DSAi - The Australian Data and AI podcast

In this episode I speak with Simon Elisha, the Chief Technologist at Amazon Web Services and a significant influencer in the world of cloud computing across Australia, New Zealand, and Oceania.  Simon shares his impressive career journey, from his enthusiasm for programming and tech to his current position as a leader and promoter of digital literacy as Chief Technologist for Amazon Web Services. He revealed some of the latest advances and innovations in cloud computing, such as event-driven architectures, serverless computing, sustainability, and machine learning. He shared some guidance on how to stay updated and skilled in the dynamic tech world. We also talked about his role and what it’s like to be a Chief Technologist and how he helps customers access the benefits of the cloud.  Towards the end we talk about AWS Bedrock, the new Large Language Model (LLM) service from Amazon Web Services. This episode is full of insights and value for anyone interested in cloud computing and technology. I hope you find it as enjoyable as I did. Enjoy!

We talk with Prof Mike Merzernich.  Mike is an American neuroscientist and professor emeritus at the University of California, San Francisco who has won the Award for Distinguished Scientific Contributions, the International Ipsen Prize,  Zülch Prize of the Max-Planck Institute, Thomas Alva Edison Patent Award, The Purkinje Medal and the Karl Spencer Lashley Award. In this episode we briefly talk about his history in creating startups & his experience and connection with Australia creating the company “Stronger Brains”. We then deep dive into the heart of Mike’s research - a phenomenon of the human brain known as “Neuroplasticity” and discuss how - even as an adult - one can self correct negative behaviors you might have picked up in the past.  We then touch on the connection between his work and the field of Machine Learning wrapping up by discussing Mike’s opinion on how tools such as ChatGPT might affect society at large.This was an extremely interesting episode & an absolute honour to talk to Mike. We hope you enjoy this episode of the DSAI podcast. For more info on Stronger Brains check out their website here: https://strongerbrains.org/ [https://strongerbrains.org/]

Back to the finance talks and in this session, we chat with Girish Nair (Director, Global and Asia Pac Quantitative Strategist) at Bank of America Merill Lynch (BAML).  We learned where Girish started his data journey, from a financial analyst looking at financial statements to where he is now running quantitative strategy and analysing millions of data points to find common threads for investors at BAML.  While his specialization is in analysing equity markets, we also discussed the importance of data for any business and how it helps companies to have more data just as much as an influx of capital can help them. We discussed alternative data and what kind of sources are used in the investment space to analyse companies from satellite and shipping data to news and social media.  As with all other guests, we discussed challenges that our guests overcame, and for Girish, it was about how the lag in decision making can add up to costs in the millions of dollars per year. Accessibility and adoption of technology have helped in his pursuits to answer these challenges. Find out more about these topics and more in the interview.

Another week another interviewee up to be showcased. In keeping up with the economists we've had on we now speak with Grant Coble-Neal, the Forecasting and Data Science Manager at Western Power, a utility provider in Western Australia. We talk about the operational issues that come up when handling data at a large energy transporter. We look at the types of data sources they manage and collect to enable better forecasts and the need for data science teams to enable the business units with their data models and regularly check/audit them.  Lots of value in this talk for us and it continues to be great to learn how others do things. There's a lot we learned from this talk and we hope you do too.

The Australian Defense, Science, and Technology Group is conducting research activities incorporating Artificial Intelligence to see how it can help with decision-making to solve real-world problems. In this episode, Martin from DST discusses how wargaming is being used in conjunction with Ai to push the state of the art in planning for the Disaster in the Joadia Islands Gameathon.  Martin explains the concept of red teaming to identify situations that can affect strategy and to test the weaknesses of overall systems with the goal of making future relief efforts more effective. Martin also discusses the two major elements of the Joadia Gamethon - the challenge of designing a game to incorporate problem elements of the real world & how we can leverage AI technology to help humans make decisions extracted from games.