The Data Science Institute hosted a high-profile lecture as part of London Technology Week 2015, at the Royal Institution of Great Britain.

The DSI hosted a lecture from Professor Steve Furber CBE, one of the original designers of the BBC Micro computer and ARM 32-bit microprocessors, at the Royal Institution of Great Britain in Mayfair, central London. The event was held as part of London Technology Week, a weeklong city-wide festival of tech that was opened by London’s Mayor Boris Johnson.

Over the past year, the DSI organised a series of speaker events - Data Science Insights in partnership with Thomson Reuters - featuring speakers from both academia and industry, focusing on how we use data in different sectors and how to interpret data in different ways. So far this year we have had speakers including Professor David Hand from Imperial College, Edwina Dunn from Starcount, and Judith Batchelar from Sainsbury’s speaking at Imperial.

For our final event in the series, we welcomed Steve Furber, ICL Professor of Computer Engineering at the University of Manchester, who gave a talk on the new computer architecture that he has developed: SpiNNaker. 

Steve Furber and Axel Threlfall

SpiNNaker is one of a small handful of efforts to implement artificial neural networks directly onto hardware in order to make things like machine learning more efficient and performant, and at Imperial College several research groups across the university have acquired and use SpiNNaker boards from Professor Furber’s Advanced Processor Technologies Group at Manchester. Axel Threfall, editor-at-large at Reuters, kindly agreed to chair the event and drove a lively discussion reaching beyond technical aspects of Professor Furber’s talks that included questions on AI, what hyper-intelligent machines would mean for society, and on understanding the human brain.

You can catch up with this event and also find videos of all of our Data Science Insights events on the Imperial College YouTube channel.