5 and 12 December 2024

AI shapes the world around us and is fast becoming integrated into our everyday lives. Join us for a series of digital events offering young people access to guest speakers at the forefront of AI technology. 

Each digital workshop will last 50 minutes with specialist speakers from Massachusetts Institute of Technology [MIT] and Google DeepMind. Expect classroom activities, insight into how our guests use AI in their work and an opportunity for your students to ask questions.

Regina Barzilay will discuss her cancer diagnosis and how she is using AI to support developments in medicine. This session is for students aged 11-18 only.

David Silver’s event is for upper primary [age 7 plus]. SEND schools are welcome. Please note: activities will be aimed at younger students. Teachers should choose sessions they feel are appropriate for their students.

Classes can attend multiple workshops – simply register for the sessions you would like to attend. This programme is free to join thanks to the generosity of the Royal Commission for 1851.

Regina Barzilay – Distinguished Professor for AI and Health, MIT

Regina Barzilay is a School of Engineering Distinguished Professor of AI & Health in the Department of Computer Science and the AI Faculty Lead at MIT Jameel Clinic. She develops machine learning methods for drug discovery and clinical AI. In the past, she worked on natural language processing. Her research has been recognized with the MacArthur Fellowship, an NSF Career Award, and the AAAI Squirrel AI Award for Artificial Intelligence for the Benefit of Humanity. Regina is a member of the National Academy of Engineering, National Academy of Medicine, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

David Silver – Principal Research Scientist, Google DeepMind

David Silver leads the reinforcement learning team at Google DeepMind. He is also a professor at University College London. David’s work focuses on artificially intelligent agents based on reinforcement learning. David led or co-led projects that played Atari games directly from pixels (Nature 2015), defeated a world champion in the game of Go (Nature 2016), learned by itself to defeat the world’s strongest chess, shogi and Go programs (Nature 2017, Science 2018), even without knowledge of the rules (Science 2020), and defeated professional StarCraft players (Nature 2019). He also contributed to AlphaFold, the program that solved the protein folding problem (Nature 2020, Nature 2021). His work has been recognised by the ACM Prize in Computing, Marvin Minsky award, Mensa Foundation Prize, Royal Academy of Engineering Silver Medal, ACM Fellowship and Royal Society Fellowship.

Any questions? Please contact Engineer@big-ideas.org