A new podcast of the Center for Innovation and Research in Computing (CIRC) at Southern Adventist University aims to explore cutting-edge research in easily digestible episodes.
Exploring cutting-edge computing research in easily digestible episodes is the focus of a new podcast recently launched by Professor Harvey Alférez, director of the Center for Innovation and Research in Computing (CIRC) in the School of Computing at Southern Adventist University.
The podcast draws content from research articles published with computing students about artificial intelligence (AI), data science and software engineering, making it digestible to a general audience. For example, one recent episode covers an open zero-watermarking approach to prevent the unauthorized use of images in deep learning.
The article by Alférez, Ryan Downs, ’24, and Daryl Illangovan, senior computer science major, was published by Springer Nature and presented at the Intelligent Systems and Applications Conference in 2024, where it received the Best Presentation Award.
Prof. Alférez envisions the podcast as a way to collaborate with other academic fields and industries and more widely distribute research data that often requires a fee or paid subscription to access.
“It’s important to broadly share this knowledge with the whole educational community instead of working in silos,” he said. “Collaboration is key. Whether on Southern’s campus or at another school across the country, if other professors in various academic disciplines listen to this podcast, they can all know what we’re doing here and contact us to see what we can do together.”
Each podcast episode recaps the information from one academic paper in roughly 15 minutes. To minimize costs, Prof. Alférez uses AI to generate voices for the podcast’s two hosts, as well as the introduction and ending sequences. The hosts break down the academic article by explaining the highlights of the problem being addressed and then detailing the proposed solution. New episodes are currently released every two weeks and are expected to continue over the summer.
Find the podcast on Spotify and RSS under the Center for Innovation and Research in Computing or by visiting southern.edu/CIRC.