Katherine Gorman’s podcast, Talking Machines, is introducing the world to the scientists working on Artificial Intelligence (AI), and has the biggest names in the industry appearing on her show. A self-proclaimed “nerd, journalist” (putting ‘nerd’ before ‘journalist’ is on purpose, you’ll see why in a second,) Ms. Gorman is committed to the promotion of this field to everyone, not just computer scientists. Committed enough to leave her established journalist/producer job at National Public Radio (NPR)’s Here and Now after ten years in public media and start a consulting firm, has allowed her time to produce this amazing show.
Earlier this week, I caught up with Ms. Gorman and asked why she left NPR.
“My passion has always been science and technical reporting, and in public radio, I felt like there was never enough time to commit to the topic to do it justice. After ten years of daily news and working on national shows, I didn’t like where my career was going. I started Talking Machines because machine learning was one of the most talked about topics, with the least amount of insight into what was actually going on.”
She never misses a beat talking about leaving her established job for a totally new venture, and she embraces her ‘nerd’ title over being just a journalist or publisher because she knows it is what she loves.
Katherine Gorman
Ms. Gorman met her co-host Dr. Ryan Adams (Harvard Computer Science Professor) through her media services consulting firm and together they have grown a consistent audience of 30,000 listeners per week! Their star line-up of scientists includes the biggest names in the industry like Dr. Yoshua Bengio, Dr. Yann LeCun, and Dr. Geoffrey Hinton who all sat down together to discuss their field in Episodes Five and Six. You can find the line-up of episodes here.
To accomplish the traveling necessary for the production of these amazing segments on Talking Machines, the co-hosts have reached out using Kickstarter to ask for support to fund a second season. With only a few days left, they need help finishing the funding and you can pledge your support here.
If you want to read more about machine learning and don’t have a Ph.D. in the field, Ms Gorman strongly recommends, The Master Algorithm by Dr. Pedro Domingos.
Finding your passion for an interesting career, like Ms. Gorman, is possible and we hope you will take time this week to look at where you are in life, and where you want to go. Please visit our own Kickstarter (Startup Notebook and Design Folio) to see the tools we have created and made available to help with this process.
Cheers,
Mike
Copyright 2015, Original Content Books
