Join us on Tuesday 11th June at 5:45pm for two presentations.
Authority Defenders or Democracy Advocates? Chinese Urban Planners in the Digital Era Shuwen Zhou
Internet of Things, Big data and AI technologies have brought digital development into a new era. Urban planning is one of the areas that these technologies are widely applied. The observations in North American and European countries raised concerns over the return of 'rational scientific' planning which was widely criticised in the 1960s and 1970s for its detrimental effects to democracy. In China, the popularity of rational comprehensive planning is also boosted due to technological advancement. However, while in other countries it is seen as a force against democracy, in China it is seemingly empowering Chinese urban planners to be insurgent and to challenge the political leaders in power for making cities more inclusive. Strong non-state grass-root forces are also participating in urban planning with the applications of new technologies. Is digital development driving Chinese urban planning towards a democratic process? This talk will present the observations and start the discussion.
Shuwen Zhou is in her first year of DPhil in Sustainable Urban Development. She received MA in Public Policy from the University of Tokyo and MSc in Urban Development Planning from University College London (UCL). Before she started her DPhil research at Oxford, she was a programme manager leading Poverty and Urbanisation Portfolio at United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) in China. She also researched on urban inequality at the Asian Development Bank Institute (Tokyo) and worked on community-led slum upgrading projects with the Asian Coalition for Housing Rights (ACHR) in Southeast Asia.
Artificial Intelligence: the missing pieces Louis Mahon
Technology that falls under the heading “Artificial Intelligence” is responsible for so many of the significant changes in the world today, and its effect size is only going to grow in the coming decades. Alongside these practical implications of AI research, it is viewed by some as an end in itself. Indeed, to me, building a machine that is as intelligent or more intelligent than us is one of the greatest feats that humanity can attempt. When I first tell somebody that I am researching in the area of AI, there is often a change in their expression, and in a tone of interest, or maybe skepticism or tentative excitement or even fear, they ask “so, is it real? is it going to happen?”. I cannot answer yes or no to these questions, but can perhaps give an indirect answer through a description of AI and the state of AI research. This talk is an attempt to do just that. First I will give a brief history of the field. Next I will discuss the collection of algorithm known as Artificial Neural Networks, and the role they have played in the current wave of progress in AI. Then I will describe the open research problems, and the position of my MSc thesis in relation to such problems. Finally, I will give my view on the philosophical question of what AI is and how best to conceive of intelligent machines.
My interest in the mind and the nature of consciousness began with a summer Philosophy course I took when I was 14. At 18 I attended Trinity College in Dublin, where I studied first Maths and Psychology, and then switched to Maths and Philosophy after one year, specializing in Abstract Algebra, Logic and Philosophy of Language, and being significantly influenced by the work of philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein. After graduating I completed a Masters in Speech and Language Processing, where I encountered the application of computer programming to natural language. This led to a job in the Dictionary department of Oxford University Press--a fun job as jobs go, but I quickly realized that I did not want to spend my life in industry, and so I enrolled in Oxford’s MSc in Computer Science. I will most likely be moving to a PhD in the same next year.