<iframe src="//player.blubrry.com/id/32892818/" width="100%" height="138px" frameborder="0" scrolling="no" data-mce-fragment="1"></iframe>

Goren Gordon directs the Curiosity Lab at Tel Aviv University. His background and approach is truly multi-disciplinary: Goren holds six academic degrees, including two PhDs, but none of them are strictly in computer science. We talk about his journey from quantum physics to social robotics, how he chooses which ideas to pursue, and how he advises his current students as they navigate interdisciplinary research. He also shares some great summer reading recommendations.

Bio

Goren has a BMSc (bachelor in medical sciences), MSc in physics and MBA from Tel-Aviv University, Israel. In Weizmann Institute of Science he finished one PhD under the supervision of Prof. Gershon Kurizki, on dynamical quantum decoherence control, a way to facilitate the emergence of quantum computers; and another PhD under the supervision of Prof. Ehud Ahissar, where he developed and extended mathematical models of curiosity, analyzed animal’s behaviors with it and implemented it in robots that learned about their own body, similar to infants. He did his postdoc with Prof. Cynthia Breazeal at the Personal Robots Group in the Media Lab, MIT, where he studied how curious robots interact with curious children. He discovered that curiosity can be “contagious”, i.e. children playing with a curios robot became more curious themselves. Goren now heads the Curiosity Lab in Tel-Aviv University, where he develops state-of-the-art computational models of curiosity; quantitative assessment tools for curiosity; and curious social robots that learn about other agents in their environment, all by themselves. Goren is also interested in scientific education and he has a Teaching Certificate from MIT. He develops quantum computer games that teach quantum physics to children via play as well as gives popular lectures on quantum physics, the brain and inter-disciplinary thinking.

Transcript

Andrew Miller:             So first of all, I want to thank you so much for talking with us today, and the first question I’m asking all the guests on this podcast is, actually for most guests I’m asking, what first got you interested in computing? But I think for you, it might be a better question to ask what first got you interested in science in general and research in general?

Goren Gordon:             So actually, I started really early and everything that was in the beginning was actually in science fiction books. I can, all my life since I remember, like from the age of 12 or 13, I had these dual passions. One of them is for neuroscience and the brain, and that was from “Fantastic Voyage Two” of Asimov, which everybody knows “Fantastic Voyage” one when people shrink and they go into the body, but he actually didn’t like that book. He wrote “Fantastic Voyage Two,” and they shrunk and went inside the brain. That’s an amazing book that started my passion about understanding the brain and how we think and what goes on there.

Goren Gordon:             The other way is I read “The Emperor’s New Mind,” by Roger Penrose, which it’s a very heavy book but it really explains well quantum physics. It’s just so weird and counterintuitive that I had to understand them, so throughout my entire research career I always was interested in both of them, and I always, it was very hard for me to decide which one I loved more, so I researched both of them most of the time.

Goren Gordon:             For me, one of the major goals is to actually make science fiction nonfiction, because there are so many ideas and so many crazy stuff out there that slowly becomes reality. It was very important for me to understand what’s going on and what are the barriers to actually make it work? That’s what drove my passion throughout the years.

Andrew Miller:             Looking at your journey so far, I can really see those two trends. You call yourself someone with a triple double, right?

Goren Gordon:             Yeah.

Andrew Miller:             You have two undergraduates, one in medicine and one in physics, two master’s, one in physics and one in business, and then two PhDs, one in physics and neuroscience. Did I get that right?

Goren Gordon:             Yeah, I think that’s right. What people don’t know, that I did all of them in parallel. People usually ask me, “Why did you quit physics and went to do neuroscience?” But almost throughout my entire career, I did two degrees in the same time. Each one of them took me a little bit longer, but I literally did my first two undergrads together, and also my two master’s together, and the PhD, I finished my first PhD when I already finished all the courses for the neuroscience. I did all the courses for the neuroscience PhD while I was doing the quantum physics PhD. Throughout my entire career, I always was interested in both of them, so it’s not like I jumped from one to another, but it was like really combining them or studying both of them.

Andrew Miller:             Yeah, one question that I think a lot of people would have is how do you sustain motivation to pursue degrees in such seemingly disparate areas? Did you try and connect them together, like did you try and do it in one project that would work for both?

Goren Gordon:             Yeah, so actually when I finished my first PhD in quantum physics, I tried to turn to what the research field called quantum biology, which is trying to find quantum phenomena within the biological system and also the brain. I looked for this connection, but then after doing all the math I realized that I don’t really believe that it works, although it’s a blooming field now.

Goren Gordon:             Actually now in my lab, to my amazing surprise and wonder, I actually have two projects that’s combined both neuroscience or machine learning actually, and quantum physics. That’s like a total surprise for me. I didn’t think I would do it again, but I actually came back to quantum physics recently and it’s just wonderful. There’s again, another research field, amazing research field, it’s called quantum cognition which actually attempts to use quantum physics to explain irrational behavior of people. It’s just an amazing thing, because you’re using quantum math and everything that I love about quantum physics, and to actually understand psychology of people, which is for me again, it’s just amazing to be able to somehow combine them both in a research project, which is so cool.

Andrew Miller:             Yeah, I mean you sort of touched on this just now. I’m interested to hear, so what is it about physics for example that you like, but what does physics not give you that you need to get from another discipline, like neuroscience?

Goren Gordon:             Yeah, so the reason I actually left quantum physics is because for me, it was too unrelated to the day to day world. You know, I solved equations and I understand how you can make things levitate, and how measurement can create amazing phenomena and stuff like that, but in the end you don’t see it, you can’t touch it, it doesn’t do anything in the world.

Goren Gordon:             But when you do neuroscience, then you can actually start to understand like the human behavior, and trying to understand that. Also, when I went into neuroscience I in parallel also went to robotics, which is totally in this world and moving in the world, and the actual physical embodiment of all these ideas. I didn’t just went to neuroscience in the sense of understanding the brain, but also trying to recreate it. For me, it was a huge jump from quantum physics to engineering and robotics, and so then you need to do an experiment that fails because something breaks, as opposed to just running equations and stuff like that. It was a big jump, but it was very interesting. That was what was missing for me in theoretical quantum physics, that I wanted to do something in the real, day to day world.

Andrew Miller:             Your research at the moment is very robotics-driven. One of the things that I think is interesting for our listeners is that you have all of these degrees, and none of them are officially in computer science, right?

Goren Gordon:             Yeah, I have to say something. It’s funny, so I have several degrees, but actually what I’m doing now is like a multidisciplinary approach for four disciplines which I don’t know anything about, which is computer science, engineering, which I don’t have a degree in engineering, developmental psychology and education. That’s like four things that I’m doing now which I have no clue about, and it’s so much fun, it’s unbelievable. I’m learning all the time. I feel like a freshman again, and I love the feeling, although my students I’m not sure like it, because I have no idea what to say to them, because I don’t know anything.

Goren Gordon:</stron