Paul Festor is a PhD candidate in computer science at Imperial college, London working on applying reinforcement learning to sepsis. He is passionate about bringing AI and machine learning to the healthcare industry and helping to save lives. In this session, we discuss many topics from ancient civilisations to the pursuit of science to his experience doing a PhD, digging deep during the COVID-19 pandemic, and finding perspective. He also talks about his experience about how we are just a few key actions away from amazing experiences. Tune in for a great session!

Research Group: https://faisallab.org/members/paul-festor

Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/paul-festor/?originalSubdomain=uk

Timestamps:

00:55 PhD Project

1:34 Sepsis

3:38 Reinforcement learning on data from ICU beds and sensors

5:06 Framing the reinforcement learning problem and difference with other machine learning methods

10:16 Gamification in healthcare

16:34 Sifting through ICU data

18:42 Motivation for the PhD

21:04 Pure and applied research

Imperial College Professor Eric Laithwaite on superconductors: Magnetic River 1975

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OI_HFnNTfyU&ab_channel=ImperialCollegeLondon

Professor Richard Feynman’s nanotechnology lecture: "There's P lenty of Room at the Bottom”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4eRCygdW--c&ab_channel=MuonRay

25:04 Other technologies

27:47 Most difficult part of a PhD / low income SWE?

33:03 Trends in machine learning academia

38:19 Bringing value to the world through data science, AI, and software engineering

39:51 French Tertiary Education system

48:33 Learning Reinforcement Learning by reinforcement

49:32 Thoughts about ancient and modern civilisations

55:32 Nihilism and appreciation of the adventure of life

01:01:57 Doing a PhD, getting stuck, and finding perspective

01:15:58 AI news - Oxford Union debates ethics of AI with an AI

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-59687236

01:24:14 Deepmind co-founder Mustafa Süleyman and Inflection AI on conversational AI

https://techcrunch.com/2022/05/13/inflection-ai-led-by-linkedin-and-deepmind-co-founders-raises-225m-to-transform-computer-human-interactions/

01:27:58 AI on mobile devices, productivity, app development

01:37:05 Impact in science communication and making AI and data science more accessible to doctors

01:51:47 Quantifying uncertainty

01:56:02 Piano in stations worldwide and planting seeds

https://www.ted.com/talks/dotan_negrin_searching_for_the_key_of_life

02:05:48 Next steps

02:10:35 Where can people find your work and reach out to you?