Hello everyone and welcome to Talk Nurdy. Today is Monday, March 11th, 2019. I'm your host Kara, Santa Maria, and I want to give a shout out to those of you who have made

talk nerdy possible this week. Remember, talk nerdy is and will always be 100%

free to download, and that's because I rely on support from listeners just like you. So if you want to

pledge your support you can go to patreon.com slash talk nerdy and learn more.

This week I want to thank Rob Shrek, Pedro M Rosario, Barbosa,

Phil T-Bare, the zombie drummer, David J.E. Smith, Jeffrey Perez, Charles Payet, Gabriel, Felipe, Hermio Gonzalez, Brian Holden, and Jeffrey Sewall.

Thank you all so, so very much. Remember like I said you can pledge your support at

Patreon.com slash talk nerdy but you can also just visit my website kara Santa

Maria.com to learn more about the show and you can get some cool

talk nerdy swag at you guessed it talk nerdy merch dot com. All right that's enough

of that I'm really excited about this week's episode. I had the opportunity to sit down in studio, which I don't get to do all the time anymore, so it's always a pleasure whenever I get to sit down with somebody face to face, look them in the eyes while we have a

conversation, and this week was a great one. I'm going to see if I can pronounce her name

correctly because it's not terribly easy for me. Okay, she is Dr. Birchen Bedrick Gerber.

I hope that was okay.

And she is an associate professor and director of graduate programs

at the Astani Department of Civil and Environmental

Engineering of the University of Southern California that's in the Viterbi School of

Engineering.

She's also the founding director

of the Innovation in Integrated Informatics Lab

and the Center for Intelligent Environments, Technology,

and Society.

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