“A.I. in the real world” 2011 lecture at Sussex Uni

I’ve just given my yearly lecture at Sussex Uni talking about Artificial Intelligence in the real-world. It details some of my exploits over the last 10 years. The presentation is below, I’ve also linked to some of the videos below.

For my real world examples I covered cars and a few other projects. Audi have their automated racing car which climbs Pikes Peak in 27 minutes (a human racer does it in 17 minutes). I haven’t managed to find a video of the race, there is this video taken earlier in the year.

More interestingly Google have an automated car that drives the streets (has video) – this is a real automated vehicle really driving on the real roads. This is darned impressive. Sooner or later we’ll have low-accident-rate automatic cars which are far cheaper to drive than human-power-cars, this’ll have big economic implications (but could be years off yet).

IBM’s Watson played Jeopardy recently (has video), it is pretty scary watching the machine beat humans at tricky general knowledge questions.

I also mentioned Word Lens (a real time OCR-based translation system using a phone camera) and I demo’d Google’s Voice Translator with some French to English on my Android-based Galaxy S.

Finally I linked to my own project – Social Ties does data mining and natural language processing to give you a mobile ‘people radar’ – it helps you find interesting people at events and places. We’re in alpha at present, sign up on the site if you’d like to join the beta.

At the end of the talk I spoke about some local events that will help people move forwards with A.I. company ideas, these are:


Ian is a Chief Interim Data Scientist via his Mor Consulting. Sign-up for Data Science tutorials in London and to hear about his data science thoughts and jobs. He lives in London, is walked by his high energy Springer Spaniel and is a consumer of fine coffees.