Dinners

Today’s machines have already shown glimpses of creativity in art, literature and music.

As AI develops, completely new forms of the arts – currently unimaginable – are bound to emerge; in our season of exploring AI and its uses, creativity and ethics our speaker – Prof Arthur I Miller – will explore this brave new world, probing questions such as: ‘Can and will computers be creators like us and even go beyond us? Will we have to rethink concepts like ‘art’ and ‘creativity’ and, if so, how?’ Prof Miller will discuss and debate all this and much, much more!

The narrative of The Artist in the Machine: The World of AI-Powered Creativity spins off the hundred-odd interviews which Prof Miller carried-out with scientists on the cutting-edge of AI-created art, literature and music.

This book brings together and extends his work of over three decades on creativity in humans and creativity in machines; it is a tour of creativity in the age of machines.

Everyone attending this event will receive a signed first edition of Arthur’s The Artist in the Machine: The World of AI-Powered Creativity courtesy of the real Time Club.

Moreover, it is not a dystopian account – rather it celebrates the creative possibilities of AI in the arts.

About our Speaker

Professor Arthur I Miller – Professor Emeritus of history and philosophy of science at University College London

Arthur I. Miller is fascinated by the nature of creative thinking. He has published many critically acclaimed books, including Insights of Genius; Einstein, Picasso (shortlisted for a Pulitzer); Empire of the Stars (shortlisted for the Aventis Prize); and 137, and writes for the Guardian, The New York Times and Wired.

He is professor emeritus of history and philosophy of science at University College London.

An experienced broadcaster and lecturer, he has curated exhibitions on art/science and writes engagingly about complex social and intellectual dramas, weaving the personal with the scientific to produce thoroughly researched works that read like novels.

His previous book, Colliding Worlds: How Cutting-Edge Science is Redefining Contemporary Art (W.W. Norton), tells the story of how art, science and technology are fusing in the twenty-first century.

Most people know that bees pollinate a significant amount of the crops which provide the food that we eat and that there is a growing danger to the bees.

In fact, since the 1990s there’s been a dramatic increase in the observations of domestic beekeepers and apiarists at honey farms from around the world of sudden and mysterious disappearance of bees with a considerable decline in honeybee colonies; this is from Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD) – the sudden and unexcited loss of bees.

From 2006 apiarists have identified that CCD strikes when seemingly thriving bee colonies with plenty of food stores and artificial hive frames on farms with eggs, larvae, and pupae empty themselves of adult bees with a matter of days, leaving behind—at best—a queen and a handful of bees in the hive, with no evidence of dead and dying bees on the bottom boards or in front of the hives.

There are many theories around what is causing this, though they are mainly theoretical at this point.  The huge loss of biodiversity to monocultures must not be overlooked:

• 40% Loss of commercial honeybee in the US Since 2006
• 25% Loss of commercial honeybees in Europe Since 1985
• 45% Loss of commercial honeybees in the UK since 2010

By creating a global network of data about bees, the World Bee Project is identifying trends and analysing vast arrays of data – such as acoustics – using AI, searching for a cause to this global effect.

An example of using hive monitoring technology to one aspect of the problem – from Arnia remote hive monitoring – and understanding the vast and intricate acoustic data collected from around numerous beehives, the main predator of bees – the Asian Hornet – can now be identified on approach to the hives, the beekeepers can be alerted, and the threat managed.  But this is just one answer, and not a global one at that.

This is a widespread, intricate and complex problem. And this is just the beginning of the application of AI with other technology to solve this worldwide issue.

About our Speaker

Caroline Denoon-Slater, Autonomous Account Director at Oracle

Caroline has 24 years’ experience working across consulting, pre-sales and sales of Applications and Technology, but has always been happiest when applying the technology to a cause.

She established and chaired the Corporate Social Responsibility Board for Oracle UK 2006-2010 managing the teams focused on education, sustainability, and charities such as the Princes Trust, British Heart Foundation, Comic Relief and Cancer Research.

In 2016 she launched the Innovation Showcase at Oracle UK headquarters in Reading as a place to demonstrate the capabilities of emerging technologies.

In 2018 Caroline joined the team working with the World Bee Project applying technology to the plight of the bees.

Location: Peers’ Dining Room, House of Lords

‘The Death of the Gods: The New Global Power Grab’ won the 2019 Transmission Prize. It describes Carl’s ground-breaking journey to track down and expose one of the most important things that shapes, guides and limits each of our lives: power.

The journey brought him face-to-face with face with a fake news merchant in Kosovo, cyber-pranksters in Berlin, hikikormori – ‘the departed’ – in South Korea, who only live online.

Amongst the rolling hills of Berkshire, he met British Army information warriors and in Las Vegas the largest gathering of hackers in the world.

He has gone on a cyber-crime raid with the police, peered into the mechanics of secret algorithms, built a bot to keep the peace on Twitter, lived in a political-technology commune (twice) and bcome involved in a struggle for control of an online assassination market.

He traces how a new, digital form of power has chipped away at the old, familiar places where power used to sit; scaring CEOs, forcing politicians to resign, swallowing up newspapers, eclipsing experts, and pulling down companies.

For centuries, writers and thinkers have used power as a prism through which to view and understand the world at moments of seismic change.

As power escapes from its old bonds, he shows us where it has gone, the shape it now takes and how it touches each of our lives.

…and the rise of power in the digital age.

About our speaker:

Carl Miller – Research Director, CASM at Demos

Carl is the Research Director of the Centre for the Analysis of Social Media (CASM) at Demos.

Carl Miller is an award-winning author and researcher who has thrown himself into some of the most scary, hidden, weird and important parts of the digital age to understand how all of our lives are changing. His work combines data and analysis with immersive, first-hand reporting.

He is particularly interested in how social media is changing society, and how researching it can inform important decisions. This includes:

• Digital politics and digital democracy
• Cybercrime, and the hacking community
• Cyber-bullying, hate crime, misogyny and abuse online
• Information warfare and online disinformation
• ‘Fake news’, digital and citizen journalism
• Automated decision-making, Internet governance and digital addiction
• Building new methods and technology to study social media data

He is the co-founder and Research Director of the Centre for the Analysis of Social Media at Demos the first UK think tank institute dedicated to studying the digital world and is a Visiting Research Fellow at King’s College London.

His debut book, ‘The Death of the Gods: The New Global Power Grab’, an examination of the new centres of power and control in the twenty-first century was published in 2018 by Penguin RandomHouse, and won the 2019 Transmission Prize.

He has written for Wired, New Scientist, the Sunday Times, the Telegraph and the Guardian, appears frequently in the press, and speaks about his work around the world. He researches and writes widely on these issues, including for Wired, New Scientist, the Sunday Times, the Telegraph and the Guardian. He is a Visiting Research Fellow at King’s College London.

Carl’s website is www.carlmiller.co and he Tweets at @carljackmiller.

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Today’s event is kindly hosted by The Lord Lucas. It is a very special event since we will be raising a glass and celebrating the life of Charles T Ross (RIP 3rd November 2018) before we hear from our speaker.

*** Due to circumstances beyond our control the date for this event has changed to Tuesday, 28th May 2019 ***

Is adding ’empathy’ into Artificial Intelligence the secret ingredient to digital transformation, customer centricity, digital ethics and diversity?

In this talk, Minter Dial will recount how a bot got in the way of a romantic evening with his wife, what it means to be empathic as leaders, and why cognitive empathy can solve so many issues in business and start-ups, including how to unleash AI and AGI, giving heartificial empathy to heartificial intelligence.

The leading author in this field, Minter Dial, will speak on the future of empathy in AI and AGI, to hear of a better future through better AI, to be inspired, informed and involved.

Everyone who participates in this dinner will receive a gift from your Chair – a signed copy of Minter’s new book ‘Heartificial Empathy: Putting Heart into Business and Artificial Intelligence’

About our speaker: Minter Dial

Minter Dial is a storyteller, filmmaker, two-time author and an international professional speaker. In particular, Minter is author and producer of the award-winning WWII documentary film and book, The Last Ring Home (2016). The book won the Book Excellence Award 2018 in the category of Biography.

His second book, ‘Futureproof, how to get your business ready for the next’, co-authored with Caleb Storkey, wowed readers in 2017 and won the Business Book Award 2018 in the category of Embracing Change.

His latest book, ‘Heartificial Empathy, Putting Heart into Business and Artificial Intelligence’ came out in November 2018.

Founder of The Myndset Co. and then of the DigitalProof Consultancy, Minter speaks and consults on Branding, New Tech and Digital Transformation, working with major global brands, such as Samsung, Remy Cointreau, Kering and Tencent.

Prior to setting up his own ventures, Minter led a 16-year international career with the L’Oréal Group – including 9 different assignments in France, England, USA and Canada. Among these, Minter was MD Worldwide of REDKEN, then of the Professional Division for the Canadian subsidiary. In his final position at L’Oreal, he was a member of the Executive Committee worldwide, in charge of eBusiness, Business Development and Education.

As we maintain industry simmering with uncertainty and paralysed by an inability to ‘innovate for good, innovate for all’ – particularly in all-things digital – perhaps what we need is a new impetus, new drivers and new processes to free companies that are suffering from ‘trapped-inside’ syndrome?

Nicole Yershon maintains: “It’s very easy to look around and think the world is stacked against you; everywhere you look there’s out-dated systems, and crazy procedures with processes that seem designed to reward the lazy.

“They waste valuable resources and promote the mediocre. If you do nothing you may well spend your entire adult life having the imagination, inspiration and innovation sucked right out of you. You’ve got two choices, you can let it crush you or you can push back and write your own rules.”

Nicole has written some new rules based on 17 years of developing new innovation processes put into practice in her own ‘Innovation Labs’ – they’ve proved successful.

Everyone who participates in this dinner will receive a gift from your Chair – a signed copy of Nicole’s new book ‘Rough Diamond’.

Nicole Yershon, The NY Collective

Nicole Yershon is a maverick, inspiration and the original rough diamond. She is at once a consultant, speaker, judge, mentor, connector and Amazon #1 Best Selling author.

She works on the front line of innovation – bringing organisations kicking and screaming into the 21st Century. In that sense she properly defines disruption. And when that’s done, making it actually happen.

She is rebellious and restless – a true entrepreneurial spirit. She can call on a vast International network of start-ups, entrepreneurs and bleeding edge businesses.

Disruption presents many challenges and opportunities – Nicole turns both into advantages. She is not content unless her clients get impact and return on their investment. It’s always about delivering measurable value to the business.

Nicole is the founder of The NYC and before that the Ogilvy Labs – the dedicated Innovation unit of Ogilvy & Mather Group. Part of WPP Group plc.

Just a few of the clients she has worked with over recent years: Danone, Disruption Magazine, Havas, Amex, IBM, BP, Danone, Go Compare, Unilever, BA, Wetherspoons, Microsoft Ventures, IBM Smartcamp, and Cisco.

Towards Collaborative Human and Machine Intelligence

Innovation is a challenge at every level of industry and in society; real time continuous improvement in innovation is a new paradigm that is being driven by rapid advances in robust, secure and decentralised communication platforms.

New developments embracing understanding the cognitive science of change to inform development of decentralised AI will bring a step-change in our power to inspire, inform, involve and innovate at an enterprise level.

This has led to decentralised AI-based apps for real time continuous improvement in business.

Join us at the Real Time Club on February 19th 2019 to hear from the leader in this field, Katz Kiely, speak on the future of innovation using deep learning decentralised AI-based apps, to hear of a better future, to be inspired, informed and involved.

“new ways of connecting is the only path forward to improving our collective well-being. Katz gets it.”

— Vint Cerf, Father of the Internet and Google’s Chief Internet Evangelist on Katz Kiely

Katz Kiely, CEO & Founder, beep

Katz is an award-winning serial entrepreneur and pioneer. She built the first open innovation platform for HP, re-engineered the architecture of how a UN agency does business and designed a behaviour change platform for Intel that connected mobiles, big screens and data.

She now heads up beep: the Behavioural Enterprise Empowerment Platform. beep is an enterprise-level, decentralised, AI software that empowers employees to innovate for efficiency, effectiveness and productivity.

beep on Radio 4

Decentralising our collective genius

Usually all Real Time Club events are held under the Chatham House Rule, according to which information disclosed during a meeting may be reported by those present, but the source of that information may not be explicitly or implicitly identified. That is, if you repeat something said during a Real Time Club event, don’t say who said it!

On this occasion, we are embracing social media to decentralise our collective genius, to use the limitless sources of innovation we have, where geography – in the universe – does not bind us, and where the bottlenecks of centralisation are removed: A resonant, harmonious Internet of Peoples.

Be inspired through hearing from our esteemed speaker, Robbie Stamp, reflecting on Douglas Adams and his very close association with him and projects around Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy, the nature of perspective, 42, Artificial Intelligence and Rhinoceroses’ Sense of Smell, and much, much more…

Robbie Stamp

Robbie Stamp is a TedX Speaker (Digital Afterlives and a second talk on the nature of grief), a member of the UK All Party Parliamentary Group on Artificial Intelligence (not a politician), and CEO of Bioss International, a consultancy interested in decision making and human judgement, particularly now in relation to machine learning and AI.

Back in 1995, Robbie was a Founder of The Digital Village with the late great Douglas Adams, author of the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.

The Company created the Computer Game Starship Titanic and h2g2.com, the real “earth edition” of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.

Robbie was an Executive Producer of the Disney movie of HHGG and is Chairman of Not Panicking Ltd, once again owns the digital rights to the earth edition and is now imagining a new future for “The Guide”.

He also once produced an aware winning documentary on Climate Change called “Can Polar Bears Tread Water” and wrote Trojan Horses a book about “deception” during the Second World War.

Time’s glory is to calm contending kings,
To unmask falsehood, and bring truth to light,
To stamp the seal of time in aged things,
To wake the morn, and sentinel the night,
To wrong the wronger ‘til he render right.

— The Rape of Lucrece, Shakespeare (1594)

Blockchain: “…is an incorruptible digital ledger of economic transactions that can be programmed to record not just financial transactions but virtually everything of value.” Don & Alex Tapscott, authors ‘Blockchain Revolution’ (2016).

Haydn Jones, co-author of ‘An Executive Guide to Blockchain’ with Maria Grazia Vigliotti, will give us an overview and brief history of Blockchain technology, its use for digital currency development and many other applications over the past decade or so, in his inimitable knowledgeable and humorous style.

Haydn will give us his view on the next 10 years of development of this ingenious technology and how it will potentially benefit and impact us all.

Haydn James, Founder & MD, Blockchain Hub

Haydn has over 20 years’ commercial, operational and transformation experience working for retail and investment banks (UBS/Deutsche Bank), a central bank (the Bank of England), a regulator, (the Financial Services Authority), a global management consultancy firm (A. T. Kearney) and a Japanese technology company (Fujitsu).

He brings depth in terms of operational knowledge, and breadth in terms of sector knowledge.

As to roles, Haydn has held senior operations and technology strategy roles. He has run Cash Management and Funding units, as well as FX and Equities settlement teams, alongside leading projects to re-engineer the underlying platforms.

He has worked in architecturally complex, data-rich environments, grappling with the challenge of reconciling legacy and leading-edge technologies and transforming operating models.

Operationally, he has run large, client sensitive platforms demanding high levels of availability. He has facilitated numerous technology and operational workshops, and presents regularly on fintech,digital, blockchain and digital currencies, most recently presentations in Russia, Saudi Arabia, South Africa, Nigeria and Chinese financial institutions.

He is currently the Founder and Managing Director of Blockchain Hub, a specialist strategy consultancy working on leading edge technologies including digital and blockchain strategies.

Haydn trained as an engineer at Manchester University (First Class), and was called to the English Bar by the Inner Temple. He is a Fellow of the Institute of Engineering and Technology, and Liveryman within the Worshipful Company of Information Technologists.

Or perhaps, “Are we electronic sheep dreaming of rules for the wolves of Silicon Valley?

AI is already making important decisions about our lives, in insurance, healthcare, shopping, politics and government but because we don’t know which decisions they are making let alone why, we are afraid. We don’t want a world where AI confuses men of colour with gorillas, where women find out they are pregnant by algorithms spotting a pattern in their shopping or where our pay is determined by algorithms written by unaccountable geeky white heterosexual cis males… like our after-dinner speaker Dominic Connor.

Dominic Connor

As well as being current President of the Real Time Club, Dominic Connor has done nearly every job in IT, from grunt programmer on a failed AI project at BT, through debugging Microsoft operating system code for IBM, directing the building of a secure wide area network for HM government, lecturing in advanced programming, head of IT in a bank, founder member of the VB User Group, Test Director at PC Magazine, contributor to The Register, City headhunter, vice chair of the Conservative Technology Forum, printing circuit boards for the military and despite his questionable views on fuzzy logic and lambda calculus Queen Mary College felt it had no alternative but to give him a degree in maths and computer science.

Or perhaps, “Will I fall in love with a Chatbot while I’m complaining about my pizza delivery?”

By integrating emotional intelligence – EI – with the existing artificial intelligence, AI is taking a crucial turn on its journey to becoming a transformational technology; however, even the most sophisticated AI technologies lack essential factors like emotional intelligence and the ability to contextualize information as we do.

This is the sole reason why AI has not succeeded in taking over a major aspect of our careers and lives, so, infusing emotions, empathy, and morality into AI is the next milestone technologists wish to accomplish, and a considerable amount of effort is being put in the process. By the year 2020, artificial emotional intelligence is deemed to be a technological reality.

Artificial emotional intelligence is real; companies able to effectively incorporate contextual understanding and empathy into their technologies will become the front-runners in this race to technological excellence. However, they must also be cautious of the social and personal implications of such a huge transition.

Artificial emotional intelligence is real; companies able to effectively incorporate contextual understanding and empathy into their technologies will become the front-runners in this race to technological excellence.

In the next five years, artificial emotional intelligence is projected to grow into a multibillion-dollar industry, completely transforming industries, market research, innovation, R&D, and much more.

However, they must also be cautious of the social and personal implications of such a huge transition.

Our speaker today will describe ‘What is artificial emotional intelligence?’ and how the integration of EI with AI can be beneficial and what the future of artificial emotional intelligence looks like. We’ll also get to question and debate the social, societal and personal issues that will arise from this exciting – perhaps frightening – AI development.

Professor Maja Pantic

Professor Maja Pantic is one of the world’s leading experts in the research on machine understanding of human behaviour including vision-based detection, tracking, and analysis of human behavioural cues like facial expressions and body gestures, and multimodal analysis of human behaviours like laughter, social signals, and affective states.

Professor Pantic studied Mathematics in her native Belgrade, Serbia, but moved to Delft, the Netherlands, in 1992 to study Computer Science. She obtained her BSc, MSc and PhD degrees in Artificial Intelligence in 1995, 1997, and 2001, respectively, from Delft University of Technology, the Netherlands. Until 2005, she was an Assistant/ Associate Professor at Delft University of Technology. In 2006, she joined the Imperial College London, Department of Computing, UK, where she is Professor of Affective & Behavioural Computing and the Head of the iBUG group, working on machine analysis of human non-verbal behaviour.

In 2002, Professor Pantic was awarded a Dutch Research Council Junior Fellowship (NWO Veni) for her early work on automatic facial expression analysis and named one of the 7 best young researchers in the Netherlands in that year. In 2008, she received the very first European Research Council Starting Fellowship for her research on Machine Analysis of Human Naturalistic Behaviour (MAHNOB).

At that time only 2.5% of the applicants received an ERC Fellowship. In 2011, Professor Pantic received BCS Roger Needham Award, awarded annually to a UK based researcher for a distinguished research contribution in computer science within ten years of their PhD.

In 2012, Pantic was named Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers(IEEE) for contribution to automatic human behaviour understanding and affective computing. In 2016, she was named a Fellow of the International Association for Pattern Recognition (IAPR).

In 2016, she was chosen by the journal Nature to present “Machines That Can Read Human Emotions” at the World Economic Forum in Davos. In 2017, she was named “One of Ten Female Innovators To Watch” by the tech magazine WIRED.

Professor Pantic has been appointed as Research Director of the new Samsung AI Centre in Cambridge (SAIC), where she is responsible for the overall research programme and the strategy of the Centre.