Zoubin Ghahramani and Adrian Weller are involved with the Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence which was launched this week.

Professor Stephen Hawking gave a widely reported speech at the launch.

Zoubin, who introduced the talk, is the Deputy Director of the Centre.

Adrian is an Executive Fellow at the centre and is leading the project on Trust and Transparency, which is part of his general interest in the social implications of AI.

Professor Magaret Boden, who also spoke, said:

AI is hugely exciting. Its practical applications can help us to tackle important social problems, as well as easing many tasks in everyday life. And it has advanced the sciences of mind and life in fundamental ways. But it has limitations, which present grave dangers given uncritical use. CFI aims to pre-empt these dangers, by guiding AI development in human-friendly ways.

Prof. Zoubin Ghahramani has spoken to the BBC world service Forum radio show on the question: “Do we need artificial intelligence?”. The full show can be found here.

Shane Gu was involved with a Google shared experience robotics project this summer. The project was written up on Google’s research blog and in the MIT technology review. Shane is the first author on one of the corresponding papers which can be found here.