Ready for robots?

The robots are coming to get us, or so we are often told by the media. But just how dangerous are they? And given the bad rep that they have, how can we ever trust them? In this talk James Law and Tony Prescott will explore the history of the killer robot, and the dangers posed by the army of ‘service’ robots amassing on our doorstep, as well as showing you how far we have come in creating scientific robots. Can we ever truly trust these machines?

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is among the key scientific achievements of the latter 20th century. Turing's notions on the equivalence of computation and human thought, coupled with the exponentially increasing power of computers, made it natural to dream about computers with human cognitive capabilities. Deep Learning is turning science fiction into science reality at a speed that is not yet fully appreciated. What will this mean for the future of computer science? Will future computers need computer scientists? Will the last computer scientist be a machine? Come to find out more...

Robots are becoming a useful tool in the world, performing tasks that we find dull and uninteresting. This talk looks at application areas for robots in the future, including a brief history of the technology behind Unmanned Aerial Systems (UAS), otherwise known as drones, where intelligence can be applied, how robots can work cooperatively with us so that we don't need to fear the potential of a dystopian future!