Guardian Internet of Things Live Webchat Summary
Today a summary appeared of the Guardian internet of things webchat I participated in on July 14th. The webchat was fun. I’d say it’s definitely an advantage to be able to touch type whilst...
View ArticleThe Data-Driven Economy will Help Marketers Exploit Us
I was asked to expand on a reponse I made to a question about the costs of marketing at the Guardian’s on line webchat on the Internet of Things. Oscar Williams of the Media and Tech Network asked me...
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Get Your NIPS Reviews in!
This time last year Corinna and I were starting to pull NIPS reviews together. Making sure that each paper has three reviews before the start of the rebuttal stage. It’s a lot of work. As many will...
View ArticleFerrari Looking for Gaussian Process Experts
There is a lot of fuss about deep learning at the moment, but that’s not the only machine learning game in town. A big focus for us in Sheffield is correct handling of uncertainty when the system is...
View ArticleResponding to Reviewer Comments
Disclaimer: I am not involved in the decision process at all this year, so my advice is merely that which I’ve accumulated and will give out to my own students and collaborators when responding. It is...
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How Africa can benefit from the data revolution
An op-ed piece I wrote for the Guardian Media Network appeared today. Data science in Africa workshop: discussing knowledge of technologies, ideas and solutions. Photograph by DeKUT University The UN...
View Article'Quantum' Theory of Accountability
In just over a week’s time we will run our fourth Sheffield Gaussian process summer school. Teaching on summer schools is a great pleasure, and one reason for this is that you are not teaching to a...
View ArticleCraft Software
This morning I helped my mum recover a lost Word document which I had reformatted for her over the weekend. Just using Word feels excruciating after writing 70,000 words across the summer in markdown....
View ArticleArtificial Stupidity and the Mechanistic Fallacy
Zoubin Ghahramani has pointed out the odd nature of the term “Artificial Intelligence”. As an example he says it would be non-sensical to talk about artificial flying. Things either fly or they don’t....
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The Information Barons Threaten our Autonomy and Our Privacy
Today an Op-ed I wrote has been published in the Guardian Media & Tech Network. This is the original link here...
View ArticleIt's not an Internet of Things, It's an Internet of People
When you get up at 2:30 in the morning to catch a train to attend a workshop I think it’s inevitable you question yourself as to what on earth it is you’re up to. I’m in Edinburgh today for an Alan...
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System Zero: What Kind of AI have we Created?
Apparent rapid advances in artificial intelligence are plugging into deep-seated fears we have about the fate of humanity. These fears are not new, they go back as far Kubrick and Clarke’s “2001: A...
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A Modern Version of Occam's Razor
Landscapes are shaped by water and cloudscapes are shaped by air. Cloudscapes shape landscapes because they generate the water that shapes the land. Landscapes shape cloudscapes because the guide the...
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10 ways you might be able to tell when an area of research is undergoing...
Your field might be getting a bit over-hyped when you attend your main conference and … … you describe your evening to your wife: she thinks you’ve just been watching the latest Ironman movie. …...
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OpenAI won't benefit humanity without data-sharing
An op-ed piece I wrote inspired by the launch of OpenAI appeared in the Guardian today. Here it is reposted below. Artificial intelligence experts welcome the launch of the Elon Musk-backed venture,...
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A Seasonal Test of AI
Turing proposed that we test for artificial intelligence by conversing with a computer. The computer should persuade you that it is a human. Here’s a more seasonal test for you to think about. Would...
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AI and ML Futures 1: Background
With the purchase of DeepMind by Google for a rumoured 400 million pounds a chain of events was set off that began a debate in the glare of the media: just how far away was superintelligence, the AI...
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AI and ML Futures 2: The Quiet Revolution
First of all, I want to highlight something that seems to go missing in the current hype. There is a lot more to machine learning than deep convolutional neural nets and recurrent nets. I don’t want...
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AI and ML Futures 3: The Trojan Wars of Machine Learning
In my imaginings, I sometimes envisage conversations between billionaires in California. The conversations that I imagine are a little like conversations among the Greek gods. For modern day California...
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Science Week Talk 2016
I’m doing a public event for Science Week this year on 17th March in the Diamond building. More details and seat bookings are here The Rise of the Algorithm: What Kind of Artificial Intelligence have...
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Future Debates: This House Believes An Artificial Intelligence will Benefit...
This evening I’m participating in a debate on AI. We get seven minutes each for our initial statement. This is the script for mine. As my Cambridge based colleague Zoubin Ghahramani says “the term...
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Sheffield Advertises Posts in Machine Learning
I’m excited to announce that the University of Sheffield’s Department of Computer Science will make two appointments in machine learning this year. These appointments support our recently launched MSc...
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Deep Learning, Pachinko, and James Watt: Efficiency is the Driver of Uncertainty
It seems it may only be a matter of time before the best Go player on the planet is a computer. AlphaGo beat the European champion in Go and was driven by machine learning, a technology that has...
View ArticleQuora Q&A Session Answers
This post contains my answers from a Quora session I did on machine learning and artificial intelligence. Each section contains a link to the original Quora question, the overall session can be found...
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David MacKay Symposium
Just back from Cambridge where I attended a symposium that was in honour of the work of David MacKay. David was an incredible influence on my thinking and so many others’, it was really impressive to...
View ArticleSheffield University Life
This week I’m tweeting from the @shefunilife account, an account that is switched once a week between staff and students at the University of Sheffield. This post is just to introduce me to those that...
View ArticleBecoming More Efficient
Busy day yesterday, was thinking about things that make me more efficient. Here are three. 1) Cycling Most convenient way to get to work, the station, from office to office, from office to station etc....
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AI and ML Futures 4: The Future of AI Meeting
On 15th September, 1830, the Liverpool and Manchester Railway opened. It was the first passenger railway. It is said that when rail travel was first proposed fears were voiced that travel at high...
View ArticleData Analysis, NHS and Industrial Partners
Update: I tidied up some of these thoughts and on May 5th they were published in a Guardian article here I was asked by samim and Sam Shead to pass comment on a recent development in the DeepMind...
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Google's NHS deal does not bode well for the future of data-sharing
Originally appeared in the Guardian’s Media and Tech Network Privacy concerns enable companies to avoid the scrutiny that is crucial to reaping public benefits from patient data Data-sharing has become...
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Future of AI 5: The Singularians
Update: through a tweet I found this paper from last year by Luciano Floridi on broadly the same idea. Clearly Luciano’s been thinking about this longer than me. Nice writing, and an additional concept...
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Future of AI 6. Discussion of 'Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies'
Update: readers of the post have also pointed out this critique by Ernest Davis and this response to Davis by Rob Bensinger. Update 2: Both Rob Bensinger and Michael Tetelman rightly pointed out that...
View Article'NLP is a Rabbit in the Headlights' quote
I made this slightly glib remark at the ICML Deep Learning workshop, which seems to have been quoted a bit since (for example in this article by Chris Manning). Just for the context, first Yoshua said...
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Data Trusts
Data is at its most powerful when it is interconnected. A major challenge for modern data is interconnection of different data types to obtain a fuller picture of the data subject. Questions about an...
View ArticleData trusts could allay our privacy fears
Originally appeared as an Op-Ed in the Guardian Media and Tech Network. Current data-sharing arrangements are more akin to a form of data feudalism than data democracy The 1832 reform act was a...
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The Real Story Behind Today's Referendum
Today tens of millions of people in the UK will head to the polls and vote “leave” or “remain” in the country’s referendum on the EU. But perhaps the real story behind this event, is not the result...
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Data Science Challenges
This post is thoughts for a talk given at the UN Global Pulse lab in Kampala as part of the second Data Science in Africa Workshop at the UN Global Pulse Lab in Kampala, Uganda. It covers challenges in...
View ArticleRe-work Interview Questions
I’m talking at the Re-work event on deep learning in London on 22-23 September. They’ve asked a few questions for a pre-event interview. The blog post of the interview is hereI’ve reposted my answers...
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Lies, Damned Lies and Big Data
Benjamin Disraeli in 1878 Benjamin Disraeli said1 that there three types of lies: lies, damned lies and statistics. Disraeli died in 1881, 30 years before the first academic department of applied...
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Don't Panic: Deep Learning will be Mostly Harmless
This is a blog post summarizing topics covered in a talk at the Dagstuhl workshop on “New Directions in Kernels and Gaussian Processes”. Schloss Dagstuhl Thoughts on New Directions in Kernels and...
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Salon des Refusés
The Palais de l'Industrie At the 1863 exhibition of works from the Paris Salon, there was a room dedicated to paintings rejected by the jury. Inspired by this, Ule von Luxburg and Isabelle Guyon, this...
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Post NIPS Reflections
I’ve just selected two papers from this year’s conference, not that there weren’t many more, but I wanted to keep this fairly short. Model Composition A general trend at the conference was composition...
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Data Readiness Levels: Turning Data from Palid to Vivid
Application of models to data is fraught. You are faced with collaborators who sometimes have a very basic understanding of the complications of collating, processing and curating data. Challenges...
View ArticleQuestions on Artificial Intelligence
I had an email from a UK high school student, Molly Patterson, who was researching “Are Science and Technology Going too Far?” for a project. She asked some questions, which I thought were interesting....
View ArticleDiscarded Hard Drives: Data Science as Debugging
As a University professor, when setting data orientated projects to Computer Science undergraduates, I used to find it difficult to get students to interact properly with the data. Students tended to...
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What is Machine Learning?
In this post we’ll provide a general introduction to machine learning, which tries to highlight the underlying technical challenges and where we have solutions. Machine learning is the principle...
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Decision Making and Diversity
I’m planning to put this into Arxiv, but thought I’d share via a blog post first in case there’s any feedback. TL;DR Variation is important in decision making. Introduction It should be remembered that...
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Natural and Artificial Intelligence
How are we making computers do the things we used to associated only with humans? Have we made a breakthrough in understanding human intelligence? While recent achievements might give the sense that...
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The 3Ds of Machine Learning Systems Design
There is a lot of talk about the fourth industrial revolution centered around AI. If we are at the start of the fourth industrial we also have the unusual honour of being the first to name our...
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The MoSM
This is an imagined future, one that I believe could place the UK at the forefront of AI today. It builds upon our traditional strengths, but is forward looking.I’ve set the scene below by imagining...
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