On Thursday 10th November, a number of Sixth Form students travelled to London to take part in the Computer Science 2022 seminars. During their time there they got the opportunity to listen to four guest speakers talking about their profession and the past and future of IT. Kieran Bush (Upper Sixth) talks about this below:

The first presentation was about the autonomous vehicles industry, specifically on the behaviour of these cars in certain situations as well as how these autonomous cars could be popular in London and used in the not-so-distant future. The speaker mainly talked about the depth that is required to research for a simple task such as what to do in the situation of someone crossing the road.

Another fascinating presentation we listened to was regarding the election system used in 13th Century Venice. The system they used involved in voting for 43 successors who then selected an additional 43 successors. This process was repeated ten times and at the end the final group of successors then elected the Douge of Venice. She went into the thought behind it and how a system like this also gives minority parties a chance to become the Douge and minimalised the amount of bias in these elections. It turned out that this algorithm is much like the one used today and is simpler for technology to interpret, therefore helping improve AI technology over 700 years later.

The group’s favourite and arguably the most fascinating and relatable presentation was about smart cities and how data points from your phone allow people to do dangerous things from being able to track your locations to the extreme of eventually being able to predict where you will be. During this presentation, we heard real-life examples about how a student of his was able to predict where and when he would be in random places just by tracking his location for a few weeks. He also spoke about larger-scale examples of this ability of big data usage mainly being used by police to predict meeting points of criminals if they turn off the phones used to track them.

Amongst all of this, we also had some helpful wisdom about revising for computing exams that are transferable to other subjects as well.