In today's episode, Maarten de Hoop and Michael Conniff talk about research and the role of UNIPLAT in creating opportunities for researchers and scientists in less developed countries. 
 Maarten de Hoop is a researcher and a Professor of Computational and Applied Mathematics at Rice University.  Maarten’s research interests are in extracting subtle signal information from the ever-expanding data sets produced from advances in data acquisition by dense arrays and sensor technology. Maarten is interested in exploiting the foundations of the theory of seismic waves, their properties, and multi-scale interaction with complex, highly heterogeneous media and nonlinear inverse theory, and in developing new paradigms for large-scale computing. He has always been interested in physics from an early age. Over the years, this interest grew into what he does today in the world of deep learning. He is Senior Advisor to UNIPLAT. Maarten and Michael talk about how the platform creates opportunities for researchers and scientists who are not lucky enough to be in the US to have a way of showcasing their work and research and getting the funding that they need. UNIPLAT aims to ensure that researchers from less developed countries get the same opportunities as those from developed countries.