Dennis Hong: From Hollywood Robots to Magic, Art, and Automated Kitchens

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"Well designed machines are sexy!" Join me for Episode 10 of the podcast. This time my guest is the legendary Dennis Hong, Professor of Robotics at the University of California, Los Angeles. The Washington Post called him the Leonardo da Vinci of robotics, he is the go-to expert whenever Hollywood needs a robot, and he has appeared on shows like MasterChef USA and Magic for Humans. Dennis is truly one of the few remaining modern polymaths, and it was a pleasure to talk with him not only about robotics, but also about his expert-level knowledge in fields as diverse as magic, cooking, and art. For me, Episode 10 was definitely 10/10 on the fun scale. Go watch it now! Outline * 02:23 Childhood in USA and Korea * 07:45 Academic Career * 13:06 Car For The Visual Impaired * 19:10 RoboCup World Champion * 22:58 Pioneering Breakthrough Technology * 25:22 Becoming An Artist * 29:56 Hollywood and Robotics * 31:47 Reinforcement Learning vs. MPC for Locomotion * 35:50 Cooking and MasterChef USA * 39:17 Automatic Ghost Kitchen * 43:32 Becoming a Magician * 46:35 Live Magic Trick * 48:19 On Making People Happy Episode Links * Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/episode/7auQAJvcCXdVFomgSX5tC3?si=eWVM6LP5TSGEKm43m1341g * Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/dennis-hong-from-hollywood-robots-to-magic-art-and/id1812910570?i=1000769489626 * X: https://x.com/andreas_orthey/status/2058916537868726453 * Robotics and Mechanisms Laboratory (RoMeLa): https://www.romela.org/ * Dennis Hong's Website: https://samueli.ucla.edu/people/dennis-hong/ * Dennis Hong's TED Talks: https://www.ted.com/speakers/dennis_hong * Dennis Hong on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/hong.dennis/ Podcast Links * Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/andreasorthey * X/Twitter: https://x.com/andreas_orthey * Spotify: https://creators.spotify.com/pod/profile/andreasorthey/ * LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/aorthey/ * Support: https://buymeacoffee.com/aorthey * Personal Website: https://aorthey.com * Podcast Website: https://aorthey.com/src/podcast

Oliver Brock: Science of Intelligence, Protein Folding, Berlin, AllAdvantage | Andreas Orthey #7

Everyone talks AI, but what is intelligence, actually? Join me and Prof. Oliver Brock, director of the Science of Intelligence excellence cluster, for a deep-dive into the science of intelligence, robotics, protein folding, and his startup side quests. Here are my three personal highlights from this podcast: - Oliver believes that intelligence manifests itself through behavior, and that behavior depends on a small set of principles. One of those principles, he believes, is active interconnection, where information flows between different parts of a system, guided by optimization. - He recounts his truly inspiring life-story, including how we grew up in the 80s in West Berlin, what he did when the wall came down, how he found his way into Stanford University, and how he became the CTO of a company raising $200M in funding. - By linking protein folding to robotics, Oliver explains how Deepmind's AlphaFold achieved a breakthrough in finding stable protein folding states, what Levinthal's paradox entails, and that necessity has driven nature to excel at protein folding. Outline * 02:14 Growing Up in Berlin in the 80s * 08:26 Path Towards Academia * 17:17 Founding AllAdvantage * 27:23 Professorship in Amherst, MA * 29:15 Protein Folding and AlphaFold * 37:54 Interactive Perception * 44:42 Intelligence, Behavior, and Braitenberg Vehicles * 47:21 Definition of Intelligence * 49:02 Multiple Intelligences * 53:33 Intelligence as a Process * 55:15 Work Turing Test * 57:19 Principles of Intelligence: Active Interconnection * 01:05:59 Science of Intelligence * 01:10:16 Future of Robotics Thanks and Credits Special thanks to the Science of Intelligence excellence cluster, especially Maria Ott, for providing the podcast room for this episode and help with setting everything up. Unfortunately, the audio of this episode got scrambled during recording due to a microphone malfunctioning. I had to reconstruct roughly 90 percent of this episode using AI tools. To do this, I used ElevenLabs.io to generate a transcription of the scrambled audio (which was surprisingly good) and then used their voice cloning tool to regenerate the audio in Oliver's voice. Unfortunately, the voice cloning introduced an accent to Oliver's voice, so the voice you hear is not the original voice of Oliver. However, the content is preserved and has not been altered from the original. Furthermore, this process led to some mismatch between lips and audio, which made the video stream unusable. I used different tools like facefusion.io, sync.so and diff2lip to finally restore the lips to be in synchronization with the audio from the voice cloning. The final video still has some audio and video artifacts plus the additional accent for Oliver's voice, but it was the best that could be achieved with the tools available to date. Books Mentioned * Mind Children by Hans Moravec * Computers & Thought by Edward Feigenbaum * The $2 Million Cough by Greg Hoffman [About the company AllAdvantage] * Vehicles: Experiments in Synthetic Psychology by Valentino Braitenberg * Action In Perception by Alva Noë Episode Links * Science Of Intelligence: https://www.scienceofintelligence.de/ * Oliver Brock Homepage: https://www.tu.berlin/en/robotics/about-rbo/prof-dr-oliver-brock * Robotics and Biology Laboratory: https://www.tu.berlin/en/robotics * Wikipedia AllAdvantage: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AllAdvantage * The Work Turing Test: https://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/pdf/75d3340c6dbd7bcd8c4b4c617acb5d932b03f4ba Podcast Links * Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/andreasorthey * Support: https://buymeacoffee.com/aorthey * Podcast Website: https://aorthey.com/src/podcast

21 de nov de 20251 h 14 min

Dennis Hong: From Hollywood Robots to Magic, Art, and Automated Kitchens | Andreas Orthey #10

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