Andrew Booth Memorial Lecture 2016
On 25 October, the Birkbeck School of Business, Economics and Informatics hosted the Andrew Booth Memorial Lecture 2016 at Senate House.
On 25 October, the Birkbeck School of Business, Economics and Informatics hosted the Andrew Booth Memorial Lecture 2016 at Senate House.
The Andrew Booth Memorial Lecture is delivered annually by a distinguished computer scientist and commemorates Professor Booth's work in creating some of the world’s first electronic computers at Birkbeck as well as his pioneering research into machine translation. This year, the School was privileged to hear from Professor Andrew Blake, the Founding Director of the Alan Turing Institute, who delivered an engaging lecture on the Institute’s “Science and Innovation Strategy” to a packed audience of alumni, current students and staff from the Department of Computer Science and Information Systems.
Professor Blake’s lecture discussed in great detail his institution’s mission to advance data science research to change the world for the better. He highlighted the need for a data-centric approach to infer decisions on an industrial scale, in a world where there is an ever-increasing amount of data produced from business, engineering and human activity on different platforms. Big Data and Machine Learning, the new paradigms of research, are revolutionising industries across the globe; governmental organisations and companies from different countries are harnessing huge benefit by inferring intelligence from data. Professor Blake described the strategy whereby the Alan Turing Institute is engaging with multi-disciplinary research, combining theories and ideas from various fields such as mathematics, linguistics and computer science, and its interest in pioneering A.I. technologies, such as decision-making Artificial Neural Networks.
In his vote of thanks, Professor Mark Levene, Head of the Department of Computer Science and Information Systems, thanked Professor Blake, and expressed a hope for collaboration between the Alan Turing Institute and the newly established Birkbeck Institute for Data Analytics (BIDA). BIDA was founded to develop interdisciplinary research in Data Analytics and Data Science; it provides a focus and a platform for research that combines expertise in Computer Science with domain-specific requirements and knowledge arising from across all areas of research at Birkbeck, including the Sciences, Social Sciences, Economics and Humanities. This enables Birkbeck academics, like those active at the Alan Turing Institute, to exploit opportunities provided by the digital revolution and develop leading-edge cross-disciplinary research in the emerging field of data analytics.
Prior to joining the Alan Turing Institute as Director in 2015, Professor Blake held the position of Microsoft Distinguished Scientist and Laboratory Director of Microsoft Research Cambridge. In addition to his many accolades, his contribution to the field of Information Systems was most recently celebrated by the honour of the 2016 BCS Lovelace Medal, the top award in computing in the UK, which is awarded by the Chartered Institute of IT.
The Alan Turing Institute is the national institute for data science, founded in 2015 by five universities – Cambridge, Edinburgh, Oxford, UCL and Warwick – in collaboration with the UK Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council to answer a national need for investment in data science research. Situated in the British Library the institute hopes to provide researchers from all over the country with a great environment for knowledge sharing and acquisition.
Further information:
- Department of Computer Science and Information Systems
- Birkbeck Institute for Data Analytics
- Alan Turing Institute
- Professor Andrew Blake
- Professor Mark Levene