Churchill Computer Science Lecture 2020: William Tunstall-Pedoe

This year's talk, entitled "Entrepreneurship, Artificial Intelligence and Bringing Science Fiction to Life", looked at how Alexa pioneered a new product category that has had the fastest adoption of any new technology and is now present in hundreds of millions of devices.
As a child William was fascinated by the voice-controlled computers seen in science fiction like Blake's Seven and Star Trek and wanted to bring this to life. His project to do so started with working alone in the UL on the core AI technology, followed by seven years as a venture-capital backed startup and then another three within Amazon after they acquired his business. William talked about the stack of really really hard engineering that such a product requires, how early things still are, what still needs to be done and about the importance of machine learning, in its broadest sense, to further technological progress.