Abstract

We’re sorry to announce that the 2022 Wheeler Lecture, scheduled for Wednesday 18th May, has been cancelled due to illness. We are hoping to reschedule the lecture at a later date.

Please find below the programme for the Research Showcase (in lieu of the Wheeler Lecture):

18th May 2022 @ 15:15-16:15 in LT1 RESEARCH SHOWCASE A very exciting programme has been put together for today in LT1 as follows:

15:15-15:30 – Introduction by Ann Copestake (15 mins) 15:30-15:35 – Jennifer Cobbe ‘Compliant & Accountable Systems’ (5 mins) 15:35-15:50 – Srinivasan Keshav ‘Bringing Trust to Carbon Credits Through Computer Science’ (15 mins) 15:50-15:55 – Andrea Ferlini ‘In-Ear Audio Sensing’ (5 mins) 15:55-16:10 – Simon Moore ‘Fundamentally improving security using capabilities’ (15 mins) 16:10-16:15 – Martin Kleppmann ‘Local-first software: Resilient and secure collaboration’ (5 mins) 16:15 – Closing remarks by Ann Copestake

An Afternoon Tea will follow immediately in The Street after the Research Showcase.

About the annual Wheeler Lectures

The annual Wheeler Lectures are held in memory of Professor David Wheeler, one of the pioneers of Computer Science. He worked on the original EDSAC computer here and wrote the first computer program ever to be stored in a computer’s working memory. He pioneered the use of sub-routines and is particularly remembered for his work on data compression.

About David Silver

We were very much looking forward to hearing the talk by David Silver who leads the reinforcement learning team at DeepMind and is also a professor at University College London. We hope to reschedule his talk at a later date.

David’s work focuses on artificially intelligent agents based on reinforcement learning. David led or co-led projects that played Atari games directly from pixels (Nature 2015), defeated a world champion in the game of Go (Nature 2016), learned by itself to defeat the world’s strongest chess, shogi and Go programs (Nature 2017, Science 2018), even without knowledge of the rules (Science 2020), and defeated professional StarCraft players (Nature 2019).

He also contributed to AlphaFold, the program that solved the protein folding problem (Nature 2020, Nature 2021).

His work has been recognised by the ACM Prize in Computing, Marvin Minsky award, Mensa Foundation Prize, Royal Academy of Engineering Silver Medal, ACM Fellowship and Royal Society Fellowship.

We look forward to welcoming him into the Department to give his talk when a suitable date can be arranged.