(calm music)
- Hi my name's Richard,
I'm studying a Masters in
Computer Science focusing
in artificial intelligence
at Churchill College, Cambridge.
In my spare time I enjoy
squash, dancing and debating.
- So you were studying within
Churchill College at Cambridge, right?
- Right.
- Okay so what does that mean
for somebody who doesn't know?
- So Cambridge is almost
like a bunch of different
universities that are
just crammed together.
Each college has its own facilities,
its own professors even and
Churchill's one of the biggest.
it's a little bit out of
the way, out of the center,
but it's got a nice community feel so
what that means is I live
there, I eat meals there.
I'm playing on the college sports teams,
but then I go to the
department for lectures.
- Okay so you're academics
aren't necessarily tied
to the college but you're
like living experience is.
- Yeah, at undergrad your
academics are actually
mostly done in your college as well.
You have tutorials or supervisions,
depending on what you call them,
that are done by your
professors in the college.
- And that's the same at Oxford right?
- That's right, but then for
post grad it's more focused
on the department because you
just don't have enough people
in each college you can
specialize so narrowly.
- Gotcha, so what sort of community
have you found in Churchill?
- There's a lot of like events
that are run by the MCR,
which is what you call the
group of post graduate students.
- Okay.
- And you have a lot of
people who even have their own
families come along so it's
a quite communal environment.
(upbeat music)
- So tell me a little bit more
about activities within the college.
Sports, societies, that sort of thing.
- Sure, so I play squash for
my college and we've got four
squash courts right on site
so that's really convenient.
My friends are doing
football and the teams there.
We've also got a pretty
active music society
so we have concerts and
recitals every week.
As well as there, we've got
some academic societies as well.
We have people who are giving
talks about their research
pretty regularly or people who
are, just I guess exploring,
discussing things they're interested in.
- Very cool, and you compete against
the other colleges when
you're playing squash?
- Yeah exactly, so it's
pretty competitive.
Everyone is pretty loyal to their college.
- Are you guys the best?
- Not quite but we're getting there.
- Okay, now that you're here.
- Yeah exactly.
(upbeat music)
(piano music)
- So I'm involved in a
bunch of music stuff.
I play the piano a fair
bit and I'm in a choir.
We just had a show a couple
of weeks ago where we were
singing a lot of Disney
songs or songs from musicals,
that sort of thing, so fun stuff.
Apart from that I play a bit
of sports as I mentioned before
and I've done a lot of
debating over my degree
so I was doing debating training for the
Oxford Union when I
was there for undergrad
and I've done tournaments from,
I guess basically most
of the continents now.
Debated in America a bit
and across Europe and Asia.
(piano music continues)
This is the Cambridge Union,
it's the debating society
here and I think the oldest
in the world perhaps.
They run regular debates
here between students
and politicians, MPs, or lawyers.
People from across the world.
There's one at Oxford as well,
so when I was part of that
I was debating against
Britney Spears' lawyer and
we had an Oxford Cambridge
debate here where actually,
we won it for Oxford although now
I'm cheering on the other side.
The other thing they do is
send students across the world
to tournaments so we just
had the world championships
and the European championships coming up
in a few months and they invite speakers.
People who are pretty big names
come here pretty regularly.
So we've got a lot of American
presidents actually over
the past few decades have
come here at some point,
as well as celebrities,
actors, all sorts of people.
(upbeat music)
So I'm on a one year masters
program in computer science
and I'm choosing to focus on AI,
specifically natural language processing.
It's mostly a research program
so I think 60% of my grade
is based on a research thesis
which I am just starting now,
and then the rest of it is from classes.
So the sort of classes I'm taking are
things like probabilistic
machine learning,
deep learning, and computer vision.
Those are run by the university
but they've also got a lot
of industry help as well so
the class I'm currently taking
is actually run by one of
the google research divisions
and they're bringing in
lecturers to come and run that
and they're also paying
for us to actually have
server time in order
to do our calculations.
- So these are like top
of the line professionals
from google, from amazon coming to
Cambridge to teach these courses?
- That's right.
Most of them, of course, are
still Cambridge professors
but it's actually not
so much of a difference
these days because a lot of professors
are working in industry as well,
part time or sort of moving between them.
- What are you doing your
thesis on, do you think?
- So I think I'm probably
gonna be looking at some
sort of summarizational
paraphrasing of articles.
So things like, can we
figure out what it actually
means in different words if
I give you a piece of text
can you figure out what the key words
are and things along those lines.
- Me being an artificial
intelligence program.
- Yep.
- When you finish the
program, do you know what
you're looking to do afterwards?
- Yeah, I think right now
I'm interested in becoming a
research engineer, so working
with some of the teams
who are looking into the top
AI stuff going on right now
and there are some pretty top notch
teams from across different companies.
Like almost every top
company now has some sort of
AI division who's looking
into all sorts of things.
- Have you seen The Terminator?
- I haven't actually but
I've heard a lot about it.
Sorry.
- We're doomed.
(skull crunching)
(lasers firing)
(explosion booming)
- So what made you start studying
computer science in the first place
and then what made you look towards AI?
- So I was always attracted
to maths and physics and so on
and at first I wasn't so
interested in computer science
because there are a lot of
stereotypes about what it's like,
but I think actually computer science
is like the best parts of math.
So it's not like the really esoteric stuff
but it's things you can
actually see yourself using
and also working in computer science is
probably the best job
you could have these days
just in terms of like a lot of people
doing some really cool things.
In particular on artificial
intelligence I think,
you know, it's the next big
frontier and intellectually
it's really fascinating
because we're figuring out,
like you know, how does thinking work,
how do we figure out
things about the world?
It's sort of the really deep
questions that used to be,
I guess, a lot of philosophers
throwing them around
but now we're actually
coming out with algorithms
that we can, you know, figure
out actually, you know,
the structure of vision or
the structure of language
works like this and we can process it.
- So you studied computer
science at Oxford,
what was the transition
like going from the program
Oxford to the program at Cambridge now?
- So at Oxford, and partly because it was
undergrad it was a lot more diverse.
I did a lot of different
subjects in computer security,
computer graphics and a little
bit of machine learning.
I also did philosophy at
Oxford for about a third
of my degree so that was
really interesting and
looking at things like, you
know, what is knowledge.
How can we encode knowledge and how can we
reason about things like probability
from a philosophical side of things.
I think it's definitely been very
helpful I think in terms of just
the solid theoretical,
mathematical grounding.
- So outside of class you're also
involved in AI discussion groups,
things like that, tell me about those.
- Yeah, so one of the
great things about being at
Cambridge is there are
a lot of people who are
really interested in the
sort of questions like,
what is the future of AI gonna be like and
how is society going to change over the
next few decades or
even a century or more.
So a couple of the groups
that I am involved with,
there's one which is
looking at the risks of AI
so talking about the technical papers,
discussing for example, how do
we specify what we want from,
you know, a very smart computer system
because I think that's
something that a lot of people
aren't worrying about
as much as they should.
That people sort of think, it'll be fine,
we'll deal with it once
we get to it but actually
that's something that
we should be planning.
- So why is it something that
we should be worrying about?
- Because, I think, in
the same way that humans
are smarter than monkeys and, you know,
we use that in order to
take control over the world,
if we come up with
computer systems that are
actually super intelligent
then it's very difficult
to predict just how capable they will be.
(menacing music)
(metal clicking)
(upbeat music)
- So overall, why did you
choose to come to the UK
for school as opposed to
staying in New Zealand?
- So I think the universities
here are, you know,
a lot better than the ones in New Zealand.
I think that in terms
of just being in a part
of the community where everyone, you know,
is really bright and
interested in their subjects.
That's the sort of thing
that you can get over here
at the universities and, you know,
because I want to have a career
maybe in the northern
hemisphere somewhere.
I want to get started with
university over here first.
- What did you find was
the most surprising thing
coming from New Zealand to the UK?
- People specialize a lot more here.
So in New Zealand, you
know, you might do a
bachelor of science but you get to choose
which sciences afterwards whereas at most
universities in the UK you just pick
your subject when you go in and
then you study it for three years.
So it's definitely the
case that you want to have
a pretty good idea of what you want to
study before you apply for your degree.
- And you knew that you wanted to do
computer science before
you arrived at Oxford?
- That's right but I actually, you know,
it took me awhile to figure that out and
I like went in to study
engineering for a year.
I was in the States
actually before I realized
that wasn't for me and so I
decided to come here and do
computer science and
also for the philosophy
as well just to keep
it, mix it up a little.
I think the main thing
is there are so many
opportunities at the
universities over here
that you really need to
figure out, you know,
what you want out of it and go for that.
So a lot of the time, you
know, there are a lot of
research opportunities
if you want to do PHDs.
There are a lot of
opportunities to get into acting
if you want to go into
theater or something like that
but you sort of need to know what
you're going for and figure that out.
So I think that's the main thing.
Like sit down and seriously think
about those sort of questions.
(upbeat music)
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