Conversation with Gillian Tett, the new Provost of King’s

WHEN: Thursday 12 October 2023
6 pm – 6.30 pm: Wine reception in Chetwynd Room
6.30 pm – 7.30 pm: Talk in Keynes Lecture Theatre
WHERE: King's College, Cambridge

Gillian Tett is the new Provost of Kings and was a chair of the editorial board and editor-at-large, US of the Financial Times. She writes weekly columns, covering a range of economic, financial, political and social issues and co-founded Moral Money, the FT sustainability newsletter.

She has been named Columnist of the Year (2014), Journalist of the Year (2009) and Business Journalist of the Year (2008) in the British Press Awards, and received three awards from America's Society of Business and Economic Writers Awards. She is a best-selling author and received the Royal Anthropological Institute Marsh Award and the American Anthropological Association President Medal for her work in social science.

Tett’s past roles at the FT have included US managing editor, assistant editor, capital markets editor, deputy editor of the Lex column, Tokyo bureau chief, and a reporter in Russia and Brussels.

In Conversation with Jay Clayton, former Chair of the Securities and Exchange Commission

WHEN: Monday 9 October 2023
5.30 pm – 6.00 pm: Wine reception in Chetwynd Room
6.00 pm – 7.00 pm: Talk in Keynes Lecture Theatre
WHERE: King's College, Cambridge
ZOOM LINK: click here to join online

For over twenty-five years, Jay Clayton has advised domestic and international financial institutions, market participants and government officials on various significant strategic matters and policy issues, including the world’s second-largest IPO, various cross-border mergers in the telecom, airline and shipping sectors, the design and application of the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP), the design and application of the mortgage relief programs arising out of the $25 billion “robo-signing” settlement, and the U.S. government response to the COVID-19 pandemic.

A Conversation with the Godfather of AI

You are warmly invited to join the next E-Lab event with King's (KC 1967) very own Geoffrey Hinton, the Godfather of AI.
WHEN: Friday 26 May 2023
5.30 pm – 6.00 pm: Wine reception in Chetwynd Room
6.00 pm – 7.00 pm: Interview followed by Q&A in Keynes Lecture Theatre
WHERE: King's College, University of Cambridge

WATCH: watch the recording of the event, below or here.

SPEAKERS' BIO:

Geoffrey Hinton (KC 1967, Natural Sciences)

Dubbed the British "godfather of AI" and a pioneer of deep learning, Geoff until recently divided his time between work as an academic at the University of Toronto, in the Department of Computer Science (Emeritus Professor) and a role at Google, where he was the part-time Vice President and Engineering Fellow, managing Brain Team Toronto, now a part of the Google Brain Team. 

Earlier this month, Geoff announced his resignation from Google in a statement to the New York Times.

Geoff came up to King's to read Psychology and during his studies realised that scientists didn't really understand the brain.  How neurons learned or computed could not be explained and he has spent his career trying to better understand these processes.  From Cambridge he went on to the University of Edinburgh to pursue a doctorate in artificial intelligence, followed by postdoc appointments at the University of Sussex and the University of California San Diego.  Geoff subsequently spent five years in the Computer Science Department at Carnegie-Mellon University, before making the move to Toronto where he has been ever since, apart from a three-year spell at UCL (1998-2001) where he set up the Gatsby Computational Neuroscience Unit. 

Geoff was one of the researchers who introduced the backpropagation algorithm and the first to use backpropagation for learning word embeddings. His other contributions to neural network research include Boltzmann machines, distributed representations, time-delay neural nets, mixtures of experts, variational learning and deep learning.  His research group in Toronto made major breakthroughs in deep learning that revolutionized speech recognition and object classification.

 A co-founder of the Vector Institute for Artificial Intelligence, Geoff has received numerous awards, including the 2018 Turing Award (received jointly with two colleagues), as well as featuring in the 2016 Wired 100 list of global influencers.  He has been awarded honorary doctorates by the universities of Sussex and Edinburgh.

Read more about Geoffrey in the recent NY Times article.

Second King's E-Lab Annual Nobel Prize Lecture by Joseph E. Stiglitz

Friday 21 April; 5.00 pm – 6.00 pm: Lecture followed by Q&A in Lecture Theatre 2, Judge Business School
Webinar recording: view the recording below or here

About our speaker:

Joseph E. Stiglitz is an American economist and a professor at Columbia University. He is also the co-chair of the High-Level Expert Group on the Measurement of Economic Performance and Social Progress at the OECD, and the Chief Economist of the Roosevelt Institute. Stiglitz was awarded the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in 2001 and the John Bates Clark Medal in 1979. He is a former senior vice president and chief economist of the World Bank and a former chair of the U.S. Council of Economic Advisers. In 2000, Stiglitz founded the Initiative for Policy Dialogue, a think tank on international development based at Columbia University. In 2011 Stiglitz was named by Time magazine as one of the 100 most influential people in the world. Known for his pioneering work on asymmetric information, Stiglitz's research focuses on income distribution, climate change, corporate governance, public policy, macroeconomics and globalization. He is the author of numerous books including, most recently, People, Power, and Profits, Rewriting the Rules of the European Economy, and Globalization and Its Discontents Revisited.