Duncan Dollimore, Head of Campaigns, Cycling UK wants to hear our views on local cycle campaigning
Cycling UK has spent the last few months considering how to work with local campaign groups. Duncan is coming to Oxford because he was impressed by the energy at our conference 15 months ago. This is our chance to influence how Cycling UK relates with local groups like Cyclox.

Dung beetles in the British Isles are a vital part of their associated ecosystems but have been historically rather overlooked probably due to their chosen habitat. Now our native dung beetles are finally beginning to get some of the invertebrate limelight due to an emphasis on ecosystem services and a much more environmentally friendly farming future. However we are lacking on a great deal of base data about these vitally important species and surveying is the one of the best ways to get information. This means getting into dung and discovering these unsung heroes

The ecology and history of one of the largest atolls in the world. Aldabra, situated in the South West Indian Ocean, supports the largest population of giant tortoises worldwide. A UNESCO World Heritage Site, it is a stronghold for wildlife in a region that is besieged by threats.

Talk followed by questions and discussion. All welcome

Is competition in the digital economy desirable? Does it currently exist? Is it possible? Is there anything policy can do?

This talk addresses all of these questions and presents the recommendations of the Digital Competition Expert Panel which was chaired by Jason Furman and recently presented its recommendations to the government.

This lecture is being given by social responsibility expert, Professor Andy Westwood – the former President of the OECD’s Forum for Social Innovation and an adviser at the IMF. Andy is Professor of Government Practice and Vice Dean of Humanities at the University of Manchester and a Visiting Professor of Further and Higher Education at the University of Wolverhampton.

The 5th Annual Oxford Business and Poverty Conference will feature a diverse range of speakers addressing the Paradoxes of Prosperity. Sign up here: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/5th-annual-oxford-business-poverty-conference-tickets-57733957822
Hosted at the Sheldonian Theatre, the conference will feature keynotes by:
Lant Pritchett: RISE Research Director at the Blavatnik School of Government, former Senior Fellow at the Center for Global Development
Efosa Ojomo: Global Prosperity Lead and Senior Researcher at the Clayton Christensen Institute
John Hoffmire: Director of Center on Business and Poverty and Research Associate at Kellogg Colleges at Center For Mutual and Employee-owned Business at Oxford University
Ananth Pai: Executive Director, Bharath Beedi Works Pvt. Ltd. and Director, Bharath Auto Cars Pvt
Laurel Stanfield: Assistant Professor of Marketing at Bentley College in Massachusetts
Grace Cheng: Greater China’s Country Manager for Russell Reynolds Associates
Madhusudan Jagadish: 2016 Graduate MBA, Said Business School, University of Oxford
Tentative Schedule:
2:15-2:20 Welcome
2:20-2:50 Efosa Ojomo, co-author of The Prosperity Paradox, sets the stage for the need for innovation in development
2:50-3:20 John Hoffmire, Ananth Pai and Mudhusudan Jagadish explain how the Prosperity Paradox can be used in India as a model to create good jobs for poor women
3:20-3:40 Break
3:40-4:10 Laurel Steinfeld speaks to issues of gender, development and business – addressing paradoxes related to prosperity
4:10-4:40 Grace Cheng, speaks about the history of China’s use of disruptive innovations to develop its economy
4:40-5:15 Break
5:15-6 Lant Pritchett talks on Pushing Past Poverty: Paths to Prosperity
6:30-8 Dinner at the Rhodes House – Purchase tickets after signing up for the conference
Sponsors include: Russell Reynolds, Employee Ownership Foundation, Ananth Pai Foundation and others

Organised by Oxford Civic Society @oxcivicsoc. Government proposals for significant growth in Oxfordshire in coming decades include an Expressway and several new communities. Are these needed or can growth be directed elsewhere? Can growth be ‘intelligent’, leading to prosperity without compromising the quality of life? In the third and final debate to mark the 50th anniversary of Oxford Civic Society, Councillor Ian Hudspeth, Leader of Oxfordshire County Council, and Danny Dorling, Halford Mackinder Professor of Geography in the University of Oxford will contest the issues.. https://www.oxcivicsoc.org.uk/programme/

Dr Larkman is a retired Oxford biologist who has been chairman of OOS for the last 5 years. His main interest is the precipitous decline in the UK’s small, seed-eating farmland birds over the last 50 years.

The ability to accurately identify and interpret Track and Sign rests on a body of traditional knowledge that previous generations of naturalists would have regarded as fundamental. Sadly, now it is largely unknown and untaught, but with the upsurge of Citizen Science, it is perhaps more relevant than ever.

Slime moulds thrive in damp woodlands and normally spread over rotting logs eating bacteria and fungi. They are also unusual in being single giant cells that show remarkably sophisticated behaviour considering their humble form. This talk presents a little vignette of the science behind these curious beasts and how it has led to better understanding of other networked systems, and even the origins of civilisation.

Data-driven micro-targeted campaigns have become a main stable of political strategy. As personal and societal data becomes more accessible, we need to understand how it can be used and mis-used in political campaigns and whether it is relevant to regulate political candidates’ access to data.

This book talk will be followed by a drinks reception and book sale, all welcome

Bernard Tucker Memorial Lecture – Joint with Oxford Ornithological Society

Big data and AI are starting to feature in cancer research today, and will will play an even greater role in the future. Join researchers from Cancer Research UK to discover the technologies and methods they use to help find, prevent and treat cancer, and what big ideas they have for the future.

IF Oxford is operating a Pay What You Decide (PWYD) ticketing system. This works by enabling you to pre-book events without paying for a ticket beforehand. Afterwards, you have the opportunity to pay what you decide you want to, or can afford. If you prefer, you can make a donation to IF Oxford when you book. All funds raised go towards next year’s Festival.

Geographers have long been interested in the spaces brought into being by the internet. In the early days of the Web, digital technologies were seen as tools that could bring a heterotopic cyberspace into being: a place beyond space de-tethered from the material world.

More recent framings instead see digital geographies as always-augmented, hybrid, and ontogenetic: integrally embedded into everyday life.

Against that backdrop, Professor Mark Graham will present findings from three large research projects about digital platforms. First, a large-scale digital mapping project that looks at how digital inequalities can become infused into our urban landscapes. Second, a study about the livelihoods of platform workers in Southeast Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa. Finally, early results from a new action research project (the Fairwork Foundation) designed to improve the quality of platform jobs.

In each case, the talk explores why understanding the ways that platforms command digital geographies is a crucial prerequisite for envisioning more equitable digital futures.

Please register via the link provided. This talk will be followed by a drinks reception, all welcome.

David Miles, former Chief Archaeologist at English Heritage and former Director of the Oxford Archaeological Unit, will be with us here at Blackwell’s to discuss his latest book, The Land of the White Horse: Visions of England.

Synopsis

The White Horse at Uffington is an icon of the English landscape – a sleek, almost abstract figure 120 yards long which was carved into the green turf of the spectacular chalk scarp of the North Wessex Downs in the early first millennium bc. For centuries antiquarians, travellers and local people speculated about the age of the Horse, who created it and why. Was it a memorial to King Alfred the Great’s victory over the heathen Danes, an emblem of the first Anglo-Saxon settlers or a prehistoric banner, announcing the territory of a British tribe? Or was the Horse an actor in an elaborate prehistoric ritual, drawing the sun across the sky? The rich history of this ancient figure and its surroundings can help us understand how people have created and lived in the Downland landscape, which has inspired artists, poets and writers including Eric Ravilious, John Betjeman and J.R.R. Tolkien.

The White Horse itself is most remarkable because it is still here. People have cared for it and curated it for centuries, even millennia. In that time the meaning of the Horse has changed, yet it has remained a symbol of continuity and is a myth for modern times.

This event will take place in the History Department on the second floor. It is free to attend, but please do register to let us know you are coming. For more information call our Customer Service Department on 01865 333 623 or email events.oxford@blackwell.co.uk

Charles Babbage has been called the ‘great-uncle’ of modern computing, a claim that rests simultaneously on his demonstrable understanding of most of the architectural principles underlying the modern computer,band the almost universal ignorance of Babbage’s work before 1970. There has since been an explosion of interest both in Babbage’s devices and the impact they might have had in some parallel history, and in Babbage himself as a man of great originality who had essentially no influence at all on subsequent technological development.

In all this, one fundamental question has been largely ignored: how is it that one individual working alone could have synthesised a workable computer design over a short period, designing an object whose complexity of behaviour so far exceeded that of contemporary machines that it would not be matched for over one hundred years?

Our Leverhulme funded project Notions and notations: Charles Babbage’s language of thought investigated the design methods that Babbage used, and their impact on subsequent design practice. As part of that work we constructed a steam-driven difference engine to Babbage’s outline design.

In this general interest talk, we shall describe some aspects of Babbage’s designs and design methods, and demonstrate the difference engine.

This talk will describe a class of machine learning methods for reasoning about complex physical systems. The key insight is that many systems can be represented as graphs with nodes connected by edges. I’ll present a series of studies which use graph neural networks–deep neural networks that approximate functions on graphs via learned message-passing-like operations– to predict the movement of bodies in particle systems, infer hidden physical properties, control simulated robotic systems, and build physical structures. These methods are not specific to physics, however, and I’ll show how we and others have applied them to broader problem domains with rich underlying structure.

The talk will provide an overview of dragonflies and their life cycles and habitats as well illustrating a number of species that occur in England including those that are currently colonising from the Continent and increasing in numbers.

When the UK joined the EU in 1973 all previous trade barriers with the EU were abolished, which led to a strong intensification of trade with the European continent.

This situation will soon be a thing of the past, however, as new trade barriers will be erected with the withdrawal. Since the food self-sufficiency rate in the UK is particular low newly invoked trade barriers will significantly affect how food is produced and consumed in the UK.

Please register via the link provided.

Lord Sumption will discuss the impact on our constitution and political system of the referendum of 2016 and its aftermath.

Part of the Oxford Martin Lecture Series: ‘Shaping the future’

Warburg Memorial Lecture – Joint with BBOWT
Volunteer-based botanical monitoring has been a mainstay of British and Irish botany for decades, but only recently has a recording scheme for plant communities been established. Dr Pescott outlines the history of this new National Plant Monitoring Scheme, with a particular focus on the challenges and rewards that have been associated with establishing this novel approach in the UK.

A talk from Homeless Oxfordshire about how they strive to be effective and appropriately challenge perceptions, how they are responsive to need and compassion to fellow human beings, and brave enough not to give up on people that society has left behind. This talk is free and open to all.

This talk is delivered by Mackenzie Aspell. Mackenzie is a Senior Fundraiser at Homeless Oxfordshire who believes advocacy to be the most powerful tool for change. Mackenzie also has a background working with mental health charities.

In modern high-tech health care, patients appear to be the stumbling block.

Uninformed, anxious, noncompliant individuals with unhealthy lifestyles who demand treatments advertised by celebrities and insist on unnecessary but expensive diagnostics may eventually turn into plaintiffs. But what about their physicians? About ten years ago, Muir Gray and Gerd Gigerenzer published a book with the subtitle “Envisioning health care 2020”. They listed “seven sins” of health care systems then, one of which was health professionals’ stunning lack of risk literacy. Many were not exactly sure what a false-positive rate was, or what overdiagnosis and survival rates mean, and they were unable to evaluate articles in their own field. As a consequence, the ideals of informed consent and shared decision-making remain a pipedream – both doctors and patients are habitually misled by biased information in health brochures and advertisements. At the same time, the risk literacy problem is one of the few in health care that actually have a known solution. A quick cure is to teach efficient risk communication that fosters transparency as opposed to confusion, both in medical school and in CME. It can be done with 4th graders, so it should work with doctors, too.

Now, in 2020, can every doctor understand health statistics? In this talk, Gerd Gigerenzer will describe the efforts towards this goal, a few successes, but also the steadfast forces that undermine doctors’ ability to understand and act on evidence. Moreover, the last decade has seen two new forces that distract from solving the problem. The first is the promise of digital technology, from diagnostic AI systems to big data analytics, which consumes much of the attention. Digital technology is of little help if doctors do not understand it. Second, our efforts to make patients competent and to encourage them to articulate their values are now in conflict with the new paternalistic view that patients just need to be nudged into better behaviour.

This talk will be followed by a drinks reception, all welcome

Joint event with: The Oxford–Berlin Research Partnership

What happens when new artificial intelligence (AI) tools are integrated into organisations around the world?

For example, digital medicine promises to combine emerging and novel sources of data and new analysis techniques like AI and machine learning to improve diagnosis, care delivery and condition management. But healthcare workers find themselves at the frontlines of figuring out new ways to care for patients through, with – and sometimes despite – their data. Paradoxically, new data-intensive tasks required to make AI work are often seen as of secondary importance. Gina calls these tasks data work, and her team studied how data work is changing in Danish & US hospitals (Moller, Bossen, Pine, Nielsen and Neff, forthcoming ACM Interactions).

Based on critical data studies and organisational ethnography, this talk will argue that while advances in AI have sparked scholarly and public attention to the challenges of the ethical design of technologies, less attention has been focused on the requirements for their ethical use. Unfortunately, this means that the hidden talents and secret logics that fuel successful AI projects are undervalued and successful AI projects continue to be seen as technological, not social, accomplishments.

In this talk we will examine publicly known “failures” of AI systems to show how this gap between design and use creates dangerous oversights and to develop a framework to predict where and how these oversights emerge. The resulting framework can help scholars and practitioners to query AI tools to show who and whose goals are being achieved or promised through, what structured performance using what division of labour, under whose control and at whose expense. In this way, data work becomes an analytical lens on the power of social institutions for shaping technologies-in-practice.

Identification, ecology and conservation of amphibians found in Oxfordshire.

To enhance our natural environment, we need to put the environment
back into the heart of the economy. Using natural capital as the
guiding principle, we can leave a better environment for future
generations, implementing a bold 25 year environment plan, thereby
restoring rivers, greening agriculture, putting nature back into towns
and cities, and restoring the uplands and our marine ecosystems. We
can put the carbon back into the soils, encourage natural carbon
sequestration, rebuild our biodiversity and improve our mental and
physical health. This is the prize – a Green and Prosperous Land – and
it is much more economically efficient than the dismal proposed of
business-as-usual and allowing the declines of the last century to
continue.

In this talk Professor Gina Neff, Oxford Internet Institute and Professor Ian Goldin, Oxford Martin School, will examine publicly known “failures” of AI systems to show how this gap between design and use creates dangerous oversights and to develop a framework to predict where and how these oversights emerge. The resulting framework can help scholars and practitioners to query AI tools to show who and whose goals are being achieved or promised through, what structured performance using what division of labour, under whose control and at whose expense. In this way, data work becomes an analytical lens on the power of social institutions for shaping technologies-in-practice.

In 2020, Governments around the world made the decision to lock down their country to help stop the spread of Covid-19. This led to teaching, meetings, conferences, contacting family and more being conducted from home via the internet.

How did this affect data being used across the world? Did the systems already in place stand-up to the pressure? Was our privacy compromised. As companies and families grapple with how much data they need, we find ourselves in the midst of these important moral deliberations. The pandemic is revealing just how complex the data inter-dependencies are when we need to respond effectively.

Join Sir Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web, and Professor Sir Nigel Shadbolt, leading researcher in Artificial Intelligence (AI), as they discuss what we have learnt and in what new directions we need to head in the world of data architecture.

On the 30th November it was announced that the Artificial Intelligence computer programme AlphaFold had made a decisive breakthrough in the determination of the 3-D structures of proteins.

The announcement was immediately hailed as one of the major scientific advances of the decade.

Why is it important to understand the 3-D structures of protein, why are they difficult to construct, and what is the nature of AlphaFold’s advance? Why is this so exciting and what further advances in medicine and the other biosciences may result? To find out, join a conversation between Yvonne Jones, Director, Cancer Research UK Receptor Structure Research Group and Charles Godfray, Director, Oxford Martin School, who will explore these fascinating issues.