ICT Forum
2014 Conference

Massive growth in the volumes and variety of data that organisations need to process is leading to requirements for a new class of computer platforms: so-called cognitive systems. The first real exemplar of this type of system was the IBM Watson platform that in 2012 won the US TV game show 'Jeopardy!'; beating the two all-time human champions in the process. This game showed the ability of a computer to take the spoken word as input, handle a 'quirky' language style and analyse a vast corpus of data in seconds. Whilst an achievement in itself, the marketplace for Jeopardy-playing supercomputers is pretty small so Watson needed to find new challenges. Since 2012, Watson has been put to work helping organisations in a wide range of industries and problem spaces.

This session will look at how Watson works, how it anaylses large quantities of data in seconds, and how it combines different analytical techniques to arrive at a conclusion. We will further see how Watson has been extended as it has taken on the challenge of the healthcare, finance and customer service industries and how it will further evolve into the future.

The Zooniverse is the world’s most successful web platform dedicated to citizen science - the involvement of the general public in research. Zooniverse PI and Oxford astronomer Chris Lintott will reveal some of the challenges behind building highly scalable and robust platforms to support this effort, including what happens when Brian Cox tells four million people to visit your website.

Much media attention surrounded the discovery of a new integer-spin particle (a boson) on July 4 2012 at CERN near Geneva Switzerland.  Since then the case for that boson being THE Higgs boson grew so strong that Prof. Peter Higgs was one of the recipients of the Nobel Prize in Physics. When the announcement came millions watched the presentations live on the internet. Unfortunately, they were presentations that only a Particle Physicist could love.

In my presentation I hope to explain a bit about the Standard Model of Particle physics, and what the Higgs boson does, but also to give you some idea how it was found and why it took almost two years to find once the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN was turned on.

Andy Parfitt spent over a decade leading change at BBC Radio 1, he  then moved to a senior role in another sector (Advertising) an industry in the midst of major change. What are the conditions that lead to disruptive change - technology, social and cultural and regulatory?  More importantly what’s to be done? 

Selection of freshly prepared Wraps, Rolls, Baguettes & Sandwiches with fresh Vegetable sticks & houmous, Olive & Feta pots & Assorted Mini Quiches.

Kettle crisps and fresh Seasonal fruit platter served with Juice and Water