“Computers will be cleverer than humans by 2029” Ray Kurzweil, Director of Engineering, Google
“We have what may be an extremely difficult problem with an unknown time to solve it, on which quite possibly the entire future of humanity depends” Prof. Nick Bostrom, Director, Future of Humanity Institute, University of Oxford
Cover image courtesy of the Laboratory of Neuro Imaging and Martinos Center for Biomedical Imaging, Consortium of the Human Connectome Project (www.humanconnectomeproject.org)
Introduction We’d like to welcome you to an exciting day exploring pertinent topics in machine intelligence research and new ways in which these technologies are changing the way we live, work, and play. The field of machine intelligence traces its roots deep into the history of computer science. Ranging from Alan Turing’s seminal paper, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, written in 1950, to the work of Charles Babbage and Lady Lovelace on the first programmable machine and algorithm, many have contributed to building the foundations of machine intelligence. Since the turn of the century, the pace of fundamental innovation and real world applications have only quickened. We’ve seen cloud computing go mainstream, giving developers access to unparalleled, ondemand compute capacity for less. Advances in microprocessor design, parallel computing and neural networks have triggered exponential growth in computational performance. As consumers, we’re rapidly adopting increasingly performant smartphones that have rewritten the playbook for how we procure products, services, and information. In doing so, we are producing more data than ever before, leaving a rich trail of our preferences, habits, and knowledge. Added to this mix, ambitious projects in neuroscience like The Human Brain Project are encouraging much needed fundamental knowledge creation to understand intelligent systems. We therefore find ourselves at a potentially pivotal point in history. These advances in software and hardware give us the tools to engineer intelligent systems with the computational and problem-solving capacity equivalent to or exceeding that of humans within our lifetime. With this ability comes great opportunities to advance humanity and economic output. Notwithstanding potential benefits, however, we’re entering uncharted territories where existential threats to humanity are difficult to measure yet undeniably important to plan for. We hope that today’s event will pique your interest, challenge your way of viewing what’s possible with machine intelligence, answer outstanding questions, and pose new ones. A huge thank you to our speakers, moderators, friends, and our host, Bloomberg, all of whom have helped make this event a reality. Enjoy! Sincerely,
Nathan Benaich
Joe Charlesworth
@nathanbenaich
@charlesworthjc
#ai2015 │@playfaircapital
Morning Programme Technical deep dive into machine intelligence 9.00am
Opening remarks by Playfair Capital
9.15am
Dr Martin Goodson (Skimlinks) Building sophisticated learning systems for processing billions of documents a month using deep learning and Apache Spark
9.40am
Dr Gabriel Brostow (University College London) Human-in-the-loop computer vision systems
10.05am
Dr Stefan Leutenneger (Imperial College London) Bridging the gap between sensors, processors and AI: real-time mobile robot localisation and environment mapping
10.30am
Coffee and networking
10.45am
Dr Jun Wang (University College London) Applying artificial intelligence for computational online advertising
11.10am
Dr Blaise Thomson (VocalIQ) Changing the way we speak with machines
11.35am
Dr Guillaume Bouchard (University College London) Programming by teaching
12.00am
Lunch and networking
Afternoon Programme Applications and socioeconomic impact of machine intelligence 1.05pm
Opening remarks by Playfair Capital
1.15pm
Dr Rand Hindi (Snips), moderated by Mark Beech (Bloomberg) Using artificial intelligence to make technology disappear
1.50pm
Dr Ferenc Huszar (Balderton Capital) + Richard Newton (author), moderated by Charles Arthur (journalist) Will machine intelligence usher the age of technological unemployment?
2.15pm
Dr Daniele Quercia (Computational social scientist), moderated by Mark Beech (Bloomberg) Maps: optimising routes for happiness
2.40pm
Alex Housley (Seldon) Building an open source artificial intelligence company
3.05pm
Dr Dan Goodman (Imperial College University), moderated by Kristen Schweizer (Bloomberg) Computational neuroscience
3.30pm
Coffee and networking
3.45pm
Dr Ben Medlock (SwiftKey) + Calum Chace (author), moderated by Sally Davies (Financial Times) How will machine intelligence impact the fabric and function of society?
4.10pm
Dr Tristan Fletcher (Thought Machine), moderated by Izabella Kaminska (Financial Times) The role of artificial intelligence in automating financial markets
4.35pm
Keynote Lecture Mustafa Suleyman (Google DeepMind) Applied artificial general intelligence
5pm
Jaan Tallinn (Cambridge Centre for Existential Risk, Skype, Kazaa), moderated by Amy Thomson (Bloomberg) Exploring the existential risks post by machine intelligence
5.25pm
Closing remarks by Playfair Capital
5.30pm
Drinks reception and networking
6.00pm
Close
Speakers Dr Martin Goodson Skimlinks Martin Goodson is VP of Data Science at Skimlinks, leading on large-scale machine learning for natural language processing and the modelling of consumer behaviour. He was previously working as a statistician at the University of Oxford, where he conducted research into the genetics of personality and the statistical analysis of genomes. He was also head of research at Qubit, building predictive models of behaviour for online personalisation. @martingoodson
Dr Gabriel Brostow University College London Gabriel Brostow is an associate professor in Computer Science at UCL, and a scientific adviser at Thought Machine. His group explores research problems in Computer Vision and Machine Learning. His focus is on algorithms for human-in-the-loop systems: vision systems for scientists, artists, and other specialists, that are responsive to a user, and build up models from prior data or experience. After his PhD at Georgia Tech, Gabe was a Marshall Sherfield Fellow in the Computer Vision & Robotics Group at Cambridge University, and research scientist at ETH Zurich.
Dr Stefan Leutenneger Imperial College London Stefan Leutenegger is a Lecturer in the Dyson Robotics Lab at Imperial College London, co-leading it with Prof. Andrew Davison. His research is centred around autonomous robot navigation: robots need dedicated sensing capabilities as well as algorithms for localisation inside a potentially unknown environment. This includes localisation and mapping with a suite of sensors, most importantly cameras, to be processed efficiently to yield accurate results at real-time. In the past, he has mostly worked with Unmanned Aerial Systems (UAS), in order to allow them to fly autonomously and close to the ground for applications such as inspection, environmental monitoring or search and rescue. Stefan received a BSc and MSc in Mechanical Engineering from ETH Zurich in 2006, 2008, respectively, and a PhD in 2014, working at the Autonomous Systems Lab of ETH Zurich on Unmanned Solar Airplanes: Design and Algorithms for Efficient and Robust Autonomous Operation.
Dr Jun Wang University College London Jun Wang is Senior Lecturer in Computer Science, UCL and CTO, MediaGamma Ltd. In 2014, He co-founded MediaGamma, an online advertising technology company, creating the first programmatic futures/options exchange for online advertising. His main research interests are statistical modelling of information retrieval, collaborative filtering and computational advertising. Jun has published over 80 papers in leading journals and conference proceedings. He won the Microsoft Beyond Search award in 2007 and Yahoo! FREP award 2014, and also awarded multiple Best Papers in information retrieval and computational advertising. In 2013, his team won the first global RTB display advertising algorithm contest with 80+ participants worldwide.
Dr Blaise Thomson VocalIQ
@blaisethom @vocaliq
Blaise Thomson is co-founder and CEO of VocalIQ, the world’s first self-learning dialogue API, putting real, natural conversation between people and their devices. Before co-founding VocalIQ, Blaise spent several years researching new approaches to building spoken dialogue systems; first as part of his Ph.D. and then as a Research Fellow at the University of Cambridge. Dr. Thomson has received multiple awards from the IEEE and the Journal of Computer Speech and Language for his groundbreaking research into natural language processing and machine learning algorithm design. He received a BSc(Hons), Pure Mathematics, 1st, from the University of Cape Town, South Africa in 2004. Outside of work, he enjoys playing guitar and dancing.
Dr Guillaume Bouchard University College London Guillaume Bouchard is a senior researcher at UCL, founder and director of Bloomsbury AI, and a part-time Innovation Partner for Xerox company. He has 15 years of research experience in statistical, machine learning and natural language processing, both in academia, after a PhD from the French research institute INRIA, and in industry, working 10 years at Xerox Research Centre Europe. He holds more than 60 patents and is the author of 50 international publications. He managed multiple data analytics project such as the development of a virtual conversational agent, and actively participated in bigdata European projects, including Fupol (extraction and summarisation of political opinions), as well as Fusepool (creating of a software architecture to seamlessly integrate machine learning algorithms in content management systems). He recently moved to the UK to pursue his long term dream of creating virtual agents that learn only by interacting with humans in their language.
Dr Rand Hindi Snips
@randhindi @snips
Rand Hindi is an entrepreneur and data scientist. He is the founder and CEO of Snips. Rand started coding at the age of 10, founded his first startup at 14 and created a web development agency at 15 before starting his PhD at the age of 21. He has been elected as a TR35 by the MIT Technology Review, as a "30 under 30" by Forbes, received the Excellence Française award, was the founding ambassador of the Sandbox network in Paris, is a World Economic Forum Global Shaper and a Kairos Society fellow. He holds a BSc in Computer Science and a PhD in Bioinformatics from University College London (UCL), as well as two graduate degrees from Singularity University in Silicon Valley and THNK in Amsterdam.
Dr Ferenc Huszar Balderton Capital
@fhuszar
Ferenc Huszar is Data Scientist in Residence at earlystage technology investor Balderton Capital. He holds a PhD in Machine Learning from Cambridge, with an academic track record spanning from mind reading to quantum physics. He got into the London tech world as chief data scientist of media analytics startup PeerIndex, recently acquired by Brandwatch. As an investor and aspiring entrepreneur Ferenc is now looking for applications where modern machine learning and AI will create most value.
Richard Newton Author Richard Newton is an entrepreneur & writer. He cofounded of OP3Nvoice, an audio and video search company, and Screendragon, a creative marketing platform. He is a frequent journalist and columnist on innovation and startups and a SundayTimes #1 bestselling author. His latest book, The End Of Nice: How to be human in a world run by robots, considers the different traits that will lead to the good life in a time of fast rising automation and AI. @richnewton
Dr Daniele Quercia Computational social scientist
@danielequercia
Daniele Quercia is a computer scientist, has been named one of Fortune magazine's 2014 Data All-Stars, and spoke about “happy maps” at TED. He is interested in the relationship between online and offline worlds, and his work has been focusing in the area of urban informatics. He was a Research Scientist at Yahoo Labs, a Horizon senior researcher at The Computer Laboratory of the University of Cambridge, and Postdoctoral Associate at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He received his PhD from UCL. His thesis was sponsored by Microsoft Research Cambridge and was nominated for BCS Best British PhD dissertation in Computer Science.
Alex Housley Seldon
@ahousley @seldon_io
Alex Housley is the founder and CEO at Seldon, a predictive AI platform released under a permissive open-source license in February 2015, after three years of R&D. Seldon is on a mission to make machine intelligence accessible to developers and analysts by building a fully-integrated ecosystem that connects the world’s leading open and closed AI platforms. Alex is a creator of audacious projects that challenge the status quo. His Genome Laser sequenced the late Dr. Charles Townes, Nobel Prize-winning physicist and inventor of the laser, and blasted his DNA into space with a giant laser.
Dr Dan Goodman Imperial College London Dan Goodman is a lecturer in the Electrical Engineering department of Imperial College London. He worked previously at Harvard Medical School and the Ecole Normale Supérieure in Paris, and studied at the Universities of Cambridge and Warwick. His research is in computational neuroscience with a particular focus on the auditory system. His aim is to understand how to use “spiking” neurons – a form of hybrid digitalanalogue computation unique to the brain – to carry out sensory processing in complex, noisy environments.
Dr Ben Medlock Swiftkey
@ben_medlock @swiftkey
As co-founder and CTO of SwiftKey, Ben Medlock invented the intelligent keyboard for smartphones and tablets that has transformed typing on touchscreens. The company’s mission is to make it easy for everyone to create and communicate on mobile. SwiftKey is best known for its smart typing technology which learns from each user to accurately autocorrect and predict their most-likely next word, and features on more than 250 million devices to date. SwiftKey has been named the No 1 hottest startup in London by Wired magazine, ranked top 5 in Fast Company’s list of the most innovative productivity companies in the world and has won a clutch of awards for its innovative products and workplace. Ben has a First Class degree in Computer Science from Durham University and a PhD in Natural Language and Information Processing from the University of Cambridge.
Calum Chace Author
@cccalum
When Calum studied philosophy at Oxford University, he discovered that the science fiction he had been reading since boyhood is actually philosophy in fancy dress. He has recently published Pandora's Brain, a techno-thriller about the arrival of the first conscious machine. He is a regular speaker on artificial intelligence and related technologies and runs a blog on the subject at www.pandoras-brain.com. Prior to writing Pandora's Brain, Calum had a 30-year career in business, in which he was a marketer, a strategy consultant and a CEO. He maintains his interest in business by running a small property business and serving as chairman and coach for growing companies. In 2000 he co-wrote The Internet Startup Bible, a business best-seller published by Random House. He lives in London and Sussex with his partner, a director of a design school, and their daughter.
Dr Tristan Fletcher Thought Machine
@tristanfletcher
Tristan Fletcher heads up the machine learning team at Thought Machine - a startup revolutionizing personal finance with AI. He's an expert in applying state of the art machine learning techniques in the practical domain: from algorithmic trading, portfolio management, supply chain optimization and medical research to fine wine pricing at Invinio. He has academic qualifications in Engineering, Computer Science and Machine Learning from Cambridge, Sussex and UCL respectively. He maintains honorary post-doctoral positions at UCL and Imperial College London in finance and medicine.
Mustafa Suleyman Google DeepMind Mustafa Suleyman was co-founder & Chief Product Officer of DeepMind Technologies, a leading AI company backed by Founders Fund, Li Ka-Shing, Elon Musk, and David Bonderman amongst others, which was bought by Google in 2014 in their largest European acquisition to date. He is now Head of Applied AI at Google DeepMind, responsible for integrating the company’s technology across a wide range of Google products. At 19 he dropped out of Oxford University to help set up a telephone counselling service, building it to become one of the largest mental health support services of its kind in the UK. He then worked as a policy officer for the Mayor of London Ken Livingstone. Mustafa went on to help start Reos Partners, a boutique consultancy with eight offices across four continents specializing in designing and facilitating large scale multi-stakeholder ‘Change-Labs’ aimed at navigating complex problems. As a skilled negotiator and facilitator Mustafa has worked all over the world for a wide range of clients such as The UN, The Dutch Government and WWF.
Jaan Tallinn Cambridge Centre for Existential Risk Jaan Tallinn is a founding engineer of Skype and Kazaa. He is a co-founder of the Cambridge Centre for Existential Risk (cser.org), Future of Life Institute (futureoflife.org), and philanthropically supports other existential risk research organizations. He is also a partner at Ambient Sound Investments (asi.ee), an active angel investor, and has served on the Estonian President's Academic Advisory Board.
Moderators Izabella Kaminska Financial Times
@izakaminska
Izabella Kaminska is a blogger and commenter for the Financial Times, with a keen interest in commodities, central banking and technology. She joined FT Alphaville in October 2008. Before that she worked as a producer at CNBC, a natural gas reporter at Platts and an associate editor of BP's internal magazine. She has also worked as a reporter on English language business papers in Poland and Azerbaijan and was a Reuters graduate trainee in 2004. She is currently working and researching a book on cultism in markets.
Charles Arthur Journalist Charles Arthur is a freelance journalist, speaker and moderator who was The Guardian’s technology editor for nine years and before that as technology editor at The Independent and New Scientist magazine. He is old enough to remember the first time that virtual reality was the next big thing, and the first two times artificial intelligence was the next big thing.
@charlesarthur
Sally Davies Financial Times Sally Davies is the Digital Editor of the Financial Times Weekend. She's particularly interested in the ethical and social dimensions of technological change, including its relationship to urbanisation, the environment, gender and the future of work. She was previously the FT's Technology and Innovation Correspondent, and has also worked as an editor at Nautilus magazine.
@daviesally
Mark Beech Bloomberg Mark Beech is the London technology editor for Bloomberg News. He previously worked as a news editor and reporter for ITN and the Sunday Times. He has an M.A. from St. Catherine's College, Oxford University, where he read philosophy, politics and economics. He is the author of four books including “All You Need Is Rock."
@mark_beech
Amy Thomson Bloomberg Amy Thomson is the reporter in charge of technology coverage for Bloomberg News in London. She's written on technology and telecom trends for Bloomberg and Businessweek for nine years, starting in New York and moving to London in 2011.
@athomson6
Kristen Schweizer Bloomberg Kristen Schweizer is Bloomberg's European media correspondent. Prior to being based in London she was the news agency's Budapest bureau chief where she wrote and edited stories about the region's European Union accession and political scene. She previously worked as a feature writer for Reuters in Budapest and at newspapers in Illinois and New York.
@ksbeatniks
Notes
