On 27th November, 16 Sixth Form students attended a series of lectures on future developments in the field of ICT.

We had a talk from Matthew Leeke who went into detail about a system being developed that uses your location data in order to predict where you will be – the system has a 93% degree of accuracy!

Rebecca Tickle gave us an insight into big data and how it is being used to identify accident black spots.  She went behind the user interface of the program she uses, to explain the data structures and search algorithms used.

Jon Macey gave us an insight into the mathematics used in computer animation and how swarms and shoals of fish can be animated.

Amanda Prorok talked about consensus algorithms with a group demonstration.  These are used to allow independent robots to agree a course of action and she is currently applying this research to autonomous vehicles. 

The final lecture of the day was by Dave Cliff who looked at the future of AI and computing – including the development of biological computers (imagine having to feed your computer to get it to work!), quantum computing and ethics. 

To put all the information together – the future is an autonomous biological robot that can communicate with other robots to agree a course of action… and they know where you are going to be.  Time to be nice to your computer!

Overall, it was a very informative day and the thought-provoking lecture will be of great use in the Sixth Form students’ coursework.

Mr G Millbery

Head of ICT