#14 Albert Maas: Making the building blocks for robotics

Short conversation between Andrew and Gareth about the highlights of Season 1 (first 20 episodes) and the rational for the second season.

In this episode, we talk with Benno Broer, CCO of PASQAL, about what types of problems Quantum Computing will help solve.  We also dive deeper into what it takes to develop algorithms for quantum computers, what are the constraints, and how one can build a company around this.

Vincent Warmerdam is a research advocate at Rasa – we discuss some of the challenges of making good chatbots, such as different languages and mistaken intents. We also touch on the career path to a research advocate and the importance of labeling datasets for machine learning. 

Roos Rooijakkers and Geert Jongen are data scientists at Pipple. We discuss some of the different roles in data science and data engineering, what makes a problem a good fit for data science and how to fit data science into a company’s processes.   

In this episode, Cor Datema co-founder and managing director of Dynaxion Security shares how by using neutrons, analyzing the resulting gamma rays with artificial intelligence we can have a deeper understanding of what elements are in packets and luggage that goes through security checks, and as a result make the world a safer place. We also learn from him how to balance building top-class product, minimizing the cost, and at the same time increasing throughput.He also shares some of his trajector and insights as a co-founder for more than one company and some of the main characteristics needed to succeed in creating your own company.

 Nina Hoff CEO and co-founder of byFlow shares her insights into what is needed to make 3D food printing a reality, from technical design of the printers, to the logistics of cleaning, designing, and selling these machines across the world. There is much more to 3D food printing than just a machine, as Nina explains and opens our horizon towards the life of chefs. The episode also shares how our family influenced her to get started and where 3D food printing is going. 

In this episode, Paul from IBM shares his experience in explaining Quantum Computing to artists and how they used Quantum Computing to make art.  He explains his personal journey and how got a job at IBM. Paul also reveals some possible applications enabled with this technology as well as a sneak preview of what is to come.Here are some of the resources that are mentioned in the episode:Quantum Mechanics: The Theoretical Minimum, bookIntroduction to Quantum Computing, interactive bookQiskit Global Summer School 2021: Quantum Machine Learning, lecture series Web app to program IBM quantum computers

Albert Maas is the CEO of Avular, they make drones and robots, but more importantly the building blocks and platforms to help others put them together quickly.  Albert talks about some of the key insights the company is built on - separating the roles of embedded software engineering and controls engineering and using graphical programming tools to accelerate development. 

Koen Vossen in this episode shares what inspired him to create his company called TeamTV which focuses on Sports Analytics. We discuss the challenges in capturing data and video for different sports with the goal to provide insights for coaches and players. Koen shares some best practices on how sports analytics can help develop coaches and players in a wide variety of sports. We also take a deep dive into understanding the technology stack used at TeamTV. We also discover that Koen also maintains a python package kloppy for standardizing event data for sports analytics. Koen also maintains PySport.

Dennis Ramondt shares his views on how his company Sensorfact uses AI to help reduce energy bills for large factories. He talks about the amount of data, the infrastructure used at Sensorfact to manage and derive valuable insights for their customers. We also discuss the skills needed to work as a data scientist and discover his personal story of becoming the head of a Data Science team. In this episode, Dennis shares how important it is to formulate the business problem well in order to build the right technology.