Christ's Fellow, Professor Mark Girolami FREng FRSE, will be giving a Lady Margaret Lecture, Lord Kelvin, First Baron of Largs: A Father of the Digital Age?, in the Yusuf Hamied Theatre at Christ's College on Monday 30 January at 5:30pm. Professor Girolami is the Sir Kirby Laing Professor of Civil Egineering; Royal Academy of Engineering Research Chair in Data Centric Engineering; and the Chief Scientist at The Alan Turing Institute.
Abstract:
The digital era we are living through is one with the hallmark of breathtaking transformation and disruption in all that humanity experiences. Digital technologies are rapidly transforming our ways of living and working for both good and ill. From mobile smart phones to self driving vehicles, from Artificial Intelligence driven ChatBots to targeted personalised medicine, from computer games to cyber-physical environments, it is no exaggeration to state that we face many tipping points having potentially huge societal impact.
The names of those at the forefront of this age of digital transformation include Sir Tim Berners-Lee and his delivery of the world web web to mankind, or the tech pioneers such as Bill Gates and Steve Jobs unleashing the personalised computing paradigm upon us. Further back one can thank Alan Turing for the foundations of Artificial Intelligence, and Claude Shannon for the underpinning Information Theory launching the communications era, Ada Lovelace with the Analytical Engine, or indeed James Clerk-Maxwell who provided us with the mathematical unification of electricity, magnetism and light.
One name that is seldom linked to the digital era is William Thomson, First Baron Kelvin, Professor of Natural Philosophy at the University of Glasgow for over half a century during the Victorian age. Given the many contributions to scientific knowledge and advances in technology this victorian polymath gave to us, in this Lady Margaret Lecture I will consider whether Lord Kelvin should indeed be considered as one who helped lay the scientific and technical foundations upon which we are building the digital revolution.
