13 May 2025
13 May 2025
On 13 May 2025 Neil Lawrence was a guest on BBC Radio 4’s The Life Scientific, in conversation with Jim Al-Khalili. The episode is Neil Lawrence on taking down the ‘digital oligarchy’ and why we shouldn’t fear AI.
The discussion moves through Neil’s career across academia and industry — movie animation, Formula 1, medical research, and a spell as Director of Machine Learning at Amazon — and into the argument of The Atomic Human: learn to use AI, but keep a sceptical eye on how data is used and on the power of large platforms. The through-line is making a difference to everyday life rather than treating robots-taking-over as the main story.
A World Service reversion aired later on Discovery (18 August 2025).
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.
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.
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.
