Friday 24 January 2025 12:00pm to 1:30pm
Seminar Room, Civil Engineering Building, University of Cambridge
About
Kicking off the Lent term in style, the DRF Lunchtime Clinic is delighted to be joined by Clare Hall Vice President, Prof. Andrew Blake, FREng FRS, a pioneer in the development of the theory and algorithms that make it possible for computers to behave as seeing machines. Prof Blake's talk is entitled, Self-driving taxis coming to roads near you?
Talk Abstract
Self-driving has been one of the big challenges of AI, ever since a team from Stanford aced the DARPA challenge in 2005. There have been many predictions of its imminent commercial deployment. But the technology has proved to be far harder to bring to commercial reality than anyone realised. Billions of dollars have been invested, and several substantial companies have given up, leaving Google with limited commercial services in California and Arizona, and Baidu operating in China. Perhaps this is not surprising because AI has no track record in safety critical systems, as this clinic will explore.
Prof Andrew Blake
Andrew Blake, FREng FRS is a pioneer in the development of the theory and algorithms that make it possible for computers to behave as seeing machines. Following an election by the Fellowship, Andrew became Vice-President of Clare Hall in August 2024.
His interests are primarily in automating the analysis of images and tracking the movement of objects in 3D scenes. His career has been divided between academia – as junior faculty in Edinburgh in the 1980s, and later in Oxford as Professor of Engineering Science and Fellow of Exeter College. At the turn of the millennium he moved to Cambridge to join Microsoft’s newly established European research lab. He became Lab Director (2010-15) winning, with his team, the Silver and the Gold medals of the Royal Academy of Engineering for research and technology for 3D machine vision. He was inaugural Director of the Alan Turing Institute (2015-18) and established Samsung’s European AI lab in Cambridge (2018-22). He is a consultant in Artificial Intelligence, and has advised major European companies, a variety of startups. He mentors numerous budding scientists and engineers. He received honorary doctorates from the Universities of Sheffield and Edinburgh in 2013, and was elected an Honorary Fellow of Exeter College, Oxford in 2024.