The Short Version

University at Albany
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Quick insights for busy people. We're helping you understand the world 15 minutes at a time. Recorded in Albany, New York, at the University at Albany, one of the most diverse public research institutions in the United States.

  1. 3d ago

    Oceans, on the record: What corals can tell us about our past and future climate

    The longer versionIn this episode, Sujata walked us through what coral cores can reveal about past climate and how they can help us forecast future conditions. She also went further, explaining what natural climate archives can tell us that other environmental monitoring methods miss, and how bringing together different types of natural archives surveyed on land and at sea can give scientists a stronger foundation for shaping global climate policy. Host: How far back do climate records extend, and how do measurements taken with instruments compare with natural archives like coral? Sujata Murty: The answer to that question is tricky because it depends on where you are in the world. The short answer is that our best observations come after satellites started getting launched into space starting in the early 1980s. That was the moment that opened up a huge opportunity for us to collect global data very frequently and at a very fine resolution, down to the hour or minute. Before satellites, we were reliant on people actually putting instruments out in the ocean or going by ship and scooping up a bucket of water and sticking a thermometer in it and measuring temperature, for example. That was much more sporadic. It would depend on when ships were moving through the water. So, whaling ships or military ships or merchant ships might collect that data, but it was geographically inconsistent and followed where the ships were going anyway. In the regions I study, there's virtually no reliable information before the 1980s. In the Atlantic Ocean and in parts of the Pacific, we've done a better job of observing those regions for the last hundred years. But in the Indian Ocean and the Indonesian seas, the Maritime Continent, there is very little, lower quality data before the 1980s. So, although it exists and you can download it, those records require us to take more time to check whether they are reliable or accurate. Often they are not. One of the unique things about corals is they give us data points every single month. So they're comparable to our satellite data, but they also extend the satellite record back a few hundred years. But because they only go back a few hundred years, they also have their limitations. Host: You're now part of a new international research collaboration trying to fill in that missing data. What sorts of natural archives are you taking into consideration? Sujata Murty:  In this project, we're synthesizing the coral records with other paleoclimate archives like speleothems, which are cave deposits. You might have heard of them as stalactites or stalagmites if you've ever toured a cave. We’re also going to bring in data from tree rings and marine sediment records. Bringing this information together will take us back over the past couple millennia so that we can understand how the monsoon is migrating and moving between the northern and southern hemisphere over these longer time scales, and what does that mean for rainfall and the distribution of rainfall across the tropics? We're synthesizing the climate archives, and we're also working with modelers. As  paleoclimate scientists, we can reconstruct how climate has changed, but we can't so easily understand and pinpoint why it's changing that way. That's where we really need to work with modelers who can help us understand what's driving the change we reconstruct in our records.   Dive DeeperSujata’s work was featured in “Oceans of Time,” a photo series from The Synergy Project that paired scientists with artists to bring ocean research to wider audiences. The images in the project were taken during Sujata’s dives in the Indonesian seas and Pacific Ocean. In 2020, Sujata joined the McMullen Museum of Art’s programming for “Indian Ocean Current: Six Artistic Narratives,” an exhibition that put contemporary art in conversation with climate science. Sujata discussed how her love of the arts shapes the way she studies geochemistry and communicates about climate change on the PBS show A House for Arts.   Episode creditsAudio editing and production by Scott Freedman  Photo by Justin Ossolinksi Hosted and written by Erin Frick The Short Version is produced by the Office of Communications and Marketing at the University at Albany, which is part of the State University of New York. Comments, ideas, suggestions? Send them to mediarelations@albany.edu and be sure to put The Short Version in the subject line.

    Oceans, on the record: What corals can tell us about our past and future climate

  2. Oct 16

    Unnaturally clean: The environmental costs of the cleaning products we love

    The longer versionA common thread linking Kendra’s work on the history of milk and her exploration of the environmental hazards caused by cleaning products is that, on some level, we want it both ways. Paraphrasing here: We hold nature up as the ideal of purity while at the same time being kind of skeeved out by the inherent messiness of it. We want our milk fresh — but not, like, straight-from-the-cow fresh. “We are suspicious of wholly synthetic food or introducing too many chemicals into the home. And yet, there's also a limit to how natural we want these things — fresh is great, but raw milk can be risky,” Kendra says. “The forest smells good, but we don't actually want our floors to be covered in leaf litter and dirt like the forest floor.”  While this paradox might define consumer thinking about these products, it’s clear some of the companies behind them fully embraced their place in the chemical-industrial complex. The Science History Institute has in its archives some fantastic examples of the mid-20th century Hercules Powder Company ads used to market its pine oil cleaners to companies that would then re-sell them to consumers. Published in the likes of Chemical & Engineering News and Naval Stores Review, the ads make clear that Hercules was trying to sell both the wonder of its chemistry and the veneer of natural freshness that came with it. One ad depicts a stately evergreen with a white chemical formula printed over it and extolls the product’s virtue as a disinfectant, insecticide and detergent. Another declares: “creative chemistry helps the South serve industry” “Sell the smell” implores another, noting the “piney fragrance” of Hercules’ Yarmor 302 formula “keeps customers coming back for more.” Maybe most telling, Hercules’ own ads put the words “pine woods” in quotation marks to describe the smell of their cleaners. Somewhere, the Lorax and Brown Bar-ba-loots are weeping. Go deeperA Dirty History of Cleaning Up will be published in February by the University of Washington Press. Kendra’s first book, Pure and Modern Milk, was published by Oxford University Press. Listen to her talk about it. Episode credits  Interview by Michael ParkerAudio production and editing by Scott FreedmanHosted and written by Jordan Carleo-Evangelist The Short Version is produced by the Office of Communications and Marketing at the University at Albany, which is part of the State University of New York. Comments, ideas, suggestions? Send them to mediarelations@albany.edu and be sure to put The Short Version in the subject line.

    Unnaturally clean: The environmental costs of the cleaning products we love

  3. Oct 14

    Only murders in Draper Hall: How college students are helping crack real cold cases

    The longer versionCold case analysis is difficult, complicated work, and even explaining what it entails comes with its own set of challenges. Investigators often have to dig through old stores of evidence that may be damaged, incomplete or badly disorganized. Plus, the cases that get a second look tend to be serious crimes involving real harm and graphic evidence that can be disturbing to handle. Every aspect requires care — from preventing a misstep that could compromise future legal proceedings, to protecting the people reinvestigating and survivors affected by the crime. That’s a lot to convey to someone who has never worked a case. So how do you show and tell without showing, or telling, too much? Cam created a card game to fill that gap. Maggie Hartley: How do you talk about this work with people who don't have any idea what you're doing? Cam Hughes: That was actually a really big struggle for me because a lot of what we work on involves not only confidential information, but also some really graphic information that you just don't want to share with people in general. As I was thinking about how to give the cold case experience to people who haven't signed all the confidentiality agreements and that I'm not carefully monitoring to make sure that they're not getting burnt out or having a traumatic response to the things we're working on, I developed a card game. It's called “Build a Case,” and it presents a more generic description of some of the things that we run into when working a case. To play the game, you draw cards which show things that make a case more likely to be solvable, or less likely to be solvable. Then you can work through a facilitated discussion, and can even link it to a current case if it's appropriate for the group you're working with. Maggie Hartley: What kind of information is on these cards? Cam Hughes: The cards cover a few different categories, so, for example, information about the evidence. We get cases where the evidence is extremely well documented. We know exactly what it is, what bag it's in, where it's currently being stored. We also know there are examples from the cold case world of evidence being stored in basements, the basement floods, and all of the evidence gets destroyed, which is the worst card you can draw in the deck. Maggie Hartley: So the card says "evidence destroyed in flood"? Cam Hughes: Right. And any other evidence they had has to be thrown out because now all of that is gone. It's a point-based system. The more negative cards you have, the less likely you are to solve the case. You can also pull helpful cards like a well organized case file. The LAPD did an extensive review of their homicide cases and created a system for organizing a homicide case. Every single case file for homicide from LAPD is organized the exact same way. Well, that's super useful. And so if you get that card, it's a really beneficial card. We talk about witnesses and whether or not the witnesses feel like they can talk to the police. We talk about the status of the victim. Are they from a community that would make it more likely for them to be ignored, or thought of as participating in their crime? We talk about whether or not the body was found. That's part of a homicide sometimes too, and why cases go cold, is because you can't find the body. So that's how we work through some of the things we see in cold cases without having to rely on confidential information, or expose people to things that could potentially be traumatic.   Go deeperLearn more about UAlbany’s Cold Case Analysis Center. While developing her curriculum, Cam found there really was no textbook for students working on cold cases. She solved that problem by writing one. Cold Case Investigations for Colleges and Universities, co-authored with clinical psychologist Diana Orem, was published in April. Want even more? It’s in the works. Cam is currently writing another book focused on how society views victims and why certain victims seem to get more blame than others for their own victimization.   Episode creditsAudio editing and production by Scott Freedman  Photo by Patrick Dodson Interview by Maggie Hartley Research and writing by Maggie Hartley Writing by Jordan Carleo-Evangelist Hosted and writing by Erin Frick The Short Version is produced by the Office of Communications and Marketing at the University at Albany, which is part of the State University of New York. Comments, ideas, suggestions? Send them to mediarelations@albany.edu and be sure to put The Short Version in the subject line.

    Only murders in Draper Hall: How college students are helping crack real cold cases

  4. Oct 5

    Skies 'wide open': Bringing UAP studies into the scientific mainstream

    The longer version:During our conversation with Kevin, there was a question that kept bugging us. Assuming that it would require extraordinarily advanced technology to travel the enormous distances between stars, why would beings with technology that advanced seemingly keep getting busted by random humans looking up at the sky? Kevin was quick to note that the answer to that question isn’t knowable right now, and it’s an example of one of the many areas where the vastness of what we don’t know entices us to speculate about the motivation of beings we’re not even certain exist. In other words, our very human sense of wonder [see Episode 22 for more on that] continually bumps against the boundary of what science can credibly explain at the moment. And while it’s tempting to point to the allure of that wonder (not to mention science fiction's pull on our collective imagination) as part of why UAP studies fall short of "traditional science," it’s not difficult to imagine the early physicists — who saw only shadows of the forces within the atom — hypothesizing in similar ways about why the universe works the way it does.  All of which is to say, what science can credibly explain at any given moment has always only been a sliver of what can be known. And our drive to learn more is often propelled in part by wonder. Kevin and his colleagues are trying to fill in some of those gaps in a rigorous way. Here’s that part of our conversation that didn’t make the final edit: Host: It seems to me that anything that was technologically so advanced that it could move interstellar could very easily not be seen by us if it didn’t want to be seen. KK: That's very possible. They could probably hide quite easily. Yeah. Host: So then why do they keep getting spotted? KK: That’s an interesting question. These guys fly — and I'm going to call them “these guys” because we're not 100% sure of what we're dealing with, but assuming that you're dealing with another peoples — they're flying their ships around with lights on. So they're being spotted. But in some cases, these lights are incredibly bright — inhumanly bright [so much so that whatever is emitting the light is impossible to discern]. So why would you do that? And in fact, one of my good friends, my neighbor, had heard me ask this question in a talk. He was watching a podcast of my 2023 Sol Foundation presentation, and I brought up the same question. Why would you have these lights on these craft that are so bright that it just doesn't make sense? And he said something interesting, he goes, "You would do that if you wanted to be seen but you didn't want to be observed." And I thought: That's really interesting. And the only thing that makes sense is that for some reason they want us to notice them, but they don't want us to know about them. Go deeper“Glowing Auras and ‘Black Money’: The Pentagon’s Mysterious UFO Program” — this is The New York Times article that Kevin and many others credit with helping change the public and scientific discourse on UAP about a decade ago. Kevin and his colleagues behind UAlbany Project X published their first field results last year in the widely cited journal Progress in Aerospace Sciences, leading to a philanthropic gift from Albany, NY, businessman Tony Gorman in support of their work. UAPx was also featured in a 2022 documentary starring William Shatner called “A Tear in the Sky.” Harvard astrophysicist Avi Loeb wrote about why he accepted the invitation to lead the UAP Science Advisory Council. Some of the records so far released by the Pentagon include video of UAP recorded by military pilots. The All-Domain Anomaly Resolution Office has more on its website here. All the records so far released by the federal government can be found through PURSUE — the Presidential Unsealing and Reporting System for UAP Encounters. Episode creditsAudio editing and production by Scott Freedman Photo by Patrick DodsonHosted and written by Jordan Carleo-Evangelist The Short Version is produced by the Office of Communications and Marketing at the University at Albany, which is part of the State University of New York. Comments, ideas, suggestions? Send them to mediarelations@albany.edu and be sure to put The Short Version in the subject line.

    Skies 'wide open': Bringing UAP studies into the scientific mainstream

  5. Sep 30

    Dawn of a new golden age: Living long vs. well — and what healthy aging really means

    The Long(er) Version:Part of our conversation covered practical ways that AI-enabled technologies could support healthy aging in a variety of contexts — from preventing falls and providing companionship to facilitating difficult conversations surrounding end-of-life decisions. Host: For anyone who's hearing this who might be skeptical about AI and might feel uncomfortable about the idea of it being involved in some of these really sensitive areas, what would you say to them? AA: That’s an important point. I would say two things. One is that AI is a tool, just like any other tool or intervention approach that we've ever developed to make health better. Like other new tools, we need to figure out how to wield it wisely, taking advantage of its benefits while being cautious in our approach. With this, there’s the question of how can we trust AI? How do we know it’s being developed and deployed responsibly? In many realms, whether it's public health or social sciences or in the public domain, we are worried and wondering about the safe and secure ways in which our information is being handled. At the same time, conversations around AI safeguards and ensuring that these tools are being developed with user safety and privacy in mind, are growing. There’s real momentum there and I think in the coming months or years we’ll start to see more of that becoming codified. We certainly need to be mindful about the ways in which our information is being used, particularly when we're talking about sensitive health information or really emotional concepts. This isn’t to say there aren't protections in place, there are, but there should be more visibility around the ways in which AI is already protecting that important information. As much as new technology can feel intimidating or concerning, AI tools are also being developed specifically to protect older adults from nefarious technologies, like internet-based scams. There are AI tools being developed to protect the outflow of information on health, financials, social security information. So maybe we need to shine a light on that and help people understand that like so many things, this is a two-sided coin. While we're worried about AI potentially mishandling our data, AI also has the potential to offer powerful protections. Go DeeperHealthy aging has a long history at UAlbany. For 26 years, the Internships in Aging Project has been a signature experiential learning program in the School of Social Welfare, giving students hands-on experience in a variety of professional environments supporting older adults. Students in the program earn academic credit and a stipend. This spring, the program received a $2 million grant from the Hearst Foundations, enabling it to accommodate more students than ever, including those in the Master of Public Health program at the College of Integrated Health Sciences. Interested in learning more about how researchers are trying to put a finer point on how we measure age? In a vein similar to Allison’s work on the epigenetic clock, The New York Times recently reported on another metric: intrinsic capacity. Episode credits Audio editing and production by Scott Freedman   Photo by Patrick Dodson  Interview by Erin Frick    Hosted and written by Erin Frick  The Short Version is produced by the Office of Communications and Marketing at the University at Albany, which is part of the State University of New York. Comments, ideas, suggestions? Send them to mediarelations@albany.edu and be sure to put The Short Version in the subject line.

    Dawn of a new golden age: Living long vs. well — and what healthy aging really means

  6. Sep 23

    Our 'evolving standards of decency': What's next for the death penalty in America

    The Longer Version:In addition to capital punishment, Jim Acker has extensively studied wrongful convictions — that is, those moments when our justice system fails the accused in the worst imaginable way. It’s a phenomenon inseparable from the death penalty debate because it represents a nightmare scenario: a life wrongfully taken as punishment for a crime the person did not commit. These issues converged in the infamous 1931 Scottsboro Boys case, which Jim analyzed in his 2008 book Scottsboro and its Legacy: The cases that challenged American legal and Social Justice. Like so much to do with capital punishment and justice in America, the Scottsboro Boys case —in which nine Black teenagers were accused of raping two white women on a train in Alabama —was inseparable from the racial socioeconomic context in which it happened. It’s also an example of a time when the legal system ultimately spared the defendants from death but not the other devastating consequences of wrongful conviction, including lengthy imprisonments. We asked Jim about the case in part of our conversation that didn’t make the final edit. Here’s what he had to say. Host: Did the Scottsboro Boys case change your understanding of capital punishment? Or did it more or less reaffirm what you already understood about the social, racial, socioeconomic forces that impact how the death penalty has been implemented in the United States? Jim Acker: They were sentenced to death in circumstances that can only be described as reflecting the social and racial prejudices of the time. It reaffirmed the ugliness of some of the aspects of the death penalty in terms of preying on African-Americans who had no fair chance in the Alabama courts at the time. A New York lawyer actually got involved in the case after the first convictions were overturned, and Sam Liebowitz did a tremendous job, but it was hopeless. He was in front of the same kind of jurors in the same system. Host: And they were nearly lynched before even getting into a courtroom when they were arrested, right? JA: This is a classic case of wrongful convictions. The rapes never happened. The complaining witnesses lied, I think, pure and simple. But the rapes supposedly happened on a train that was going through northern Alabama, and word was given to the next train station down the way that this allegedly had happened.  So there was a huge crowd that rousted all the African-Americans off the train. This is the start of the depression, people riding the rails. There were these nine guys, four of them knew one another, the rest didn't. They were just on the train. They all got rounded up and  hog tied. They got taken to a jail in Scottsboro, Alabama. Crowds gathered. The governor had to call out the National Guard. Yeah, it could have resulted in a lynching. As it was, it turned into a so-called legal lynching because the trials were a sham and there was no justice in the state of Alabama at the time. The U.S. Supreme Court twice had to overturn convictions of the Scottsboro boys, and while eventually none of them were executed, many of them spent years and years in prison. Go deeperVisit the National Death Penalty Archive in UAlbany’s M.E. Grenander Special Collections and Archives That landmark 1972 case that Jim mentioned a few times, Furman v. Georgia? Here’s more background from Harvard Law School. Read more of Jim’s take on the Hamm v. Smith case recently before the U.S. Supreme Court in his commentary published in the (Albany, N.Y.) Times Union. And here’s an explainer on how the court dispatched the Hamm case in June without taking up the underlying issue, which could upend a quarter-century of settled law on whether executing people with intellectual disabilities constitutes cruel and unusual punishment. Guerrero v. Johnson is the next case the Supreme Court will hear in its coming session regarding defendants claiming an intellectual disability.  Episode creditsAudio editing and production by Scott Freedman Photos by Mario SotomayorHosted and written byJordan Carleo-Evangelist The Short Version is produced by the Office of Communications and Marketing at the University at Albany, which is part of the State University of New York. Comments, ideas, suggestions? Send them to mediarelations@albany.edu and be sure to put The Short Version in the subject line.

    Our 'evolving standards of decency': What's next for the death penalty in America

  7. Sep 15

    Beep twice if you're alive: Why thinking about AI consciousness freaks us out

    The Longer VersionOver the last few weeks, the news cycle has once again been boiling with AI anxiety after revelations that lots of OpenAI agents teamed up on a hacking spree and warnings from a former Anthropic researcher that AI could “kill us all” within the decade. That was before Anthropic released a report suggesting someone in a military lab may have been trying to use its AI to try to build a bioweapon, among other nasty potential uses of their tech. Then, over the weekend, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei publicly called for a slow-down, or pacing, in AI development — a call echoed in some fashion by Sam Altman of OpenAI and Elon Musk of SpaceX. In some ways, it’s a moment a lot like the one Blake Lemoine triggered with his controversial 2022 claims that Google’s LaMDA chatbot was sentient — only a lot bigger. The public’s attention is once again intensely focused on a technology most of us only lightly understand. But is there an important distinction between whether AI is sentient (Lemoine’s claim) and whether it’s dangerous? Because all this happened after we spoke to Alessandra, we went back to ask her take on it. Here’s what she had to say: AB: The short answer is: The question of consciousness and danger are definitely separate in the sense that there are plenty of things that kill us without being conscious or wanting to cause us harm: bombs, earthquakes, hurricanes, diseases, etc. The longer answer is that if AI ends up killing us all, it most certainly won't be because it gained consciousness and/or “decided” to kill us. What AI “does” is still exclusively the responsibility of the humans who built it, trained it, gave it objectives and unleashed it out in the world without enough safeguards in place. As far as I'm concerned, all these tech people raising these apocalyptic worries as if they created a monster they can no longer control is just an excuse to avoid taking responsibility. Alessandra also made an interesting point about the way the science fiction stories we consumed as kids continue to influence our understanding of what’s possible now that some of those technologies are moving from the realm of fiction to reality. AB: A lot of the discussion about AI and consciousness and sentience and all that comes from those sci-fi stories that we grew up with. And they really influence a lot of what we think is possible with AI right now. The simulation is an interesting case because you would even think that your body's not real. If I'm in a simulation, then all that I think I am and all that I think my world looks like, that's a lie. And at that point, if you think that that's a possibility, then conscious AI has also become a possibility. Because you could be mistaken about everything. And so even the things that sound completely implausible, why not? Go deeperAlessandra recently co-authored an article with UAlbany colleagues analyzing the apologies formulated by AI chatbots and why they’re meaningless – or,  without the moral weight of knowing right from wrong. Here’s the May 2026 article we mentioned about how some LLMs have shown the ability to pass the Turing Test in brief, controlled interactions with humans. Blake Lemoine has done many interviews about his claims that Google’s LaMDA is sentient. Here is one with Bloomberg Tech. Google’s 2022 response, via The New York Times: “Our team — including ethicists and technologists — has reviewed Blake’s concerns per our A.I. Principles and have informed him that the evidence does not support his claims. Some in the broader A.I. community are considering the long-term possibility of sentient or general A.I., but it doesn’t make sense to do so by anthropomorphizing today’s conversational models, which are not sentient.” Episode creditsAudio editing and production by Scott Freedman Interview and research by Bethany BumpPhoto by Patrick DodsonHosted and written by Jordan Carleo-Evangelist The Short Version is produced by the Office of Communications and Marketing at the University at Albany, which is part of the State University of New York. Comments, ideas, suggestions? Send them to mediarelations@albany.edu and be sure to put The Short Version in the subject line.

    Beep twice if you're alive: Why thinking about AI consciousness freaks us out

  8. Sep 9

    The blind man and the algorithm: Why our sense of wonder makes humans different from AI

    The Longer Version:In part of our interview that didn’t make the final edit, we spoke to Prabha in greater depth about a word that comes up a lot when talking about AI: reasoning. It’s a word with very human connotations. We talk about behaving reasonably and reaching reasonable conclusions. But what does it mean when we’re talking about machines? His answer was closely related to his argument about AI’s plurality. And if it sounds familiar, it may be because it echoes a point that UAlbany atmospheric scientist Kara Sulia made last fall when we discussed AI’s ability to transform how we understand the weather. AI’s great power, she said, stems not just from its ability to look deeply inside datasets but across them to help us make sense of a wider, more complex world..  Here’s what Prabha had to say: JCE: The word reasoning comes up a lot. It’s a term that most people, until lately as AI has entered the popular conversation, consider a very human thing. I’m a reasonable person. I look at the information before me and I come to a reasonable conclusion. But what does it mean in the context of AI? What is the machine actually doing? BP: I want to flip it around and ask you why you said, “I'm a reasonable person.” Why are you not saying I'm a good person or a bad person? Why are you saying I'm a reasonable person? JCE: Good and bad seems more subjective to me. When I say I'm a reasonable person, I say I've looked at the information before me and I've come to a conclusion that is defensible based on that information. Is it the right conclusion? It might be. Is it the wrong conclusion? It might be. But is it a reasonable conclusion? That’s a different question to me — as a word person. BP: So that is the gray area. You are unsure whether that's a correct conclusion or a wrong conclusion, but based on the data, based on the information that you have, based on the prior experience you have, you think you have arrived at a reasonable conclusion. That is something that the computers were not doing before AI because it was binary. It was one or zero, it was yes or no, it was true or false. Whereas now, when you have millions of records, now you reason through it and come up with a conclusion just like a human conclusion. And there is a probability associated with it; there is a confidence level based on this data, based on the amount of training.  When I say the algorithm, the machine learning algorithm, has 90 percent confidence that this is the correct interpretation of the data, it is actually mimicking the real world, the way we look at the real world — the way we try to analyze and understand the world and derive conclusions, derive interpretations or make decisions. JCE: The computers we have now and the computers that we're building now for the future can be trained on, and inference based on, billions of pieces of data —orders of magnitude that are difficult for regular people with non-mathematics degrees to really understand. Is that where AI derives its power from? The fact that it can reason based on enormous datasets? BP: Yes and no. You're talking about data as one thing. Because data is like numbers, like database records of citizens and students and whatever. But you also have images, you have video, you have audio, you have gesture and movements, you have the sensor data and other things. So again, data is not one thing. Now the power of AI — yes, it comes from data, but it also comes from the ability to integrate these multiple sources of data and then reason through that information. Go deeperTo read more of Prabha’s thinking on the plurality of AI, check out his essay on the subject in the first issue of the AI Plus Institute’s Hallucinations magazine.  Lean more about the AI Plus Institute at UAlbany. UAlbany biologist Morgan Sammons also touched on the curiosity that distinguishes humans from machines in our conversation last fall about the frontiers of brain-inspired computing. Since then, UAlbany has hired four new faculty members in neuroscience, computer hardware engineering and mathematics who will focus on the intersection of neuromorphic and quantum computing.  Episode creditsAudio editing and production by Scott Freedman Photos by Patrick DodsonHosted and written by Jordan Carleo-Evangelist The Short Version is produced by the Office of Communications and Marketing at the University at Albany, which is part of the State University of New York. Comments, ideas, suggestions? Send them to mediarelations@albany.edu and be sure to put The Short Version in the subject line.

    The blind man and the algorithm: Why our sense of wonder makes humans different from AI
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About

Quick insights for busy people. We're helping you understand the world 15 minutes at a time. Recorded in Albany, New York, at the University at Albany, one of the most diverse public research institutions in the United States.

Information

  • Creator
    University at Albany
  • Years Active
    2025 - 2026
  • Episodes
    31
  • Rating
    Clean
  • Copyright
    © 2026 The Short Version
  • Show Website
    The Short Version

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