Meet inspiring and diverse engineers whose ground-breaking work is making a difference and inspiring writers who create compelling fiction.
Engineering is at the heart of being human: for thousands of years we’ve been inventing things, from stone tools through to modern smartphones, We’ve created technology that have made our lives better and have also radically changed society. And yet as a subject Engineering is strangely hidden in plain sight. Inventive explores new ways of telling Engineering's story by mixing fact and fiction. Through this, we inspire our listeners about the contribution engineering makes.
Host: Professor Trevor Cox, Acoustical Engineer
Producers: Anna Scott-Brown and Adam Fowler
Publicity: Gill Davies
Visuals and animations: Annabeth Robinson
Curriculum materials associated with this podcast will appear on the Nustem website at Northumbria University.
Overtone Productions for University of Salford, UK
Funded by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Meet inspiring and diverse engineers whose ground-breaking work is making a difference and inspiring writers who create compelling fiction.
Engineering is at the heart of being human: for thousands of years we’ve been inventing things, from stone tools through to modern smartphones, We’ve created technology that have made our lives better and have also radically changed society. And yet as a subject Engineering is strangely hidden in plain sight. Inventive explores new ways of telling Engineering's story by mixing fact and fiction. Through this, we inspire our listeners about the contribution engineering makes.
Host: Professor Trevor Cox, Acoustical Engineer
Producers: Anna Scott-Brown and Adam Fowler
Publicity: Gill Davies
Visuals and animations: Annabeth Robinson
Curriculum materials associated with this podcast will appear on the Nustem website at Northumbria University.
Overtone Productions for University of Salford, UK
Funded by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

A fascinating insight into how AI will influence how cities operate in the future and the ethics of collecting big data.
Larissa Suzuki is a polymath – she's a computer scientist, engineer, entrepreneur, writer, inventor, and philanthropist. She was awarded the Engineer of the Year at the Engineering Talent Awards 2021 and the Royal Engineering Society's Rooke Award and she made The Guardian's Top 50 Women in Engineering.
She has one foot in academia and the other in industry – she's an Honorary Associate Professor at University College London and she's a Data Scientist at Google working on Artificial Intelligence for Smart Cities and the Interplanetary Internet – that involves connecting devices and satellites to ensure we have connectivity to provide services to the international space station and remote planets.
Larissa is autistic and she tells Trevor Cox that it's important that companies hire people who don't fit a particular profile as that's not the way to create better products and be more successful. She's an advocate for women in STEM. The pioneering computer scientists were women, so why were they not given credit for their achievements?
Trevor and Larissa delve deep into the ethics of collecting data on citizens for smart cities. Should we be even more concerned about our privacy in the future?
Author Tim Maughan's short story, My City is Not a Problem, focuses on the first AI system built for the public sector. It appears to know how to solve London's problems better than its politicians.
What did you think of the episode? We're evaluating Inventive. Please fill in our listener survey
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.