CAST IT (audio)

Felienne Hermans isfull professor of Computer Science Education at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam.Felienne is the author of the 2021bookThe Programmer's Brain, a very readable and highlyinsightful introduction to the cognitive science behind how human brains learn programming. Why is programming hard to learn, and what can we do about that, both as learners and teachers?Werecomme

Nutan Limaye is an associate professor at IT University of Copenhagen and an internationally leading researcher in computational complexity. Nutan’s research focus is on the most prestigious and fundamental questions in computer science, namely: which problems can be solved with limited computational resources? Her recent breakthrough result, with Srinivasan and Tavenas, received

Mikkel Thorup is professor of Computer Science at Copenhagen University and an internationally leading researcher in the theory of algorithms. During the Covid-19 pandemic, he has served on the scientific board advising the Danish authorities on the development of a national contact tracing app using mobile phones for exposure notification. We sit down with Mikkel, exposure notific

Robin Hanson is an associate professor of economics at George Mason University and a research associate at the Future of Humanity Institute of Oxford University and onethe world’s most influential futurists.We talk to Robin about how rigoroussocial science can help us describe a society in which “mind uploading” – the idea of simulating whole brains on digital hardware –

Tim Roughgarden is professor in the Computer Science and Management Science and Engineering Departments at Stanford University. He is also a very active science communicator, hosting a popular algorithms course on the Coursera online learningplatform.Among many recognitions,Tim has received theGödel Prize for hisresearch in computational game theory, a field that residesin theinte

Claire Mathieu is a leading researcher in algorithms design and director of research at Centre national de la recherche scientifique (CNRS) in Paris, France.) Claire has been involved in the 2018 redesign of the college admission procedure in France, where close to a million students apply for more than ten thousand different college programmes. At the root of the procedure is the

Yves Bertot is a senior researcher that the French Institute for Research in Computer Science and Automation (INRIA) in Sophia Antipolis and a leading researcher on correctness of software and the verification of mathematical proofs. Recently, his team was able to formally verify the correctness of the computation on the one millionth decimal digit of pi (which is 1, by the way), i

Sarah Pink is a Professor of Design and Media Ethnography at RMIT University, Australia, and the author or co-editor of several books about digital ethnography. To approach this area, we get Sarah’s help with some conceptual groundwork about the methods, values, and history of ethnography, and its relation to neighbouring fields such as anthropology or cultural geography. But the

Roman Beck is professor of Business Informatics at IT University of Copenhagen and the head of the European Blockchain Center. We talk to Roman about blockchain, a cryptographically secure, distributed database technology sometimes called a “trust machine.” Blockchain applications include the cryptocurrency Bitcoin, as well as various ideas for ensuring trust across institution

Ivan Bjerre Damgård is professor of theoretical computer science at Aarhus University, Denmark, and one of the world’s leading researchers in the foundations of cryptography. Among other things, Ivan is known for the Merkle–Damgård construction, which underlies many modern digital signatures. We talk to Ivan about the mathematical basics of modern cryptography, internet secur