How Revolutionary is AI? International Digital Futures Network Summer Symposium
12th June 9:30 AM – 3:30 PM BST
Just how revolutionary is the AI revolution? And to what extent will it change the world around us? This year’s International Digital Futures Network Summer Symposium brings together experts in the field from across academia and industry to explore these questions and more over a day of talks, panels and open discussions.
Co-hosted by Edinburgh Futures Institute and Bristol Digital Futures Institute, this year’s event will take place in the Futures Institute’s new home; a beautifully transformed, historic building which provides a dynamic futures-focused space for learning, research, and innovation at the University of Edinburgh.
Schedule
| 09:30 | Arrival, tea and coffee |
| 10:00 | An introduction to the International Digital Futures Institute from Professor Marion Thain Director, Edinburgh Futures Institute and member of the IDFN Steering Group |
| 10:10 – 11.10 | Evolution vs Revolution: How did we get here with AI? Professor Jane Hillston with Steven Connor |
| 11:15 -12:15 | The 8 Foundational Principles for Genuinely Intelligent (and Useful) AI Dr Marcus Weldon with Sandra Woolley |
| 12:15 – 13:15 | Lunch |
| 13:15 – 14.15 | Generative AI: Distinguishing Hype from Hallelujah Professor Peter Flach with Sanja Milivojevic |
| 14:15 – 15:15 | Panel discussion |
| 15:15 -15:30 | Closing remarks |
Speaker Biographies
Jane Hillston is a Professor of Quantitative Modelling, Dean of Research Culture and REF, Interim Co-Director of University of Edinburgh’s Generative AI Laboratory (GAIL), and former Head of the School of Informatics at the University of Edinburgh. In March 2007 she was elected to the fellowship of the Royal Society of Edinburgh and in 2018, to the membership of the Academia Europaea. She is the recipient of the Suffrage Science Award for Computer Science and the RSE Lord Kelvin Medal. She was elected a fellow of the Royal Society in 2022.
Marcus Weldon is the Emeritus President of Bell Labs, the world-renowned innovation powerhouse that defined the current digital age. He has currently helping a wide variety of companies with their AI strategies, as well as acting as the Contributing Editor for AI for Newsweek magazine with the AI Impact series of interviews with the leading prognosticators, pioneers and practitioners of AI across the globe.
Peter Flach has been involved in AI research for four decades. He joined the Department (now School) of Computer Science at the University of Bristol in 1997 and has been Professor of Artificial Intelligence since 2003. An internationally leading scholar in the evaluation and improvement of machine learning models, he has also published on mining highly structured data, on knowledge-driven and explainable AI, and on the methodology of data science. His books include Simply Logical: Intelligent Reasoning by Example (John Wiley, 1994; interactive online edition, 2022) and Machine Learning: the Art and Science of Algorithms that Make Sense of Data (Cambridge University Press, 2012). From 2010 until 2020, Prof Flach was Editor-in-Chief of the Machine Learning journal. He is a founding board member, previous President and current Vice-President of the European Association for Data Science. He is a Fellow of the European Lab for Learning and Intelligent Systems and of the European Association for Artificial Intelligence. He was the founding director of the UKRI Centre for Doctoral Training in Interactive Artificial Intelligence, and currently directs the UKRI AI Centre for Doctoral Training in Practice-Oriented Artificial Intelligence.
This event is co-hosted by Edinburgh Futures Institute and Bristol Digital Futures Institute.
