Gresham College provides outstanding educational talks and videos for the public free of charge. There are over 2,500 videos available on our website. Your support will help us to encourage people's love of learning for many years to come.
Data structures are the critical ingredient of all good information systems. Poor data structures lead to horrendous problems of interoperability and nightmarish complexity; good ones can make the ‘uncomputable’ computable.
Over the last 30 years, digital technology produced an exponential increase in astronomical data. Within our lifetime, the entirety of the visible universe will have been mapped out: we will have seen everything there is to see. The question will then be: what does it all mean?
Algorithms, loosely translated, are systems for doing things. Algorithms are thus the link from pre-history to the modern world – without algorithms we would have an inanimate universe without all the mess and complexity of real life. It turns out that the history of algorithms is messy.
What are the opportunities for using Information Technology to reduce the cost of healthcare? And what might our healthcare system look like in 10 years time if we make judicious investments in technology?
The birth of rational medicine contributed to the scientific revolution which occurred amongst eastern Greek communities in the 7th-to-5th centuries BCE.
This lecture addresses the potential links between AI and religious belief, which include the question of whether an artificial “superintelligence”, were one to arise, would be well-disposed towards us.
This talk will explain how to discern what and who to trust, how to know whether evidence is causation or just a correlation, and how to overcome the temptation to accept views that we agree with.