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🔓We discussed the concept of "Agency", specifically asking, “Is directing the work of a collection of intelligent compute resources easier than keeping a team of humans with their own hopes and motivations working towards the same goal?”We addressed these questions as well: ✔️ What does it mean for a human to have "agency" and how does this apply in the context of AI?✔️ What are the considerations to make when deciding to hire a human vs. build an agent to perform a necessary role?✔️ What can leaders learn about managing agentic teams while building their business considerations, goals and intelligence data?📣 Listen and watch the replay of our September web/podcast with Crystal and Nikos as they reflected on the challenges of a continuous exchange between human storytelling and machine visualization.

Name of Webcast: Making AI Possible Date: Tuesday, August 18, 2026 Name of Episode:  Building Chips in the Age of AI Season 2: Episode 8       

➡️ Two strategists from Eurasia Group, the top political risk firm, addressed this question with us, from Washington to São Paulo. Scott Bade, a Senior Analyst in the firm's Geo-Technology practice, covered the geopolitics of AI and US tech policy. Philipe Moura, Director of Strategy for Latin America and a Co-founder of Brazil's AI Association, brought the view from the region's most active adoption markets.  One connected story told from two very different seats.  📣 Host Nicholas Beaudoin, Caltech CTME's Affiliate Director of AI Programs discussed with Scott and Philipe where the hemisphere lines up on AI, and where does it break apart? Listen to discover how AI is transforming the future of international innovation.

Coding agents are changing how AI and ML products get built. But are the engineers who ship them still in control of what they're building? Watch and listen to our June 2, 2026 live webcast of Making AI Possible, episode 6 called, "Building with Agents and Owning the Output: Coding Agents, Product Ownership, and the Modern AI/ML Engineering Workflow." Host Nicholas Beaudoin, Caltech CTME's Affiliate Director of AI Programs, sat down with Michael Frantz, PhD, Director of AI at PreDoc, and Jonathan Cheung, PhD, Specialist Solutions Architect at Databricks. They discussed how to work with a coding agent without losing the plot of what you're building and showed us what "good" looks like in production, how to stay in control of what you ship, and what the modern AI and ML engineering workflow looks like when agents are doing more of the work. Listen in to discover how we retain the cognitive element in our use of popular coding agents like Claude Code and OpenAI's Codex.

Making AI Possible | May 5, 2026 📣What happens when AI starts shaping how we think, decide, and remember? Find out in the replay of the 5th episode of Making AI Possible: "Using AI to Avoid a 'Cognitive Coup'". In our May 5 live webcast of Making AI Possible, host Nicholas Beaudoin, Caltech CTME's Affiliate Director of AI Programs, sat down with Dr. Fatima T. Zahra, founding director of the AI, Race, and Evaluation Lab at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville; and Dr. Crystal Dilworth, neuroscientist, science communicator, and Caltech CTME instructor working at the intersection of emerging tech and human behavior. Together they discussed whether AI use is genuinely degrading our cognition or whether it can be turned into a tool that sharpens it, and what it means to build "culturally responsible" AI as these systems become embedded in daily life.

Is the technology that's meant to make your life easier actually making it harder? Making AI Possible Without Making Life Impossible Our April 7 live webcast of Making AI Possible, hosted by Nicholas Beaudoin, Caltech CTME's Affiliate Director of AI Programs, features Amber Case, Cyborg Anthropologist, UX Designer, and Founder of the Calm Tech Institute, a design standards organization asking something most AI builders aren't: does your technology demand more attention than it needs to? We get into the 70-year hype cycle behind the term "artificial intelligence," why builders are feeling busier, not less busy, since adopting AI tools, and what good AI design actually looks like when engineering safety principles are taken seriously. If your tools are starting to work against you, this live podcast is worth your time.

Welcome to the Making AI Possible Podcast—your monthly deep dive into the latest breakthroughs in artificial intelligence and how they’re shaping the world around us. Produced at Caltech in Pasadena, California, this series features in-depth conversations with the people driving AI innovation forward. In our third episode of Making AI Possible for Season 2, we present Out of This World Autonomy and AI. Director of AI Programs, Nicholas Beaudoin welcomes guest Issa Nesnas, Principal Robotics Technologist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, whose work spans multiple generations of martian and lunar rovers and foundational autonomy systems. Together, Nicholas and Issa will explore the harsh realities of operating on planetary bodies, from communication delays and radiation-hardened processors to unpredictable terrain and irreversible mistakes. The conversation digs into: • how computer vision functions in unknown environments • how onboard systems make decisions with limited compute • what “autonomy assurance” really means when a single error can end a mission This is a look at the engineering discipline required to build AI systems that are bounded, tested, and trusted where failure is permanent.

Making AI Possible:Building Inclusive AI: Lessons Learned from Production - Feb 2026 Welcome to the Making AI Possible Podcast—your monthly deep dive into the latest breakthroughs in artificial intelligence and how they’re shaping the world around us. Produced at Caltech in Pasadena, California, this series features in-depth conversations with the people driving AI innovation forward. In our second episode of Making AI Possible for Season 2, Director of AI Programs, Nicholas Beaudoin, sits down with Will Croushorn, MBA, a leader behind Wendy’s FreshAi initiative, to explore how artificial intelligence is reshaping one of the most iconic retail experiences: the drive-thru. Will shares how his team moved from experimental pilots to production-grade systems, the unexpected challenges and “aha” moments along the way, and the technical complexity behind building AI that can operate in noisy, real-world environments at massive scale. We explore how technology is advancing accessibility and inclusion—from language support to physical-ability considerations—and what this democratization of AI means for the future of retail. Will also offers candid advice on measuring ROI in operational AI systems, and a forward-looking view of what’s next as AI begins to mirror the human customer experience. Will Croushorn, MBA currently leads FreshAi at Wendy's, one of the world's largest deployments of generative AI in a physical retail environment. He focuses on taking AI from "hype" to revenue-generating operational reality and produced a 0-to-1 pilot to a mass deployment across 600+ enterprise locations, achieving ~99% order initiation success and ~95% autonomous handle rate. In addition, Will has pioneered the "Digital Drive-Thru," turning offline voice data into structured business intelligence to optimize operations in real-time. He worked in SaaS innovation for logistics and recruiting, and spent 5 years leading international development operations in the Middle East. Will thrives in ambiguity and specializes in translating complex technical capabilities into intuitive, human-centric user experiences. ♦ As Caltech CTME's Affiliate Director of AI Programs, Nicholas Beaudoin intersects strategic program development with hands-on curriculum design, positioning AI/ML education programs at the forefront of technological transformation. Leading the AI programs at Caltech's Center for Technology & Management Education, Nicholas' focus is on delivering impactful learning experiences tailored to a diverse clientele, including private and public sectors, as well as government and non-profit organizations.

Adversarial Uses of Artificial Intelligence "We don’t fear AI because it’s smarter than us. We fear it because it doesn’t care about us." Welcome to the Making AI Possible Podcast—your monthly deep dive into the latest breakthroughs in artificial intelligence and how they’re shaping the world around us. Produced at Caltech in Pasadena, California, this series features in-depth conversations with the people driving AI innovation forward. In our first Making AI Possible episode of Season 2, Director of AI Programs, Nicholas Beaudoin, sits down with Rob Petrosino, AI Consultant for the US Government, to explore the challenges of AI. Adversarial uses of AI represent a fundamental shift in the security landscape, where threats are no longer isolated, human-paced, or easily detectable, but instead scalable, automated, and designed to manipulate trust itself. Rob Petrosino draws on his work advising the U.S. government and industry leaders to explain how AI-powered deception, influence operations, and machine-speed attacks are changing what it means to defend organizations, institutions, and society. To secure your spot, register below. We look forward to seeing you there! With over 10 years of experience in emerging technologies, Rob Petrosino focuses on driving innovation and digital transformation. As Chief Innovation Officer at PeakActivity, Rob leads initiatives in generative AI, augmented reality, and machine learning, crafting strategies that integrate cutting-edge technologies into tangible business solutions. His contributions include developing technology roadmaps, exploring intellectual property opportunities, and fostering innovation in collaboration with cross-functional teams. In his role as Artificial Intelligence Consultant for the US Government, Rob focuses on advancing responsible AI adoption and forging partnerships to strengthen national security. His work emphasizes leveraging AI and digital tools to address cybersecurity challenges and create secure communication channels. Passionate about ethical AI implementation, Rob's mission is to harness technology to drive meaningful impact across public and private sectors. ♦ As Caltech CTME's Affiliate Director of AI Programs, Nicholas Beaudoin intersects strategic program development with hands-on curriculum design, positioning AI/ML education programs at the forefront of technological transformation. Leading the AI programs at Caltech's Center for Technology & Management Education, Nicholas' focus is on delivering impactful learning experiences tailored to a diverse clientele, including private and public sectors, as well as government and non-profit organizations. ♦

Bridging the Gap Between Research and Leadership Welcome to the Making AI Possible Podcast—your monthly deep dive into the latest breakthroughs in artificial intelligence and how they’re shaping the world around us. Produced at Caltech in Pasadena, California, this series features in-depth conversations with the people driving AI innovation forward. This podcast series features the latest AI advancements with some of the brightest minds in the field, such as groundbreaking research from AI industry leaders, labs here on campus, and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), which Caltech manages for NASA. In our October 7 session of Making AI Possible, Director of AI Programs, Nicholas Beaudoin, sits down with Dr. Crystal Dilworth, Caltech PhD, global science communicator, and host of the 100+ year Watson Lecture series, about the evolving intersection of science communication and artificial intelligence. They discuss what AI can and cannot solve in bridging the gap between research and leadership, share stories of AI as both a personal collaborator and a team thought partner, and explore how AI systems carry cultural assumptions into the workplace and beyond. From training scientists to lead in entrepreneurial spaces, to weighing whether enterprise AI choices reflect or reshape organizational values, this conversation challenges us to consider how the tools we deploy shape the future we want to build. Dr. Crystal Dilworth, AAAS IF/THEN Ambassador for STEM, is an international voice for science, strategic communicator, and non-profit board member. She received her PhD from the Caltech division of Chemistry and Chemical Engineering in 2014 and for the last decade has worked as a science communicator, television correspondent, and start-up advisor. She is host of the historic Watson Lectures series at Caltech, and can also be found on networks including Voice of America, Al Jazeera, and CBS. Off-screen, Dr. Dilworth works closely with academic groups and early stage start-ups, training faculty and founders in public speaking, leadership communication, and storytelling. She is an advisor for the AI working group of the Future Talent Council, helping build best practices for AI integration into higher ed and executive leadership environments, and the start-up software company Instill.ai, building the world's first AI powered "culture operating system". ♦ As Caltech CTME's Affiliate Director of AI Programs, Nicholas Beaudoin intersects strategic program development with hands-on curriculum design, positioning AI/ML education programs at the forefront of technological transformation. Leading the AI programs at Caltech's Center for Technology & Management Education, Nicholas' focus is on delivering impactful learning experiences tailored to a diverse clientele, including private and public sectors, as well as government and non-profit organizations

Konstantin Batygin a planetary scientist and professor at Caltech, where he focuses on the dynamics of planets, planetary formation, and celestial mechanics. His work includes theoretical research on the solar system's planets as well as broader studies on exoplanet formation and evolution. In addition to astrophysics, Konstantin is passionate about music and regularly make noises with his band, The Seventh Season.  Learn more: gps.caltech.edu/people/konstantin-batygin ♦   As Caltech CTME's Affiliate Director of AI Programs, Nicholas Beaudoin intersects strategic program development with hands-on curriculum design, positioning AI/ML education programs at the forefront of technological transformation. Leading the AI programs at Caltech's Center for Technology & Management Education, Nicholas' focus is on delivering impactful learning experiences tailored to a diverse clientele, including private and public sectors, as well as government and non-profit organizations.

Welcome to the Making AI Possible Podcast—your monthly deep dive into the latest breakthroughs in artificial intelligence and how they’re shaping the world around us. Produced at Caltech in Pasadena, California, this series features in-depth conversations with the people driving AI innovation forward. This podcast series features the latest AI advancements with some of the brightest minds in the field, such as groundbreaking research from AI industry leaders, labs here on campus, and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), which Caltech manages for NASA. Manuel Gonzalez-Rivero has spent a career exploring remote sensing, machine learning, data science and computer vision on a variety of orbital and terrestrial platforms. An Alum of Carnegie Mellon University, he worked at General Dynamics and Lockheed Martin building real time satellite payloads, teaching and working on remote sensing at ARL-PSU, building global machine learning pipelines at Planet Labs, Orbital Insight, and Maxar Technologies, and Directing AI/ML Execution at the Aerospace Corporation. As director of Data Science and Artificial Intelligence at the Aerospace Corporation, Manuel  coordinates with teams to consult a variety of government customers on a wide base of missions related to space. His team has focused on the creation of a development stack that simplifies the complexities of creating, training, and deploying machine learning capabilities that can educate and inform government stakeholders on data that is relevant to their missions in meaningful environments. As Caltech CTME's Affiliate Director of AI Programs, Nicholas Beaudoin intersects strategic program development with hands-on curriculum design, positioning AI/ML education programs at the forefront of technological transformation. Leading the AI programs at Caltech's Center for Technology & Management Education, Nicholas' focus is on delivering impactful learning experiences tailored to a diverse clientele, including private and public sectors, as well as government and non-profit organizations.

Welcome to the Making AI Possible Podcast—your monthly deep dive into the latest breakthroughs in artificial intelligence and how they’re shaping the world around us. Produced at Caltech in Pasadena, California, this series features in-depth conversations with the people driving AI innovation forward. This podcast series features the latest AI advancements with some of the brightest minds in the field, such as groundbreaking research from AI industry leaders, labs here on campus, and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), which Caltech manages for NASA. Discover how cutting-edge research is being applied to transform and streamline healthcare, energy, manufacturing, and finance. Tune in to discover how the latest research becomes transformative technology. Richard Anderson is the Director of Quantitative Analysis for the Los Angeles Dodgers. He is a data scientist with a Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of Michigan. Before joining the Dodgers, he worked as a Senior Data Scientist at Warner Bros. Discovery and as the Director of Baseball Analytics for the Cincinnati Reds. He also has experience with the Los Angeles Angels and has expertise in R, Python, SQL, and stan. Richard is passionate about education, statistics, casual inference, experimentation and his dog, Ralphie. ♦ As Caltech CTME's Affiliate Director of AI Programs, Nicholas Beaudoin intersects strategic program development with hands-on curriculum design, positioning AI/ML education programs at the forefront of technological transformation. Leading the AI programs at Caltech's Center for Technology & Management Education, Nicholas' focus is on delivering impactful learning experiences tailored to a diverse clientele, including private and public sectors, as well as government and non-profit organizations.  ♦

Welcome to the Making AI Possible Podcast—your new monthly deep dive into the latest breakthroughs in artificial intelligence and how they’re shaping the world around us. Produced at Caltech in Pasadena, California, this series features in-depth conversations with the people driving AI innovation forward. This podcast series features the latest AI advancements with some of the brightest minds in the field, such as groundbreaking research from AI industry leaders, labs here on campus, and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), which Caltech manages for NASA. Discover how cutting-edge research is being applied to transform and streamline healthcare, energy, manufacturing, and finance. Tune in to discover how the latest research becomes transformative technology. Dr. Matthew Graham, Research Professor of Astronomy at the California Institute of Technology received his MA in Physics from the University of Oxford and his PhD in Astronomy from the University of Central Lancashire in the UK. After a postdoc at Imperial College London, he came to Caltech in 2003, initially as a Senior Postdoctoral Scholar and then transitioning to a Computational Scientist within the Center for Advanced Computing Research. He has been a Member of the Professional Staff at Caltech and in 2017, he became research faculty in astronomy. Matthew has extensive experience in large sky surveys and their computational challenges, particularly the application of machine learning and advanced statistical methodologies to astrophysical problems. Matthew is currently the co-PI and Project Scientist for the Zwicky Transient Facility (ZTF), the first of a next generation of time-domain sky surveys producing hundreds of thousands of public transient alerts per night. He also has ongoing research projects on real-time low latency inferencing— real-time AI at scale —the application of reinforcement learning to optimize follow-up observations of short lived phenomena, the development of neural differential models for modeling black holes, and the functional analysis modeling of multivariate time series. ♦ As Caltech CTME's Affiliate Director of AI Programs, Nicholas Beaudoin intersects strategic program development with hands-on curriculum design, positioning AI/ML education programs at the forefront of technological transformation. Leading the AI programs at Caltech's Center for Technology & Management Education, Nicholas' focus is on delivering impactful learning experiences tailored to a diverse clientele, including private and public sectors, as well as government and non-profit organizations

Caltech Affiliate Director of AI Programs Nicholas Beaudoin, talks with special guest Dr. Georgia Gkioxari on the subject, From Research to Application, where they discuss how research applies to industry use cases and their direct applications. Dr. Georgia Gkioxari, PhD Assistant Professor at the Computing + Mathematical Sciences at Caltech Dr. Gkioxari obtained her PhD in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from UC Berkeley, where she was advised by Jitendra Malik. Prior to Berkeley, she earned her diploma from the National Technical University of Athens in Greece. After earning her PhD, she was a research scientist at Meta's FAIR team. In 2021, she received the PAMI Young Researcher Award, which recognizes a young researcher for their distinguished research contribution to computer vision. Dr. Gkioxari the recipient of the PAMI Mark Everingham Award for the open-source software suite Detectron (2021), the Google Faculty Award (2024) and the Okawa Research Award (2024). In 2017, Dr. Gkioxari and her co-authors received the Marr Prize for “Mask R-CNN” published and presented at ICCV. She was named one of 30 influential women advancing AI in 2019 by ReWork and was nominated for the Women in AI Awards in 2020 by VentureBeat. ♦   As Caltech CTME's Affiliate Director of AI Programs, Nicholas Beaudoin intersects strategic program development with hands-on curriculum design, positioning AI/ML education programs at the forefront of technological transformation. Leading the AI programs at Caltech's Center for Technology & Management Education, Nicholas' focus is on delivering impactful learning experiences tailored to a diverse clientele, including private and public sectors, as well as government and non-profit organizations.  ♦