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.
For nearly seventy years, what might be called ‘the canon’ of greatest films has been arbitrated by an international poll of critics delivering a ‘ten best’ list every decade, published in the BFI’s Sight & Sound.
China’s media provide a window into the Chinese mind, as the country asserts itself in the world as a great power. What do Chinese people think is the purpose of life? What matters most to them? In what do they believe? How do officials and journalists explain their responsibilities?
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.
In 1920, Nellie Melba’s singing was transmitted to Europe and Newfoundland via the wireless. In 1922 the BBC began broadcasting, and from the outset sponsored new music and relayed outside broadcasts to the nation (and from 1932, to the world).
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?
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.