Dr. Alexie Papanicolaou and the Case of the Stressed Fruit Flies and their Genomic Data

The Inaugural IIMx Podcast

Welcome to the inaugural podcast of Informationist e-Zine, which is the online magazine of The Institute for Informational Metaphysics. I’m Bruce Long and I am the founder and research director of the institute. In this our first podcast I will be talking to Dr Alexie Papanicolaou. He’s a genome bioinformatics academic at the Hawkesbury Institute for the Environment which is a research institute of Western Sydney University. Prior to that Dr Papanicolaou was a researcher at the Max Planck Institute and The University of Edinburgh. He’s also Deputy Chair of the Early-Mid Career Researchers Forum Executive of the Australian Academy of Sciences. The topics we cover in this podcast include the way in which Alexie and his team handle different kinds of genomic and scientific information. We start with some of Alexie’s thoughts on interdisciplinary scientific research in Australia and Europe, and move through a discussion of information in genome bioinformatics. In the last part of the interview Alexie makes some very interesting observations about black box machine learning algorithms for genome bioinformatics and their ethical implications. I hope you enjoy listening to the very knowledgeable Dr Alexie Papanicolaou. I thoroughly enjoyed speaking with him and briefly meeting his cat via zoom!

The book mentioned during the early part of the podcast is Consilience by E.O. Wilson.

Visit Dr Papanicolaou's research group website and podcast The Stressed Fruit Fly