Viewing archives for

Artificial intelligence entrepreneur Demis Hassabis has been made a Commander of the Order of the British Empire for “services to science and technology”.

The announcement came in the same week as an interview with Demis (OE 1988–1990) by Prince Harry was broadcast on BBC Radio Four’s flagship Today programme, which the prince was guest-editing.

Demis is the co-founder and chief executive of DeepMind, which recently announced that its supercomputer program, AlphaGo, had taught itself to become the world’s best player of the ancient strategy game, Go, without any guidance from human beings.

Responding to news of the CBE, he told the BBC he was “very proud” of his team at DeepMind. “This is recognition of the immense contribution they have already made to the world of science and technology, and I’m excited about the potential for many more breakthroughs and societal benefit in the years ahead,” he said.

DeepMind was acquired by Google in 2014 for a reported £400 million. Demis told Prince Harry that DeepMind’s workforce has gone from around 100 at that time to more 700 today, adding that there are over 60 nationalities and more than 400 PhDs inside the company.

“It’s really the biggest collection of brainpower anywhere in the world on this topic,” he said. “And it’s happening right here in King’s Cross so I’m very proud of that.”

Topics broached by the prince included the ethical implications of AI and what DeepMind is doing to ensure that the benefits of AI extend to all humanity. He also asked him why he has decided to keep DeepMind in London.

Demis said: “I’m a proud born-and-bred Londoner. I love London and Britain and I think that I have always believed that we have top talent here. We have world-leading universities and it just requires, I think, the ambition and the drive to actually really try and create a deep technology company like Deepmind. And I always felt it could be done in London.

“But I was told at the beginning when we were starting up that we were crazy and that we should go to Silicon Valley and that that was the only place that you could build these types of companies. I think we proved that wrong. Even when we got bought by Google, I insisted that we would stay in London and build the research team here.”

DeepMind has two floors in Google’s London headquarters, as well as smaller offices in California and Canada.

With global competition for AI talent fierce, DeepMind’s hiring frenzy has not come cheap. The company spent £104.8 million on “staff costs and other related costs” last year, according to a document filed with Companies House in October, reported Sam Shead, of American finance and business website, Business Insider.

The website added that DeepMind made a loss of £164 million in total in 2016, a significant increase on the £54 million loss it posted in 2015. However, the company brought in revenue for the first time in 2016, recording a turnover of £40 million. The turnover relates to DeepMind’s projects with Google.

The School’s Christmas food and clothing collection has brought in a bumper amount, capping a successful year of support for local and international charities.

Every December, QE gathers food and clothing for the Chipping Barnet Food Bank and for Homeless Action in Barnet respectively. In 2017, this was overseen by Vice-Captains Abbas Adejonwo and Adam Chong, of Year 13, in the final weeks of their term of office, and by Physics teacher Georgina Garfield.

The December collections are only one part of QE’s wider charity activities. These include fundraising for the long-established Sai School Appeal in support of a village school in south-west India – which made some £3,000 this year – as well as the House charity events, which together have raised about £350 for the QE charity of the year, Orbis.

Headmaster Neil Enright said: “In the festive season – a season characterised by goodwill on the one hand and by excess on the other – it is important to remember those less fortunate than ourselves and to do what we can to help those in need. ‘Service unto others’ is a key part of the School’s ethos, and it is good to see this in action through student-led charitable activities at Christmas and throughout the School year.”

Pupils had a key role in establishing the food bank collection, which has been running for a number of years. Boys continue to play an important part in promoting and organising it. The collection fulfils a dual function, supporting those in need through providing them with essential items, while also raising awareness of their plight.

This year, Abbas and Adam delivered a poster campaign and used form ‘reps’ and assemblies to help spread the message. Considerably more was donated to the two December collections this year than last, with clothing making up the bulk of the donations.

Adam said that his involvement in charity work through the year has been very rewarding. He found his work in the selection process through which Orbis became QE charity of the year especially enlightening. He was involved in choosing a shortlist of thee charities, which were then voted on by the whole School population. “We had to look in great detail at a range of charities. We wanted to focus on those that might otherwise not get so much attention and support. Orbis does important work providing access to eye-care procedures across the globe, particularly in the developing world.”

The House events in support of Orbis included a Guess the number of sweets in the jar competition and events based around being blind or partially-sighted such as Blind penalty kicks and Blind Pictionary.

QE’s support for the Sri Sathya Sai English Medium School in Kerala dates back to 2002. Its main target is to secure sufficient sponsorship to support the equivalent of a Queen Elizabeth’s form of 30 pupils throughout their full-time education in Kerala.

A local man who almost died from anorexia as a teenager, but has now successfully recovered, gave a brutally honest account of his experiences to Year 9.

In his first-ever talk to a school audience, Jack Jacobs told the QE boys how the eating disorder almost claimed his life, before he took the important step of asking for help and then fought his way back to health.

Having decided he wanted to make a positive difference to others and help bring about positive change, he is now establishing a foundation, No Limits, to help people reach their full potential.

Headmaster Neil Enright said: “Jack’s was an inspiring story that clearly engaged the boys and got them thinking. It was shocking to hear how bad things got, but he showed how, with resilience and perseverance, even in the most trying of circumstances you can turn things around and make a success of yourself.”

Jack was invited to QE because of the general recognition that anorexia is a growing problem among teenage boys nationally, an increasing number of whom are afflicted by body-image issues that lead to them not eating properly or to over-exercising. Eating disorders and body dysmorphia are both addressed in QE’s new Mental Health and Wellbeing Policy.

Although not a former QE pupil, Jack comes from the local area. He told the Year 9 boys that despite playing rugby and cricket, he was a little “chubby” at school and that his fellow pupils and even some teachers indulged in name-calling and labelled him “fat”.

When he and his family moved to a new house on a long road, he took the opportunity to lose weight by running up and down that road. Determined to get in shape, he “ran and swam and then ran and swam”. He lost two-and-a-half stone in three months at the age of 14, yet the name-calling continued.

He therefore decided to run in a mini-marathon, driven on by teachers who had told him “you can’t run”. They were quickly proved wrong when he competed at Lea Valley with far more experienced runners and came in the top ten. He was scouted for a running club and emerged as a very strong runner, as evidenced by his 5k time of just 18 minutes.

He was, he told the boys, motivated by a desire to prove others wrong, so he started doing all the things people said he was not capable of doing. But he became fixated on fitness, food and counting calories. In short, he was starving himself.

Even at the time, he recognised that his behaviour was becoming unhealthy, and yet, he said, that was almost the point: “I wanted to look ill. If my dad said: ‘You look well today,’ it would upset me and make me want to lose more weight. I was a zombie, focused on numbers: the numbers on the scales would determine my day.”

Eventually Jack broke down and sought the assistance of others. “Asking for help is not weak, it’s strong – it shows you are self-aware, which is really important in life,” he told Year 9.

He ended up in hospital, with a heartbeat of 33 bpm and a blood pressure of 70/40 – readings that indicate a patient is close to death. The doctors took him up to another ward in the hospital where other teenagers were being fed by tubes because they wouldn’t eat. Seeing this, he made the decision to “grow”, that is, to get better.

As he began his recovery, he again had people telling him he could not do certain things, including doctors advising him not to take his GCSEs, but just to focus on eating. Jack feels the system treats people as “numbers”, rather than as individuals, but he believes “if you have self-respect, that is all you need and you can do it”.

A few months after being in hospital, he sat his GCSEs and achieved an A* grade, 8 As and a couple of Bs. “Don’t let people tell you that you can’t do things,” he said.

Jack stressed the merits of talking oneself into a better position: “What you say to yourself is what you become.” Having not been physically or mentally well enough to go anywhere for about a year, he then went to college. He started saying he had recovered (even doing so for a programme on ITV) – and then felt that he had to live up to this.

He also began saying that he would be working for a leading firm of accountants in two years’ time on their school-leaver programme. He duly achieved this, getting through a seven-stage interview process. However, once there, he decided that his money-motivated colleagues were not the sort of people he really wanted to be working with – he wanted to work for positive change. It was important, he concluded, that we all ask ourselves: “What do we want to be remembered for?” People were, after all, remembered not for their money, but for who they really were, he said.

One of the UK’s leading human rights lawyers gave QE boys some thought-provoking insights into the complex area of British attitudes towards discrimination and the law.

Rebecca Hilsenrath, who is both Chief Executive and Chief Legal Officer to the Equality and Human Rights Commission, was a guest speaker at QE’s Politics Society. Her son, Adam Hilsenrath, (OE 2008–2015) is a former School Captain who won a place to read History at Oxford.

The commission, which is Great Britain’s national equality body, exists to “make Britain fairer…by safeguarding and enforcing the laws that protect people’s rights to fairness, dignity and respect”, according to its website.

Headmaster Neil Enright said: “I am most grateful to Rebecca for visiting us. The boys were clearly very engaged in the discussion that ensued and it is a great strength of the QE community that we can draw on people like her to come in and provide their knowledge, advice and inspiration to the boys. Her insights on the importance of voluntary work and of generally contributing to society accord fully with the tenets of our School mission.”

Ms Hilsenrath began her talk with a story of hill-climbing in Wales, where she thought she could see the top but realised that each time she got there, she had been deceived by the angle and there was in fact much further to go. A similar situation obtained with human rights in the UK, she said.

As the country of Magna Carta, Britain has “a fantastic tradition of leading on human rights and the development of law,” (which is why people in Brussels are so devastated at Brexit, she added.) The UK has done well in dealing with ‘direct discrimination’, but there are still many challenges around ‘indirect discrimination’. This results when groups are adversely affected by factors which, at face value, are not about them, but which particularly affect them. These groups often comprise those who do not enjoy high levels of public sympathy, such as gypsies or transgender people. Even with indirect discrimination, the picture is not altogether negative: there have been significant improvements for some groups as a result of cultural change, including much greater acceptance and equality.

The public, Ms Hilsenrath said, are generally supportive of single-issue matters of equality, but “people are scared of the big picture” and are negative on the advancement of human rights as a whole. There may, she believes, be some correlation between this and periods when Government finances are especially stretched: “People tend to be nastier to each other at these times, to hit out. Unhappiness can be manifested as xenophobia.”

The other important context is the continued prevalence of terrorism in the public and political discourse. The 9/11 attacks happened soon after the Human Rights Act came into full force in the UK. “Debate about human rights has been wrapped up in discussions of terrorism ever since,” she said. The public’s focus has often been on asking whether the country is being too lenient on terrorists, and there is a corresponding reluctance to grant terrorists rights: “It is much easier to give rights to those we like.”

Ms Hilsenrath argued, however, that it is possible both to have human rights and to implement robust measures to deal with terror, since many rights are “qualified” in relation to matters such as national security.

The Equality and Human Rights Commission’s last report two years ago showed big improvements for many, but made clear that there was still work to do. Some groups seemed to have fared worse than others as a result of policy and tax changes. She clarified the organisation’s mission: “We are not aiming for total equality – trying to make two people the same – instead we are after equality of opportunity.”

The boys asked a host of questions covering everything from her views on communism as a tool for trying to make society more equal and whether there should be a codified British Bill of Rights, to whether income inequality is necessarily a bad thing and whether some rights are more important than others.

She also provided some more general advice about working in law and public life, explaining that changing jobs can be a way to progress, as it helps you get a rounded experience.

She stressed the importance of voluntary work and encouraged boys to do as much of it as possible. Helping others was a key theme here: “Everybody needs to do what they can for other people out of love, to reach out and make a difference. Success in life is about being ‘the best you’, and to do that you need to do more than the day job.”

Sixty-two boys from Year 11 headed off to the West End to hear from some of the country’s most engaging Mathematics speakers – including one who hit the headlines with her investigation into Ryanair’s seat allocation policy.

The Maths Inspiration Show at the Piccadilly Theatre featured interactive lectures on a wide range of mathematical topics. It was hosted by Matt Parker, who has the unique distinction of holding the prestigious title of London Mathematical Society Popular Lecturer and of having a sold-out comedy show at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe.

Afterwards, the boys were full of praise for the event. Viraj Mehta said: “I found the lectures intellectually stimulating whilst still being humorous and interactive. I especially enjoyed the variety of topics of maths and how they link to everyday life.” For his part, Joshua Han said the show was “much more interesting and entertaining than I expected.”

Among the speakers were Jennifer Rogers, who gained a PhD at Warwick and is now a research fellow in the Department of Statistics at the University of Oxford. She was widely quoted this summer when she worked with the BBC’s Watchdog programme on investigating Ryanair’s claims that it allocated seats to people who had not paid to reserve seat on an entirely random basis. All the people in her sample were allocated the dreaded middle seats – and the chances of that happening were smaller than the chance of winning the National Lottery jackpot, she found. In her lecture, she explained how she had made the calculations using simple probability and asked the audience to consider whether this meant Ryanair’s claim to random allocation was invalid.

Mathematician and juggler Colin Wright received his maths doctorate in 1990 from Cambridge University. He looked at the importance of spotting patterns – showing that juggling tricks are, in fact, patterns with mathematical properties – but warned that patterns are not always as predictable as they seem.

Comedian and science communicator Steve Mould showed the audience his favourite shape, the Reuleaux triangle – a shape formed from the intersection of three discs. He also gave his name to the Mould Effect: his clip of a 50-meter string of metal balls briefly and mysteriously flowing upwards before plunging to the ground caused a Youtube sensation in 2013.