research

The final lecture of Richard Hamming's Learning to Learn course, from 1995, based on his well-known talk 'You and Your Research'. It covers how to do important work and build a career.

Richard Hamming's 1995 recording of his talk 'You and Your Research', drawn from his graduate engineering course. He discusses how great scientists pick important problems and build careers, drawing on his years at Bell Labs.

John Kitchin shows how Emacs org-mode with Python lets researchers combine narrative, math, figures and executable code in one document. It exports to LaTeX, HTML and PDF, and he used it for papers and e-books.

Curt Jaimungal interviews biologist Michael Levin of Tufts about consciousness, bioelectricity, emergence, and cancer research. The conversation challenges reductionist views of life.

Microsoft Research demonstrates holoportation, which reconstructs and compresses high-quality 3D models of people in real time and sends them anywhere. With a HoloLens, remote participants appear as if present in your room.

Veritasium explains why a large share of published research findings may be false, covering p-values, p-hacking, publication bias and low replication rates. It draws on John Ioannidis's well-known paper and describes reforms such as preregistration.

A 37C3 talk by Kaspersky researchers on Operation Triangulation, a zero-click iPhone attack that targeted their own colleagues. They describe capturing every stage of the chain, four zero-days and a previously unknown spyware active for years.

Tom7 explains how he built a SIGBOVIK 2017 paper made only of printable ASCII bytes that is also a valid DOS executable. He writes a C compiler targeting printable x86 without self-modifying code and solves the puzzles the constraint creates.

Disney Research presents Touche, a swept frequency capacitive sensing technique that recognizes complex hand and body configurations, and adds touch sensitivity to humans, liquids and everyday objects.

A Microsoft Research demo from TechFest 2012 of a lab touch system that lets viewers feel the effect of different input latencies, down to about 1 ms. It shows how much more responsive dragging feels compared with typical 100 ms touch delay.

Microsoft Research's Rick Rashid demonstrates a speech recognition and translation system, built on deep neural networks, that turns his spoken English into Chinese speech in 2012.

Toyota Research Institute presents an approach for teaching robots new dexterous behaviors from human demonstration. It explains why this capability matters and what advances made it possible.

Sabine Hossenfelder reads a confidential email and uses it to explain her worries about academia and incentives in theoretical physics research. She ties it to her earlier Nature Physics comment on research quality.

Tom Scott-style absurdist research by tom7 for SIGBOVIK 2021, using machine learning to discover letterforms that are 'uppercaser' than uppercase A and lowercaser than lowercase. It is a comedic, technically inventive deep dive with fonts and a paper.

A Kurzgesagt animated explainer on whether aging could be cured within our lifetimes, made with Lifespan.io and the LEAF foundation. It introduces the idea of treating aging as a medical problem.

Yann LeCun on the Big Technology Podcast discusses why current AI models cannot make discoveries despite their knowledge. He argues systems need abstract world models and also covers limits of AI research, investor expectations, and open source after DeepSeek.

A short clip of molecular biologist Cristina Sanchez describing her lab research on how THC affects cancer cells. It is uploaded on a channel promoting cannabis as a cancer treatment.

Dr Brad Stanfield recounts the research history and scandal around resveratrol, the supposed anti-aging supplement, including problems with the original studies.

TED talk by biochemist Cynthia Kenyon on how a simple genetic mutation can double the lifespan of the worm C. elegans, and what that suggests about extending healthy human life.

Disney Research's demo of quasistatic cavity resonance, which uses a purpose-built room or cabinet to generate magnetic fields that deliver kilowatts of power wirelessly to mobile receivers inside.

Timothy Roscoe of ETH Zurich delivers the joint USENIX ATC/OSDI 2021 keynote arguing that operating systems must reckon with modern hardware, which is a heterogeneous collection of processors, firmware and coprocessors rather than a simple machine. It shows how much runs below and beside Linux.

Dr. Jason Fung, a nephrologist, presents his view of the causes of obesity and type 2 diabetes, focusing on hormones such as insulin rather than calories alone. The talk draws on research and his Intensive Dietary Management program.

Ali Rahimi's NIPS 2017 Test-of-Time award talk, in which he argues that modern machine learning has become alchemy, working without being rigorously understood. He calls for more rigor and understanding in the field.

Lex Fridman's long conversation with Andrej Karpathy on Tesla's self-driving approach, Optimus, neural networks, transformers, AGI and more. It also touches on his OpenAI work and working with Elon Musk.

A MIX08 session from Microsoft's Office team on how the Office 2007 ribbon was designed. It explains the user-feedback and telemetry behind it and the alternatives that were rejected.

Street interviews of over 50 passersby in Times Square, asked what a browser is. Many answers show people confuse browsers with search engines or the internet.

Jensen Harris of the Office 2007 design team tells the behind-the-scenes story of the Ribbon at MIX08. He covers early prototypes, mistakes, and the UX principles used to design and validate it.

Dr. John Campbell reviews a mouse study on accidental intravenous injection of an mRNA COVID-19 vaccine and its potential to cause myopericarditis. He walks through the methods and findings and discusses the aspiration technique.

A Chinese state-TV-produced documentary segment, with English subtitles, about virus sample collection in the field, including scientists collecting live bats. It was published in December 2019.

Ali Rahimi accepts the NIPS 2017 Test of Time Award and argues that machine learning has become alchemy, with practice running ahead of understanding.

Andres Gomez Emilsson of the Qualia Research Institute presents a model of DMT experiences using hyperbolic geometry and dynamical systems theory. He describes how different intoxication levels correspond to changing curvature and information content of experience.

A Disney Research SIGGRAPH 2013 demo of an interactive system that lets non-experts design animated mechanical characters. The user sketches motion curves and the system generates optimized mechanisms and gear trains for 3D printing.

Alan Kay's 2015 talk on the power of simplicity, arguing that systems become simpler by building on more sophisticated fundamental building blocks and that big research horizons drove invention at Xerox PARC. It ranges across computing, tools and scaling software.

Felienne Hermans's Strange Loop keynote on the history and pedagogy of teaching programming. She questions exploration-only approaches like Logo and discusses research supporting explicit instruction and rote practice.

Nardwuar interviews Pharrell and Shay of N.E.R.D. in Vancouver, using his trademark deep research and gifts. The extended version runs about ten minutes.

Ben Felix rebuts common arguments for holding only US stocks, such as past outperformance and international revenue exposure. He supports the case for international diversification with cited academic research.

A roughly two and a half hour Noonautics panel on DMT research moderated by Graham Hancock with Andrew Gallimore and Rick Strassman. It discusses planned DMTx experiments and reported DMT experiences.

Conal Elliott presents his paper on automatic differentiation, deriving a simple, generalized AD algorithm from a natural specification. Varying the representation of derivatives yields forward and reverse mode algorithms that avoid the complexity and statefulness of backpropagation.

Simon Knowles, co-founder and CTO of Graphcore, talks about "intelligence processors", chips designed specifically for machine learning. The talk was given at the RAAIS 2017 summit and covers Graphcore's architecture.

SethBling shows MarI/O, a program using neural networks and the NEAT genetic algorithm to learn to play Super Mario World. The description links the source code, the paper and background reading.