Open Transcripts

Verifying and Validating Machine Intelligence

presented by Andrew Moore

We’ve been building autonomous vehicles for about twenty-five years, and now that the technology has become adopted much more broadly and is on the brink of being deployed, our earnest faculty who’ve been looking at it are now really interested in questions like, a car suddenly realizes an emergency, an animal has just jumped out at it. There’s going to be a crash in one second from now. Human nervous system can’t deal with that fast enough. What should the car do?

Transforming the Classroom with Ubiquitous Sensing

presented by Amy Ogan

Education has remained largely unchanged for millennia. In any classroom, you see a set of students gathered around a teacher who’s writing on the board, or maybe now we’ve added a PowerPoint deck. But, as in many other fields that have been slow to change, the data revolution is coming for education.

Making an Ethical Machine

presented by Alan Winfield

The idea of putting a robot simulator inside a robot, well, it’s not a new idea but it’s tricky and very few people have pulled it off. In fact, it takes a bit of getting your head round. The robot needs to have, inside itself, a simulation of itself and its environment, and others in its environment. And running in real-time as well.

Cybersecurity in the Age of Always-Connected Sensors

presented by Anthony Rowe

We all see the benefits of active safety systems in cars. But that same safety technology, if attacked, can actually allow you to immobilize a vehicle or even disable breaks while driving.

Personal Privacy Assistants in the Age of the Internet of Things

presented by Lorrie Faith Cranor

Imagine your privacy assistant is a computer program that’s running on your smartphone or your smartwatch. Your privacy assistant listens for privacy policies that are being broadcast over a digital stream. We are building standard formats for these privacy policies so that all sensors will speak the same language that your personal privacy assistant will be able to understand.

1983: A Blackened Window on the World

presented by Joël Vacheron

Rammellzee […] considered graffiti as viruses. And what he liked to do was to connect his production to military language. He was saying that the graffiti artists were in a kind of symbolic campaign against the standardization of the alphabet.

Uninvited Guests

presented by Natalie Kane

Most companies […] don’t deliberately want to be malicious in the technology that they’re making. However, if you don’t think about the fact that your solution is not the only one, and is going to enter into a whole host of different things, then you are going to end up causing problems and it might as well be malice.

The Internet of Damned Things

presented by Tobias Revell

We have to be aware that when you create magic or occult things, when they go wrong they become horror. Because we create technologies to soothe our cultural and social anxieties, in a way. We create these things because we’re worried about security, we’re worried about climate change, we’re worried about threat of terrorism. Whatever it is. And these devices provide a kind of stopgap for helping us feel safe or protected or whatever.

Working on ENIAC: The Lost Labors of the Information Age

presented by Mark Priestley, Thomas Haigh

The largest part of the ENIAC team by far were the people that were actually building the thing. And it’s interesting they’ve been forgotten by history, because although their job titles were wiremen, technicians, and assemblers, being a business historian I looked up the accounting records, and sometimes they spell out the payroll. You suddenly see all these women’s names like Ruth, Jane, Alice, Dorothy, Caroline, Eleanor showing up.

Lost in the Web – How to Navigate the Legal Maze and Protect Free Speech Online

presented by Nani Jansen

We all know that a lot of speech is moving online these days, either by choice because it’s a cheap and accessible way of publishing, or by necessity. At the same time we see an increase in attempts to control free speech online, in what should actually be a space in which information can flow freely.