Hot Takes | Cold Proofs

University of West London — School of Computing and Engineering

Every field has its hot takes — the things people in the room believe, argue about and repeat, but rarely have to defend in public. Hot Takes | Cold Proofs is the podcast from the School of Computing and Engineering at the University of West London. Each episode puts two academics in a room to say what they actually think about AI and technology, then asks the harder question: what's the cold proof? Hosted by Atiyeh Ardakanian and Nino Auricchio. No press-release positivity, no doom. Just people who know their subject, disagreeing productively.

Episodes

  1. 1d ago

    "It Should Be Called Ethical AI"

    The industry says "responsible AI". Prof. Julie Wall thinks that word was chosen carefully — ethics differ by market, and the rebrand quietly drops the part that binds you. Professor Julie Wall and Dr Nasim Dadashiserej get into what that looks like in practice: deepfakes that have stopped being a celebrity problem and become something ordinary people use on each other, AI agents whose upside is real and whose blast radius is enormous, and regulation that is always, structurally, written for the technology we have already left behind. Nasim's route into healthcare AI runs through six hours in A&E with her son, one nurse, and a single judgement call — an argument for decision support that no whitepaper makes as well. (00:00) Introduction (02:21) Six hours in A&E: why an engineer moved into healthcare AI (04:38) "It should be called ethical AI" (09:44) The more advanced the technology, the more vital the hand of the musician (13:30) Regulation is always written for the last technology (16:04) A teacher deepfaked his own head teacher (20:41) Hundreds of agents, one blast radius Hosted by Atiyeh Ardakanian and Nino Auricchio. Hot Takes | Cold Proofs is produced by the School of Computing and Engineering at the University of West London.

  2. 1d ago

    "You Don't Understand Anything About Humans"

    A computing dean and a psychologist on why technology keeps getting built for a "typical user" who doesn't exist — and what happens when AI averages out the very people it was meant to serve. Prof. Phil Cox (Dean of the School of Computing and Engineering) reads AI research proposals, and he has a blunt verdict on a lot of them: the coding is excellent, the understanding of people is absent. Prof. Jen Mayer (Head of the School of Human and Social Sciences), a psychologist, has the mirror-image problem — the outliers her field exists to study are exactly the ones a model is trained to discard. Between them they get at something that goes well past AI: what we lose when we optimise for the average, and why the interesting cases are always the ones that get smoothed away. Also in this episode: what happened when a dean built an AI avatar of himself from a one-minute recording and quietly ran it past his students, and an extraordinary food-engineering case study about what happens when brilliant technology meets actual human behaviour. (00:00) Introduction(04:24) "You don't understand anything about humans"(11:59) The fat-free crisp that human behaviour defeated(16:22) AI gives you the average — the outliers disappear(23:45) A dean clones himself with AI Hosted by Atiyeh Ardakanian and Nino Auricchio.Hot Takes | Cold Proofs is produced by the School of Computing and Engineering at the University of West London.

  • 2 Episodes

About

Every field has its hot takes — the things people in the room believe, argue about and repeat, but rarely have to defend in public. Hot Takes | Cold Proofs is the podcast from the School of Computing and Engineering at the University of West London. Each episode puts two academics in a room to say what they actually think about AI and technology, then asks the harder question: what's the cold proof? Hosted by Atiyeh Ardakanian and Nino Auricchio. No press-release positivity, no doom. Just people who know their subject, disagreeing productively.

Information

  • Creator
    University of West London — School of Computing and Engineering
  • Years Active
    2026
  • Episodes
    2
  • Rating
    Clean
  • Copyright
    © University of West London — School of Computing and Engineering
  • Show Website
    Hot Takes | Cold Proofs