Mathematical, Physical and Life Sciences at the Department for Continuing Education

Luc Steels delivers the 2012 Simonyi lecture and asks can machines be creative enough to invent their own language? Professor Steels talks about some of his recent breakthrough experiments which have seen robots programmed to play language games and come up with novel concepts, words and meanings. He discusses how this triggers a process of cultural evolution that leads to more complex forms of language and deliberate on what this tells us about the nature of our own intelligence and the future of artificial intelligence. Luc Steels is ICREA Research Professor at the Institut de Biologia Evolutiva (CSIC-UPF) in Barcelona and Director of the Sony Computer Science Laboratory in Paris. The Simonyi Lecture is funded by a generous gift from the Amalur Foundation.

Inspired by Évariste Galois's attempts to express symmetry using mathematical equations, Professor Marcus du Sautoy explores the inextricable link between the physical world and mathematics.

"Mathematics: Navigating Nature's Dark Labyrinth" - the Inaugural Lecture of the Simonyi Professor for the Public Understanding of Science, 2009.

Introductory lecture, given by Dr Raymond Flood, for the summer school part of the online diploma in computing. Visit http://media.conted.ox.ac.uk/on01 to view the full presentation from Raymond Flood, including his slides.