Ri Christmas lecture livestream comes to University of Liverpool

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A person posing for a photo.
Professor Mike Wooldridge

The University of Liverpool will host a livestream of the Royal Institution Christmas lectures on Thursday the 14th December. The event, which will take place in Hub 502, is open to the public and is hoping to attract school children, families and other people interested in science. The lecture being livestreamed is the second of this year’s three lectures. The Christmas lectures are an annual event which were initiated by Michael Faraday almost 200 years ago and have been broadcast on television since 1936.

In this year’s lectures Professor Mike Wooldridge will be exploring the truth behind Artificial Intelligence (AI), the most rapidly evolving field of science.  Mike will reveal how AI works and how it will affect our lives – and will tackle head-on our hopes and fears for this most fascinating of fields. 

Throughout the three Lectures, Mike will explore the big questions facing AI research and unravel the myths about how this ground-breaking technology really works. How can a machine be taught to play a game or translate from one language to another? He will show how computer programmes inspired by the human brain can be taught and even teach themselves. And he will tell the surprising story of how tools like the latest chatbots work and illustrate the mind-boggling scale of modern AI systems – that can be used in everything from gaming to movie-making to designing drugs. 

The LIV.INNO CDT is closely liked to these lectures as one of the work packages is about Machine Learning and AI. Several of the students who are studying with us have projects in this work package in subjects as diverse as astrophysics, Quantum Chromodynamics, high energy physics and medical physics. We hope to showcase some of this research at the event where we will be showing the livestream of the Christmas lecture.

Tickets for this event are now available at the following link: https://indico.ph.liv.ac.uk/event/1480/