TeX Talks Schedule

The vast majority of approaches to introducing cultural factors into robotics rely on what is perceived to be a national culture. It has been shown that the oversimplified confounding of culture and nationality results in implicit support for conservative social policies, and the reproduction of cultural stereotypes. However, there are many theories of culture not based solely on nationality. These theories come from different disciplines ranging from psychology, linguistics, anthropology and political science to philosophy, only to name a few. In robotics, there are many knowledge representations, automated reasoning, and machine learning techniques, each of which has a different expressivity, and varying computational capacities that can be harnessed for representing a different interpretation of culture. This talk advocates an epistemic analysis of cultural theories through the lens of AI methods as an essential step for endowing robots with culture. I argue that such an analysis not only allows us to identify which fundamental theories of culture are candidates to be programmed into, or learned by robots, but also provides transparency in how an intelligent robot behaves in different cultural contexts.

This talk will provide an overview of what the PwC Crisis and Resilience team actually does day-to-day, including preparing and supporting organisations to respond to crises like ransomware. We will look look at the ways in which we simulate crises and tailor them to suit the organisation’s priorities and pain points; how different crises impact an organisation’s operations, reputation, and financial stability; how we can help them during a real-life incident; and what we have been doing to support organisations as the cyber and geopolitical landscape continues to change.

Aaron is a developer at Majestic, a Birmingham-based tech company who are kindly providing pizza for TeX Talk attendees. He will be giving us a run down of what modern AI and machine learning is and why the data you put into it is vitally important to avoid getting crap out the other end!

Pizza break!

Martin will give an overview of his research revolving around robotic grasping and manipulation. First, he will take on an industrial robotics point of view, where we usually can exploit the availability of 3d models of the objects we aim to manipulate, but often require high accurancy to allow e.g. assembly operations. Second, he will consider robots in less structured environments, like households, where unknown objects need to be grasped. The main challenges here are the generalisation to various kinds of objects, the gap between simulation and reality and a limited reproducibility of experiments.

CSS alumnus and Kainos grad LikKan will be talking about Amazon Web Services and the pros and cons of the cloud services industry for businesses and individuals.

Come on a magical mystery tour through the world of reverse engineering, where nothing can be trusted, and drones, graphing calculators, broken crypto, broken people, and angry Markov chains are your only friends. We’ll discuss why all security will fail, how your lightbulbs are plotting to kill you, how processors lie to you about powerful they actually are, and why in the future your Fridge will be held hostage by the Albanian Mafia.