem is a response to Jack's chat with Trevor, interwoven throughout the episode, and explores themes that include how the data-driven systems that increasingly dominate our world may impact on our freedom and, on a more optimistic note, how we may gain more freedom by the possibilities for interaction between human consciousness and machine learning.

A informative and highly creative listen!

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A informative and highly creative listen!

What did you think of the episode? We're evaluating Inventive. Please fill in our listener survey

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Previous Episode

Episode 10: Larissa Suzuki

A fascinating insight into how AI will influence how cities operate in the future and the ethics of collecting big data.

Larissa Suzuki is a polymath – she's a computer scientist, engineer, entrepreneur, writer, inventor, and philanthropist. She was awarded the Engineer of the Year at the Engineering Talent Awards 2021 and the Royal Engineering Society's Rooke Award and she made The Guardian's Top 50 Women in Engineering.

She has one foot in academia and the other in industry – she's an Honorary Associate Professor at University College London and she's a Data Scientist at Google working on Artificial Intelligence for Smart Cities and the Interplanetary Internet – that involves connecting devices and satellites to ensure we have connectivity to provide services to the international space station and remote planets.

Larissa is autistic and she tells Trevor Cox that it's important that companies hire people who don't fit a particular profile as that's not the way to create better products and be more successful. She's an advocate for women in STEM. The pioneering computer scientists were women, so why were they not given credit for their achievements?

Trevor and Larissa delve deep into the ethics of collecting data on citizens for smart cities. Should we be even more concerned about our privacy in the future?

Author Tim Maughan's short story, My City is Not a Problem, focuses on the first AI system built for the public sector. It appears to know how to solve London's problems better than its politicians.

What did you think of the episode? We're evaluating Inventive. Please fill in our listener survey

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Next Episode

Episode 12: Trevor Cox

Ruth Amos visits the Acoustic Laboratories at the University of Salford. She gets to experience the test chambers with their extreme acoustics, from the oppressive silence of the anechoic chamber, to the booming reverberation chamber.

So this is an Inventive episode with a twist, as previous guest Ruth Amos turns interviewer, and we hear about the acoustical engineering done by Inventive's normal host Professor Trevor Cox.

Inventive Podcast is all about mixing fact and fiction, as it features groundbreaking engineers and brilliant writers. This episode features a story exploring unusual hearing from science fiction writer Stephen Cox. And yes, Trevor and Stephen are related. Stephen's story The Magic Flute draws on Trevor's Cadenza project, which aims to improve how music sounds on hearing aids.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.