You may love social media, but does it love you back? Explore cyber social networks
through some of the most popular platforms. Jason Nurse will highlight the range of
advantages and risks of maintaining a digital presence, especially as platforms begin
to integrate with the Internet-of-Things. Most importantly, Jason provides tips for how
you can protect yourselves and your families online.
Jason R.C. Nurse is a Research Fellow in Computer Science at the University of Oxford pursuing novel approaches to maintain organisational cybersecurity. Additionally he invstigates creative ways to identify and address the security and privacy risks that individuals face in cyberspace. Find him online @jasonnurse

From mobile phones to hearing aids, microphones are very common, yet their designs still have significant drawbacks. Could nature play a role in improving their quality? Engineer Rob Malkin will show how studying insects with fascinating hearing organs could hold the key to helping us build bio-inspired acoustic devices.

Rob Malkin is a senior research assistant at the University of Bristol working in acoustics and is interested in sound and sensing within insects and mammals.
This talk was awarded the annual Isambard Kingdom Brunel Award Lecture by the British
Science Association. The British Science Association’s Awards Lectures on tour is
supported by 3M.

Meet the authors of the ‘Very Short Introduction’ series of books.
Modern materials and computer technology allow telescopes to range from large Earth-based optical telescopes and radio arrays linking up across continents, to space-based
telescopes capturing the Universe in infrared, ultraviolet, X-rays, and gamma rays. Discover how all of them peer back in time and owe their development to Galileo’s observations of the familiar moons of Earth and Jupiter.

Geoff Cottrell is a Fellow of the Royal Astronomical Society. He began his career as
a radio astronomer at Cambridge, observing colliding galaxies, and later worked on magnetically confined plasmas that are hotter than the centre of the Sun.

Science is a universal and global endeavour with developments shared and interpreted among cultures, across language and throughout history.
Witness the story of science in both East and West from antiquity to the Enlightenment that effortlessly translates the work of ancient Mediterranean, Chinese, Islamic and Christian scholars.
This event will explore why understanding the history of science as a human endeavour matters so much to the way we live and think in the modern world.

Iwan Rhys Morus is Professor of History at Aberystwyth University working on the project Unsettling Scientific Stories: Expertise, Narrative and Future Histories. He has drawn on collaborators from across the globe to produce the first ever fully illustrated global history of science, from Aristotle to the atom bomb – and beyond.

‘Social Media and the New Language of Politics’

Professor Massimiliano Demata, St Cross alumnus, DPhil English Language & Literature, 1994

Digital communication has revolutionised politics. The importance of political information and propaganda spread on new media has outgrown that of traditional media. The elections of Barack Obama (called by many “the Facebook President”) and Donald Trump (“the Twitter President”) are seen as evidence of the influence played by social media in mobilising the electorate. If the media have changed (and are continually changing), so verbal and visual modes of expression within political communication. Elaborating on the analytical perspectives of Critical Discourse Analysis (including Critical Multimodal Discourse Analysis), Prof. Demata will discuss some of the linguistic and non-linguistic strategies employed by American politicians in the new media environment.

Massimiliano Demata is Assistant Professor of English Language and Translation at the University of Bari, Italy. He took his DPhil in English at St Cross College, Oxford in 1999 and was a Fulbright Research Scholar at Yale University (1999) and Indiana University (2014). In 2008 he published his monograph, Representations of War and Terrorism. The Ideology and Language of George W. Bush. He has published extensively on the language of British and American media and politics, Computer-mediated communication and translation and ideology. His current research focuses on social media and Multimodality in the context of American politics.

HOW we fund impact as important as what we fund?

What’s new in INNOVATIVE FINANCING using technology to allow investors to match their risk, return and impact preferences with specific investments and portfolios.

Oxford Impact Investments, together with Oxford Futurists & Oxford Women in Consulting are proud to present our speaker who’s come all the way from Cape Town, South Africa:

Ms. Aunnie Patton Power
Founder, Intelligent Impact
Associate Fellow, Oxford University Bertha Centre for Social Innovation

Intelligent Impact was founded to explore how to harness Artificial Intelligence / Machine Learning to help solve one of the intractable problems in the social impact / impact finance fields: how to access information that is reliable and actionable. Aunnie has advised on Innovative Finance projects including developing a South African Impact Investing National Advisory Board, a Green Investment Bank, Social Impact Bonds / Development Impact Bonds, a Green Outcomes Funds and others.

Venue @Christ Church College Lecture Room 2

Driverless cars are hitting the road, powered by artificial intelligence; robots can climb stairs, open doors, win Jeopardy, analyse stocks, work in factories, find parking spaces and advise oncologists. In the past, automation was considered a threat to low-skilled labour. Now, many high-skilled functions, including interpreting medical images, doing legal research, and analysing data, are within the skill sets of machines. How can higher education prepare students for their professional lives when professions themselves are disappearing?

Join Northeastern University’s President Joseph Aoun in conversation as he discusses new ways to educate the next generation of university students to invent, to create, and to discover – to fill needs in society that even the most sophisticated artificial intelligence agent cannot.

There will be a drinks reception and book signing following the talk, all welcome

Art has a bad reputation. It is elitist, exclusive and difficult for the wider public to access. But with an increased emphasis on creativity and its role in the ‘knowledge’ economy, perhaps art can contribute more to our lives than we currently realise.

On 17 January, we are delighted to be joined by our panellists speaking on the topic of making art more accessible to everyone.

Historically speaking, what have been the factors that have made the art world difficult to access?
Have these barriers been lifted with the advent of digital technology?
Currently, some consider the arts to be ‘soft subjects’. What can we do to ensure that this perception changes?
On the panel –

Paul Hobson has been the Director of Modern Art Oxford since September 2013. Paul read History at the University of Oxford and completed post-graduate studies in aesthetics and contemporary visual theory. Working for more than twenty years in the art world, Paul joined the gallery as Director following senior roles at the Contemporary Art Society, The Showroom, the Serpentine Gallery and Royal Academy of Arts in London.

Natasha Arselan is the CEO and founder of AucArt, the world’s first online auction house specialising in early career contemporary art. It provides a platform for contemporary art produced by artists in their final year of a BA or MA up until three years out of art school. Prices are immediately visible, with its ‘Buy Now’ capped feature, lifting the veil on an otherwise opaque art system. Unlike the traditional 50 percent commission structure that galleries offer, artists in the AucArt network benefit by receiving 70 percent of the final price.

Laura Molloy is a graduate researcher at the Ruskin School of Art and the Oxford Internet Institute. Building on her previous academic research at the University of Glasgow, Laura focuses on how artists use the internet to support their practice. She looks specifically at the artistic and economic value of the internet in the working practices of today’s artists.

The panel will be moderated by Cyrus Mahboubian, a British-Iranian artist known for his contemplative approach to photography and his continued use of analogue materials, especially polaroid. His work has been exhibited in solo and group shows in the UK and abroad.

Welcome to the Lincoln Leads Seminar Series 2018.

The third seminar in the series explores the question:
How is Technology Shaping the Future?

Tickets are free, but must be booked in advance. All welcome.

Panel:
Dr. Paul Stavrinou (Fellow at Lincoln College, Oxford)
Nicola Shaw CBE (Executive Director, UK National Grid)
Holly Hathrell (DPhil. Chromosome & Developmental Biology)

When: Thursday, 1st February, 5.45 – 7pm. Wine Reception from 5pm
Where: Oakeshott Room, Lincoln College, Turl St, Oxford
Chair: Xanita Saayman (DPhil in Molecular Cell Biology)
Organiser: Paul Stephens, MCR Academic Representative ( paul.stephens@lincoln.ox.ac.uk )

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The Lincoln Leads Seminar Series 2018 takes place on Thursday evenings during Hilary term at Lincoln College, Oxford. Each panel features an Alumnus/na, a Fellow, and a Student of the College, who will respond to a topical question linked to their research or professional experience. Following a wine reception at 5pm, each seminar will start at 5.45pm, culminating in a lively Q&A session. We have a fantastic group of panellists scheduled for the series, who aim to invite non-specialist audiences into their spheres of expertise. We therefore hope that you are eager to join them in conversation, and learn more about the exciting and diverse research connected to Lincoln.

Please see below for further details of our speakers:

Dr Paul Stavrinou is a Fellow of Lincoln College and Associate Professor in Photonics at the Department of Engineering Science. Initially trained at Marconi Instruments, as a communications engineer, he completed a BEng(Hns) in Electronic Engineering at what was then the Polytechnic of the South Bank. His PhD research was undertaken at University College London, through a Collaborative Award in Science and Engineering and, following this, he held postdoctoral positions at University College London, the University of Oxford and Imperial College London. Dr Stavrinou’s research interests span the development of materials (organic and inorganic) for photonic applications and optoelectronic devices, such as lasers, solar cells and electro-absorption modulators; the common themes all involve light-matter interactions and the flow or routing of radiation within structures.

Nicola Shaw is the UK Executive Director of the National Grid. She graduated with a BA in Modern History and Economics from Lincoln College, Oxford and completed an MSc in Transport from MIT. Nicola has held senior positions in many regulatory and operational organisations, including at the Strategic Rail Authority, the Office of the Rail Regulator and at FirstGroup PLC, with further posts at Halcrow, the World Bank and London Transport. Before joining the National Grid, she was the CEO at HS1 for five years, reporting to the UK Government on the future structure and financing of Network Rail, which culminated in the publication of the Shaw report in 2016. She was awarded a CBE in the Queen’s New Year’s Honours List in 2015.

Holly Hathrell is a third year PhD student in Chromosome and Developmental Biology. On coming to Oxford, she made a swap from her undergraduate degree in Theoretical Physics, and is incorporating into her PhD some of the computational aspects of her previous studies. Her work involves applying ideas in Neural Networks to automate the analysis of vast datasets of microscope images, a task highly impractical for humans and impossible using existing computational methods. Her research into Machine Learning has unearthed an interest into the ethical questions surrounding the use of algorithms and AI in our daily lives.

This is a joint lecture with INET Oxford

From biology to technology, a powerful mechanism to create innovation is recombination – the formation of new systems by combining old parts in new ways. However, we poorly understand the causes of this power. Part of the reason is that most success stories of innovation by recombination – especially in the history of technology – are historical narratives that do not allow a quantitative analysis.

Professor Andreas Wagner, Professor and Chair in the Department of Evolutionary Biology and Environmental Studies at the University of Zurich, will discuss a biological system that can provide a systematic and principled understanding of recombination’s power to innovate. The system is metabolism, a complex network of chemical reactions that has been the source of countless innovations in life’s evolution. It is responsible for the ability of organisms to survive on a bewildering diversity of energy sources, for the adaptation of life to chemically hostile environments, and for the ability of organisms – especially plants – to manufacture a myriad of useful molecules. He will discuss both experiments and computational analyses from his laboratory that has helped us understand the power of recombination to bring forth such innovations.

‘Mills Davis has said that “Attention is the limited resource on the internet – not disk capacity, processor speed or bandwidth.” This presentation will diagnose one particular component of technological culture, our online practices, and evaluate how our usage of the internet at present has truncated our attention both in cyberspace and when not online. Utilising the philosophical and social scientific work of Nicholas Carr, Hubert Dreyfus and Sherry Turkle it will be asserted that many experts have found that focus and attention have degraded in the age of the Internet. We “bounce” from one webpage to another and our devices support and valorize increasing multitasking and shallow interaction with the information presented to us and indeed those we meet online. How can we combat this inattention so indicative of our online lives and transform these virtual spaces so that they help support deeper interaction so needed for a meaningful Christian life? I argue that a deeper infusion of contemplative practices, at the core of the Christian spiritual tradition, can help reinvigorate a destitute online presence. Spiritual practices such as fasting, lectio divina and silence can all help provide a counter-praxis to our cyber-habits. Virtual spaces are, in fact, being used in entirely productive ways towards these ends in certain quarters of the Internet. Indeed, more meditative and attention-rich resources are being utilised through such media as the Jesuit’s “Pray-As-You-Go” podcast and the online resource “The Work of the People.” I argue that rather than solely demonizing our present interaction on the Internet as an essential aspect of internet living, Christians can and ought to employ and transform the medium.’

The Oxford e-Research Centre is pleased to welcome Dr Martin Poulter from Bodleian Libraries. He will present a seminar entitled ‘Wikidata: Knowledge as a service’

Abstract
Wikidata is an ambitious attempt to sum up human science, scholarship and culture in open, machine-readable, structured data. This talk is about how Wikidata resembles and differs from other databases, what you can and can’t do with it, and how other databases and applications benefit from its existence.

About our Speaker
Dr Martin Poulter has been the Wikimedian In Residence at the Bodleian Libraries and for the whole University of Oxford.

More Information
Tea, coffee and cakes will be made available.

Doing a DPhil, and interested in startups, but don’t really know where to start?
Come to The Oxford Foundry on Wednesday evening (1730) for a talk and free pizza from Dr. Ross Harper on the route from your research skills to launching a successful company.

What if I like research but not teaching? What if I do not like any of them? What alternatives to academia do I have?

We would like to introduce the “SIU Career Sessions”, a termly round of talks focusing on alternative careers for PhD students and postdocs, which will definitely help you with these questions. Get ready to hear from experts and explore new career paths! If you are not sure what is next after your PhD or would just like to be aware of your options, these events are for you!

Our first session will focus on a promising field for PhD-level scientists: industry. In this event, attendees will have the opportunity to hear from high profile speakers from two pharmaceutical companies with different focuses: Novo Nordisk and Immunocore. The speakers will bring not only information about the attributes they seek in potential employees, but also the daily life in industry and opportunities for a successful and stable career in big pharmaceutical companies. We will also learn from their first-hand experience how they took the career transition path to industry.

Is industry for you? Come find out with us!
As always, this event is completely free and everyone is welcome.

Plastics (polymers) and other organic materials are typically thought of as insulating materials that surround conducting metals (e.g. copper) to protect us from shocks. However, through careful design, a class of so-called “pi-conjugated” organic compounds and polymers can be both semiconducting and conducting, and can be processed as flexible and in some cases stretchable thin films. In addition, these materials can be tuned to absorb and emit light across the visible spectrum. These pi-conjugated materials have been incorporated into devices such as organic light emitting diode (OLED) based displays common in cell phones (e.g. Samsung phones and the iPhone X) and now televisions (LG). OLEDs are now a multi-billion dollar market (> $10 billion expected in 2018), that is forecasted to grow rapidly over the next decade. OLEDs are now under active development for a variety of high efficiency light applications, with high-end lumenaires being marketed by a variety of companies. In addition, these materials have found use in organic solar cells, and also as components in a new class of highly efficient “perovskite” solar cells.

In this presentation, Professor Seth Marder, Visitor to Oxford Martin Senior Fellow, Professor Henry Snaith, will provide a brief introduction to how chemists develop these materials, introduce the basic working concepts of OLEDs and photovoltaics, show how organic compounds have been used in these technologies, and touch on both the strengths and weaknesses of organic materials for these various applications.

St Anne’s College is proud to host an inspiring group of entrepreneurs to demystify the field of entrepreneurship and explain some of the paths to a career in this field.

Our speakers will present their first-hand experiences from different areas of the start-up ecosystem, from founding and growing successful companies to investing in the next generation of entrepreneurs. The talks will be followed by a Q&A panel session featuring young entrepreneurs sharing their journeys to show their routes into the field. With this range of involvement, you will be able to get a feel for how to be a part of start-ups from joining an existing team to developing your own ideas.

This event is open to everyone and free to attend. There will be a networking drinks reception following the talks where you will be able to carry on discussion.

Matt Clifford – Matt is a co-founder and chief executive of Entrepreneur First (EF), the world’s leading technology start-up builder. Since 2011 they have helped build over 140 start-ups that are now collectively worth over $1 billion. EF’s mission is to bring together individuals who want to start their entrepreneurial journeys and in this process, sthey help put people together to create cofounding teams that go on to build companies.

David Langer – During his Maths degree at Oxford, David founded GroupSpaces – a software company to help university clubs and societies manage themselves, hosting over 5 million memberships. After six years working on this, he then moved on to found Zesty, a Y Combinator backed corporate meal provider based in Silicon Valley that has raised over $20 million from investors. David is also an angel investor and startup advisor working with over 20 companies across Europe, Asia and the United States

“3.5 million cyber-crimes recorded, true figure could be 20.5 million” – this is just one of the headlines that exemplify how significant cybercrime is today.

Cybercrime has been ruthless, victimising everyone from corporations to charities and the elderly. In this light-hearted talk, Jason examines the topic of cybercrime with a focus on how criminals target individuals and exploit how we think, reason and behave. This touches on the fields of computer science and psychology. Additionally, Jason provides some tips and tricks for how you can protect yourself and your families online.

If you’ve ever wondered about cybercrime, come along tonight – Jason guarantees that fun (honest!) will be had by all!

Our world is driven by technology and while it offers a variety of benefits to society, it also exposes us to a series of new and complex cybersecurity risks. These can relate to how we conduct business, how we engage with colleagues, family and friends, or even how organisations and individuals interact with new platforms such as social media and the internet-of-things.

In this talk, Dr Jason Nurse will explore these issues from the perspective of Cybersecurity. His talk begins with a brief discussion of what cybersecurity is, and then moves on to a detailed presentation of some of the significant challenges facing cybersecurity practice and research. Topics that will be covered include: the challenge of social engineering and why it is one of the most popular attacks today; the internet-of-things and its security and privacy implications; and how criminals use social media as a key platform for intelligence gathering on potential targets. These are all topics that will become critical in the future as society grows and technology becomes even more embedded into our daily lives.

If you’d like to find out more or reach Jason online, check out Twitter @jasonnurse!

Solar energy, once a niche application for a limited market, has become the cheapest and fastest-growing power source on earth. What’s more, its potential is nearly limitless – every hour the sun beams down more energy than the world uses in a year. But Varun Sivaram, Fellow for science and technology at the Council on Foreign Relations, former Oxford researcher, and author of a new book, Taming the Sun, warns that the world is not yet equipped to harness erratic sunshine to meet most of its energy needs. And if solar’s current surge peters out, prospects for replacing fossil fuels and averting catastrophic climate change will dim.

Innovation can brighten those prospects, Sivaram will argue. Financial innovation is already enticing deep-pocketed investors to fund solar projects around the world, from the sunniest deserts to the poorest villages. Technological innovation could replace today’s solar panels with coatings as cheap as paint and employ artificial photosynthesis to store intermittent sunshine as convenient fuels. And systemic innovation could add flexibility to the world’s power grids and other energy systems so they can dependably channel the sun’s unreliable energy. Unleashing all this innovation will require visionary public policy: funding researchers developing next-generation solar technologies, refashioning energy systems and economic markets, and putting together a diverse clean energy portfolio.

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

Welcome to the first event in our two-part China-UK Science Innovation Series!

In 2016 alone, China invested USD236 billion in Research and Development, making it the second largest investor in innovation globally. Given this, as well as China’s rapid economic growth, Science Innovation Union (SIU) and the Oxford Chinese Life Sciences Society (OCLSS) have decided to team up to hold an outstanding two-session event on this exciting area of development. Attendees will hear from a distinguished group of high profile speakers coming from the government, academic and private sectors. Our audience will have the chance to learn about how China and the UK have been working together to boost innovation, opportunities available for funding and to get an update on the latest leading-edge research.

Speakers:
Sunan Jiang (Minister Counsellor for Science and Technology, the Chinese Embassy in the UK)

Dr Wenming Ji (Managing Director at Oxford Cardiomox Ltd.; Former Senior Consultant at Isis Innovation Ltd; Former Project Manager at Innovation China UK)

Dr Shisong Jiang (CTO of Oxford Vacmedix)

Schedule:
17:30-17:40 Registration

17:40-18:00 Speaker 1

18:05-18:25 Speaker 2

18:30-18:50 Speaker 3

18:50-19:10 Q&A

19:10-20:00 Networking

As always, this event is free and open to the public!

The second part of this series is entitled:
“Building bridges between UK and China: From investment to ongoing global research advances” and will take place on the evening of June 26th.
Please keep an eye out for further details in the coming weeks!

A History of Food Fraud and Its Detection
Dr Duncan Campbell (DPhil Soil Solution Chemistry, 1986)

Duncan’s talk will cover the long history of food adulteration from medieval Germany to 19th century America, the pioneers who applied scientific methods to its detection in the 19th century and some modern examples from Britain and further afield.

Duncan was a student member of St Cross College from 1982 to 1985. After his time at St Cross and a period of post-doctoral research, he broadened his horizons to apply chemical analysis to public protection and gained the qualification required to act as a Public Analyst in 1994.

Although small in number, Public Analysts play a key role in enforcing many aspects of food legislation in the UK, directing the analysis of food and providing expert opinion on the results. A leading member of the profession, Duncan has contributed to the wider debate on protecting the public’s interests in relation to food, as well as TV programmes including the second episode of Netflix’s documentary series ‘Rotten’ which sets out to expose fraud and corruption in today’s global food industry.

Drinks reception to follow.

Do you want to learn about artificial intelligence? Have you been put off by technical jargon or fears of terminator robots?

Come along to this evening course for beginners run by the AI consultancy Oxford Insights.

No previous experience or knowledge of AI is required.

The course will cover important definitions, developments and debates in AI today, to help you answer three questions:

what is AI?

who is doing what?

why should we care?

Our teachers are AI experts and great communicators who will bring technical discussions to life.

This will be a small group to leave space for lots of discussion. We are charging the very low introductory price of £15 for this evening only!

Do you want to learn about artificial intelligence? Have you been put off by technical jargon or fears of terminator robots?

Come along to this evening course for beginners run by the AI consultancy Oxford Insights.

No previous experience or knowledge of AI is required.

The course will cover important definitions, developments and debates in AI today, to help you answer three questions:

what is AI?

who is doing what?

why should we care?

Our teachers are AI experts and great communicators who will bring technical discussions to life.

This will be a small group to leave space for lots of discussion. We are charging the very low introductory price of £15 for this evening only!

Brain-Computer Interfaces (BCIs) offer the opportunity to control devices directly with the brain. Brain-controlled devices can return communication to those without speech, memory function to those with hippocampus damage, while prosthetic limbs controlled via the brain continue to develop at a pace. In the future, these technologies may also open doors to enhancements of the scope of human abilities beyond that which we generally expect.
This panel explores the state of the art in BCIs: What ethical issues arise with these technologies? How ought they to be understood, in terms of personal identity, or moral responsibility? Extending into the future, how might BCIs feature in human enhancement? Based in what we know already, we will set out to speculate about ‘beyond the horizon’, emerging BCI technologies and how to prepare for them.

Large numbers of satellites currently circle Earth, continuously observing its surface in a variety of ways. In this lecture, Professor Barry Parsons will explain how these satellites may be used to investigate earthquakes – mapping earthquake faults; determining the topography produced by past and recent earthquakes; imaging the displacement of the earth’s surface in earthquakes; measuring the straining of near-surface material, strain that will eventually be released in future earthquakes – and to find out what happens in an earthquake below the surface.

Professor Barry Parsons was Director of the Centre for the Observation and Modelling for Earthquakes, Volcanoes and Tectonics (COMET) from 2002 to 2013. COMET is an Earth Observation Centre of Excellence supported by the Natural Environment Research Council (NERC) that links scientists at several earth science departments, deploying earth observation (satellite) techniques on questions concerning the science and hazard of earthquakes and volcanoes.

Barry is currently Principal Investigator for a NERC-funded consortium project, Looking inside the Continents from Space (LiCS), which aims to exploit the opportunities to measure crustal strain accurately and in detail presented by the European Space Agency’s Sentinel-1 radar satellites.

This lecture is suitable for an audience of approx 16+, especially those with an interest in Physics, Geography, space technology and applied sciences.

This is a joint lecture with The Rockefeller Foundation Economic Council on Planetary Health at the Oxford Martin School

Technological innovation is critical to addressing planetary health challenges. What can be done to ensure that innovation systems and the new “Fourth Industrial Revolution” respond effectively with positive social, environmental and economic consequences? How can we ensure equality of the energy transition?

This is a joint event with INET@Oxford

Technological change involves many economic, social and individual human factors that are interwoven in a complex pattern; thus, technological change serves as an exemplar for a complex socio-technical system. Moreover, some individual factors central to technological change are challenging areas with more unknown than understood: among these areas are individual creative invention, scientific interplay with technology, new business formation, human/product interactions and others. In this lecture, technological change and socio-technical system expert, Chris Magee, Oxford Martin Visiting Fellow and Professor at the Institute for Data, Systems and Society at MIT will share a perspective that can help all of us better understand this phenomenon despite the complexity.

His focus on a major regularity displayed by all technological domains – a constant yearly percentage improvement in performance – and study of how these performance improvement percentage/rate varies over different technologies (but not over time) is one important foundation for this perspective. A second foundation is the wide interconnection among ideas and knowledge that drive improvements in domains that nonetheless have independent and different rates of improvement. Technological change, the process underlying the profound changes in society over the past 200 years – especially economic growth – is surprisingly decoupled from many societal and economic details.

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