28 August 2024
28 August 2024
On 28 August 2024 Neil Lawrence appeared on BBC HARDtalk with Stephen Sackur. The episode is Neil Lawrence – Professor of Machine Learning, Cambridge University; an audio version for World Service listeners is Neil Lawrence: Being human in the age of the machine.
The interview centres on The Atomic Human, published in the UK that June: what remains of human intelligence once machines take on tasks we once treated as uniquely ours, and whether people — not only specialists — will steer AI as a tool rather than become tools of it. Sackur presses the familiar divide between embrace and fear; Neil’s line is that the decisive factor is human judgment in development and deployment, not the technology alone.
Further context is on Neil’s book page.
Information topography is the geometry of how information flows through a complex system. The programme develops the mathematical foundations of that geometry — from information-theoretic axioms to predictive accounts of how communication structure emerges and reorganises.
The AI Adoption programme studies how institutions take up AI in ways that deliver public value — through public dialogue, practitioner partnership, and emerging theory on judgement, model minimisation, and the information topography of organisational change.
17 April 2020
The Royal Society launches DELVE — Data Evaluation and Learning for Viral Epidemics — to feed data-driven analysis into SAGE. Neil Lawrence helps lead the group; Jessica Montgomery provides secretariat.
4 May 2020
The first DELVE report argues that face coverings, including homemade cloth masks, could reduce community transmission when physical distancing is hard to maintain.
27 May 2020
A DELVE report sets out when TTI can help control COVID-19; Andrei Paleyes and colleagues release open simulation software used in the supporting analysis.
