The idea of neural networks – models inspired by the workings of the brain – has been around since pioneers such as Bletchley Park alumni Alan Turing (King’s 1931) and Tommy Flowers began to build machines and models that could emulate logic. It was a wonderful time to be in the field, he says, with cognitive science, signal-processing physics, applied mathematics and statistics coming together to produce a creative diversity of thinking. In 2000, Lawrence came to Cambridge for a PhD on neural networks. Laptop and started playing around with networks in my downtime.” Scientist and they were talking a lot about neural networks. “I just love making stuff work,” he says. After studying mechanicalĮngineering at Southampton, he headed off to the North Sea to work as a fieldĮngineer. Has done stints in industry as well as academia. This kind of real-world application fascinates Lawrence, who It’s not a conspiracy – it’s simply using real-word data to game a data-driven system To recognise when it’s happening, and redeploy, is a huge problem and people are not talking about it enough.” You’re constantly under attack, but the attacks are harder to identify. And people will try to game those proxies. And if your system is using real-world data, you can’t precisely program against that with something like ‘If person is good, then trust’. Remember when Google searches were ranked according to how many links a page had? People simply said: OK, I’ll build a link farm that refers people to my site. It’s simply people using real-world data to game a data-driven system, in an adversarial way – making their information more prominent than the information you really want. “It’s not a conspiracy by Facebook or Twitter. The problem is built into the system, he says. “It’s at the core of many of the challenges we’re going to face – and “That’s a high-level breach of this data/software separation,” says But in machine learning, the parameters of the modelĬome from learning on the data rather than being in the control of the It’s why we spend a lot of time and money trying to stop data being Software and persuading it to do something the developer hadn’t intended it toĭo. A virus, he explains, works by getting inside the They’re all symptoms of the same problem – machine learning blurring the lineīetween software and data. That can affect society in dramatic ways.”įake news, bots, search engine optimisation, clickbait: Interacting software components doing stuff that behaves in a certain way and Understands how all this works – but it’s not sentient. ![]() How to maximise benefit – and minimise harm,” he says. I worry about the problems that have been causedīy the rush to deploy and build things before we have a good understanding of “Not because the promises were wrong, but because it takes Re-examine paradigm-shifting computer science, and how we’re doing things, fromīack in the early days of the internet, grandiose promisesĪbout how it was going to change all our lives caused the dotcom boom – andĬrash – of 2001. “The next wave in machine learning andĪI will be a revisiting of what computer science means,” he says. ![]() And he’s here toĬompletely rethink the way AI is done. ![]() ![]() Machine Learning and a Professorial Fellow at Queens’. Letter, Lawrence became the University’s inaugural DeepMind Professor of In September 2019, some 30 years after he received that “We will not be able to offer you an undergraduate place at Downing College,” it reads. “The rest have all gone to the local computer history museum.” Next to the Mac Plus is a Lego Mindstorms robot, a shelf full of books about how the mind works and, he gleefully points out, a framed letter from the University. It was salvaged by Lawrence when he was a PhD student – “the only one of my computer collection I’ve been allowed to retain,” he sighs. Call Professor Neil Lawrence on Zoom and you’ll notice, sitting on a shelf behind his desk, an ancient Mac Plus.
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