Adio Dinika is a political scientist and researcher for DAIR, the Distributed AI Research Institute that was founded in 2021 by Timnit Gebru after her termination as technical co-lead of the company’s Ethical Artificial Intelligence Team. Adio takes us behind the scene to give us a sense of the working conditions of many thousands of people, mainly in the lower-wage areas of the global south, whose task it is to filter massive data sets for machine learning and software applications that we use every day, by labelling images and flagging harmful content. Adio discusses the sometimes desperate challenges that these people face, and the work that DAIR is doing to bring the issues to public awareness and advocate for fair treatment of the humans who make AI possible.

Dr. Federico Carollo is a researcher at the University of Tübingen who is exploring a new, dynamic phase of matter called time crystals. First theorized by Nobel Prize laureate Frank Wilczek a dozen years ago, time crystals are quickly becoming practical reality. Federico explains how they operate, the different varieties of time crystals, and their potential uses for sensing, measurement, and other applications as a new platform for probing physics. Although time crystals aren’t perpetual motion machines, as the analogy is sometimes applied, we consider some of the technologies that could emerge and the exciting future as the science of time crystals evolves.

Twesh Upadhyaha takes us on a tour of the science of thermodynamics as it has developed over two centuries, exploring the latest discoveries in the changes of energy and its various forms of heat and work at the smallest quantum level of atoms and molecules. Twesh is a PhD candidate at the University of Maryland, where he's a researcher in the Quantum Steampunk Laboratory. Join Twesh in exploring the frontiers of thermodynamics in the hidden world of energy at the microscopic level, the fascinating connection of quantum thermodynamics with information theory, the discovery of what he calls “an entire family of constraints” within the second law of thermodynamics at the quantum level, and the open question: “What does entropy even mean at the quantum level?”