Talk by Dr Hisham Al-Assam at St Paul’s Catholic School

Dr Hisham Al-Assam was invited again to give a talk at St Paul’s Catholic School, Milton Keynes, on 11 May 2016, as part of their Public Understanding of Science lectures.

The aim of the talk titled “Artificial Intelligence: Can Machines Outperform Humans?” was to provide the audience with a general non-technical introduction to machine learning. Dr Al-Assam explained the general concepts behind different machine learning approaches, and highlighted the main types of problems that can be solved using such approaches by presenting real examples based on some of the latest research projects being conducted at the Department of Applied Computing. He then tried to address some difficult questions such as: “what can computers really do?” and “is Artificial Intelligence really scary?”.

The talk was attended by an audience with a very broad background ranging from pupils who will be studying science at GCSE and A-level to professional scientists.