This year, I was delighted to host an event within ESF focused on the future of artificial intelligence, featuring Madhumita Murgia, AI Editor for the Financial Times.
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artificial intelligence
What a fantastic week at The University of Salford. We had our The Royal Institution Christmas Lectures livestream event with great talks from Marieke Navin, Dr Helen Whitehead, and Dorien de Vries, each discussing how artificial intelligence is shaping their work.
We even managed to align that event with the Greater Manchester Institute of Technology inaugural conference, which brought students and staff from across the colleges and university together. I was delighted to give the keynote talk and proud to have so many of our colleagues supporting the event. It was fantastic to hear from Jo Purves, Claire Foreman, and GCHQ about all the exciting things that are happening.
Finally, we went up to the STEM Learning UK and met Séverine Trouillet FRSA and the incredible team to take part in the second of the The Royal Institution livestreams.
So many people helped to make all of these events happen, especially anthony stephens, Tina H-Mistry, Andre Davies, Maria Dickinson, Daniel Williamson.
We also launched our Salford 360 campaign, which brings together each of our schools to speak about key areas of interest. This month, we've focused on artificial intelligence and you can read
https://lnkd.in/e58n8qu4
One more week to go! Have a great weekend everyone!
https://lnkd.in/ez4hjJFM
I was delighted to be the keynote for this amazing, first event, bringing together all of our college partners to talk about the latest innovations in science and technology. We focused a lot on artifcial intelligence and immersive technologies.
I was delighted to give the keynote at this year’s Luxembourg National Research Fund science communication conference, speaking about artificial intelligence and immersive worlds. Such a fantastic community with some incredible work. Find more about them here
A talk for the Global Alliance for Responsible AI
Great to see this write up from our AI for Good event last week. An excellent summary of what we covered.
It was an absolute pleasure to be involved with an event this week run by the Tokyo 2020 Director of International Communications Tatsuo Ogura, who took time out of his role to produce an independent, charity liveathon about all things digital and sport. For 24hours speakers from all over the world covered a range of topics in an event he wants to become the SXSW of Japan.
My session takes you through the last 20 years of digital innovation, which leads up to how esports are changing the conversation about creativity, culture, and content. You can watch it back here
This week, I took part in an event led by the United Nations agency ITU and the Global Esports Federation, examining points of intersection between artificial intelligence and esports. Other panelists included Ursula Romero, Chris Overholt, Chong Geng Ng, Bryn Balcombe, and our host was the amazing LJ Rich. We covered a wide range of subjects from how esports integration with AI is driving ground breaking research and the possibility that AI may just save the world from a range of catastrophic risks.
Currently working on a full article to examine these areas, so stay tuned! Meanwhile, here’s the recording from yesterday.
This week, I was in Sheffield for Doc Fest, taking part in a discussion about the film “Hi, Ai”, which documents the lives of people who are building new relationships with humanoid robots.
The debate took us in lots of directions, but crucial for me is how the cultural context of robotics varies. We see a family in Japan and a single man in the USA, each of which are creating new kinds of experience with their robots.
It was great to be in Lausanne again last week for #TheSpot2019, a new conference bringing together the worlds of sport and technology. My keynote was focused on the connections between biology and digital technologies, you can read the manuscript over at Medium
Thank you Professor @andymiah for having joined #TheSpot2019 and enriched the programme with your fantastic presentation 👍 @scicommsalford pic.twitter.com/bAqjlTWHJu
— ThinkSport (@ThinkSportCH) May 29, 2019
Today, I took part in a conversation focused on the ideas within a documentary directed by Roy Cohen called Machine of Human Dreams. It focuses on the story of Ben Goertzel and his work to make a robot which could demonstrate Artificial General Intelligence. It was a great chance to re-visit some of the early ideas around the AI research world and we covered so much ground, from Deep Blue vs IBM and the Turing Test, to a future in which all human jobs become automated and where we need to figure out what will be left for us to do.
It was fantastic to take part in this event and fantastic to see how a neuroscientist who took a documentary film module while at university found a way into telling one of the most complicated stories in science today. Very grateful to Erinma Ochu, who worked with Wellcome Trust to curate this programme of events, which gave me a chance again to be at the amazing and inspiring Sheffield Documentary Film Festival.
This week, I was down at the Royal College of Art again to give a talk for the Jewellery and Metals Department. Their brief was to imagine how we deal with a future where our survival is under threat...
This week, I received a report from Lord Haskell, detailing the House of Lords debate of 8th September, in which he kindly mentioned my work on drones. This is an important citation for Project Daedalus and great to have made a link there for NESTA. Here's the report, crucial reading for all UAV/drone users. Our online toolkit is also online now! Here's a link to get started on learning about drones.
A quick interview with Mind the Film productions for Project Daedalus
Video essay, from my talk at #YorkFoi York's Festival of Ideas.
This week, I took part in a panel at the Cheltenham Science Festival focused on the use of drones in every day life. I talked a lot about Project Daedalus and some new innovations, particularly high authority autonomous systems - essentially completely intelligent drones - while Gerry Corbert from the Civil Aviation Authority gave a run down of the rules and regulations surrounding application. He was quick to point out that the guidelines that surround UAVs were never designed for the very small UAVs which can now be picked up in toy stores or even the Apple store, but there were some key issues that seem unresolved. One of them relates to this video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fZkZ4FONiiw
This example of a form of augmented reality glasses being used to give FPV perspective of the drone's camera is provocative because the CAA guidelines stipulate that flying with FPV goggles is actually not legal, since the pilot must always have visual line of sight (VLOS). However, these glasses offer transparency which permits VLOS, while locating the drone's camera feed within the glasses as well. So the question is, 'is this legal?'
This seems one of the future directions around the use of augmented reality devices with drones, making even more complicated the way in which the rules operate.
Screen Shot 2015-06-05 at 11.50.45
As each month passes @SalfordUni, there is another amazing thing happening. The other week it was #SonicFusion, directed by Prof Stephen Davismoon who just happens to be best mates with Prof Eduardo Miranda, a remarkable composer and AI researcher at Plymouth, whom I have worked with and known for a few years now. There is a staggering amount of experimental innovation at Salford University and this weekend of really provocative and beautiful audio visual experiences was no exception. Here's what I grabbed during the weekend:
Yesterday, I published a piece in the Huffington Post about the increased use of automated technology within social media.
Photo of "LoveLetters_1.0”' by David Link
Happy birthday to you?
by Andy Miah, for Huffington Post
Today is my birthday. It began in the typical fashion - checking my mobile for Facebook birthday wishes. Afterwards, everyone got up and we opened presents, had breakfast, and so on. Later came text messages, then telephone calls and, eventually, the post. This seems to be the communication hierarchy today. But, it was really Facebook who occupied prime position today.
I say ‘who’, as if Facebook is a living person, which of course, it is not. Yet, we do imbue our computers and devices with identity and intention. Computer programmer Alan Turing imagined a world where computers did exhibit the same kind of intelligence as humans and automating intimate birthday greetings may be one step closer to that.
Just this month, the Computer Conversation Society awarded a prize to an artistic installation by David Link, who recreated a programme from one of Turing’s contemporaries, Christopher Strachey, who created an automated ‘love letters’ programme, which would spew out messages designed to stimulate feelings and emotion.
After having read a few of my lovely greetings from lovely people, I started to feel whether something similar was going on. Could there be an app that is allowing my ‘friends’ to create automated birthday greetings? After all, some of the people who were sending messages were not really close friends, not even people within whom I interact once in a blue moon.
So, a quick search and yes, there is an app that does this. You can even personalize the automated message by introducing a name or creating a selection of possible greetings that it will select randomly, so it doesn’t seem suspicious. Before you ask, no, I am not sharing the link to this application! In fact, I think such an app is both an indication of what is great about web 2.0 and what may bring about its demise.
Transforming such an intimate communication as a birthday wish into an automated message, betrays the value of social media and the human relationships it is supposed to foster. But, people do need help. Most of us far exceed Robin Dunbar’s counsel that the human brain has space for only around 150 meaningful relationships and ‘add friends’ like they are going out of fashion.
Like many, I am someone who forgets birthdays and tries hard to put birthday dates into my digital calendars to ease the burden. However, with calendar migration, new devices, etc, things have got lost and I’ve missed birthdays. Furthermore, my trusty kitchen wall calendar doesn’t have much ink on it these days. Facebook has become our most reliable place for anniversaries, because the person – or thing - whose birthday it is reminds us, since they who imputed the date into the global calendar.
The problem is that this service has become so good that Facebook is getting dangerously close to being a ‘who’ rather than a ‘it’. Facebook is starting to take more credit for my birthday greetings than my friends and the entire process of expressing sentiment between people is becoming automated.
Being forgetful is one thing – even if it is forgetting someone special on their birthday. Removing the entire human agent from the communication process because of this forgetfulness is quite another.
The problem is that, whichever way we turn, we are in trouble. If we don’t write a message that could make Alan Turing’s computer fail, then our friendship is in jeopardy. Yet, tailoring every message to the recipient would be a full time job. At the same time, if we don’t have time to write the message, then I’m not even sure it’s reasonable to expect the recipient to click ‘like’ in respond
For my birthday, I’m determined to reply to every greeting. Even a conversation that starts with an automatic message may lead somewhere fruitful. Although, I do wonder whether there is an automated ‘birthday greeting reply’ app out there.