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- Hi my name's Richard, I'm studying a Masters in
Computer Science focusing in artificial intelligence
at Churchill College, Cambridge.
In my spare time I enjoy squash, dancing and debating.
- So you were studying within
Churchill College at Cambridge, right?
- Right.
- Okay so what does that mean for somebody who doesn't know?
- So Cambridge is almost like a bunch of different
universities that are just crammed together.
Each college has its own facilities,
its own professors even and Churchill's one of the biggest.
it's a little bit out of the way, out of the center,
but it's got a nice community feel so
what that means is I live there, I eat meals there.
I'm playing on the college sports teams,
but then I go to the department for lectures.
- Okay so you're academics aren't necessarily tied
to the college but you're like living experience is.
- Yeah, at undergrad your academics are actually
mostly done in your college as well.
You have tutorials or supervisions,
depending on what you call them,
that are done by your professors in the college.
- And that's the same at Oxford right?
- That's right, but then for post grad it's more focused
on the department because you just don't have enough people
in each college you can specialize so narrowly.
- Gotcha, so what sort of community
have you found in Churchill?
- There's a lot of like events that are run by the MCR,
which is what you call the group of post graduate students.
- Okay.
- And you have a lot of people who even have their own
families come along so it's a quite communal environment.
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- So tell me a little bit more
about activities within the college.
Sports, societies, that sort of thing.
- Sure, so I play squash for my college and we've got four
squash courts right on site so that's really convenient.
My friends are doing football and the teams there.
We've also got a pretty active music society
so we have concerts and recitals every week.
As well as there, we've got some academic societies as well.
We have people who are giving talks about their research
pretty regularly or people who are, just I guess exploring,
discussing things they're interested in.
- Very cool, and you compete against
the other colleges when you're playing squash?
- Yeah exactly, so it's pretty competitive.
Everyone is pretty loyal to their college.
- Are you guys the best?
- Not quite but we're getting there.
- Okay, now that you're here.
- Yeah exactly.
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- So I'm involved in a bunch of music stuff.
I play the piano a fair bit and I'm in a choir.
We just had a show a couple of weeks ago where we were
singing a lot of Disney songs or songs from musicals,
that sort of thing, so fun stuff.
Apart from that I play a bit of sports as I mentioned before
and I've done a lot of debating over my degree
so I was doing debating training for the
Oxford Union when I was there for undergrad
and I've done tournaments from,
I guess basically most of the continents now.
Debated in America a bit and across Europe and Asia.
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This is the Cambridge Union, it's the debating society
here and I think the oldest in the world perhaps.
They run regular debates here between students
and politicians, MPs, or lawyers.
People from across the world.
There's one at Oxford as well, so when I was part of that
I was debating against Britney Spears' lawyer and
we had an Oxford Cambridge debate here where actually,
we won it for Oxford although now
I'm cheering on the other side.
The other thing they do is send students across the world
to tournaments so we just had the world championships
and the European championships coming up
in a few months and they invite speakers.
People who are pretty big names come here pretty regularly.
So we've got a lot of American presidents actually over
the past few decades have come here at some point,
as well as celebrities, actors, all sorts of people.
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So I'm on a one year masters program in computer science
and I'm choosing to focus on AI,
specifically natural language processing.
It's mostly a research program so I think 60% of my grade
is based on a research thesis which I am just starting now,
and then the rest of it is from classes.
So the sort of classes I'm taking are
things like probabilistic machine learning,
deep learning, and computer vision.
Those are run by the university but they've also got a lot
of industry help as well so the class I'm currently taking
is actually run by one of the google research divisions
and they're bringing in lecturers to come and run that
and they're also paying for us to actually have
server time in order to do our calculations.
- So these are like top of the line professionals
from google, from amazon coming to
Cambridge to teach these courses?
- That's right.
Most of them, of course, are still Cambridge professors
but it's actually not so much of a difference
these days because a lot of professors
are working in industry as well,
part time or sort of moving between them.
- What are you doing your thesis on, do you think?
- So I think I'm probably gonna be looking at some
sort of summarizational paraphrasing of articles.
So things like, can we figure out what it actually
means in different words if I give you a piece of text
can you figure out what the key words
are and things along those lines.
- Me being an artificial intelligence program.
- Yep.
- When you finish the program, do you know what
you're looking to do afterwards?
- Yeah, I think right now I'm interested in becoming a
research engineer, so working with some of the teams
who are looking into the top AI stuff going on right now
and there are some pretty top notch
teams from across different companies.
Like almost every top company now has some sort of
AI division who's looking into all sorts of things.
- Have you seen The Terminator?
- I haven't actually but I've heard a lot about it.
Sorry.
- We're doomed.
(skull crunching)
(lasers firing)
(explosion booming)
- So what made you start studying
computer science in the first place
and then what made you look towards AI?
- So I was always attracted to maths and physics and so on
and at first I wasn't so interested in computer science
because there are a lot of stereotypes about what it's like,
but I think actually computer science
is like the best parts of math.
So it's not like the really esoteric stuff
but it's things you can actually see yourself using
and also working in computer science is
probably the best job you could have these days
just in terms of like a lot of people
doing some really cool things.
In particular on artificial intelligence I think,
you know, it's the next big frontier and intellectually
it's really fascinating because we're figuring out,
like you know, how does thinking work,
how do we figure out things about the world?
It's sort of the really deep questions that used to be,
I guess, a lot of philosophers throwing them around
but now we're actually coming out with algorithms
that we can, you know, figure out actually, you know,
the structure of vision or the structure of language
works like this and we can process it.
- So you studied computer science at Oxford,
what was the transition like going from the program
Oxford to the program at Cambridge now?
- So at Oxford, and partly because it was
undergrad it was a lot more diverse.
I did a lot of different subjects in computer security,
computer graphics and a little bit of machine learning.
I also did philosophy at Oxford for about a third
of my degree so that was really interesting and
looking at things like, you know, what is knowledge.
How can we encode knowledge and how can we
reason about things like probability
from a philosophical side of things.
I think it's definitely been very
helpful I think in terms of just
the solid theoretical, mathematical grounding.
- So outside of class you're also
involved in AI discussion groups,
things like that, tell me about those.
- Yeah, so one of the great things about being at
Cambridge is there are a lot of people who are
really interested in the sort of questions like,
what is the future of AI gonna be like and
how is society going to change over the
next few decades or even a century or more.
So a couple of the groups that I am involved with,
there's one which is looking at the risks of AI
so talking about the technical papers,
discussing for example, how do we specify what we want from,
you know, a very smart computer system
because I think that's something that a lot of people
aren't worrying about as much as they should.
That people sort of think, it'll be fine,
we'll deal with it once we get to it but actually
that's something that we should be planning.
- So why is it something that we should be worrying about?
- Because, I think, in the same way that humans
are smarter than monkeys and, you know,
we use that in order to take control over the world,
if we come up with computer systems that are
actually super intelligent then it's very difficult
to predict just how capable they will be.
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- So overall, why did you choose to come to the UK
for school as opposed to staying in New Zealand?
- So I think the universities here are, you know,
a lot better than the ones in New Zealand.
I think that in terms of just being in a part
of the community where everyone, you know,
is really bright and interested in their subjects.
That's the sort of thing that you can get over here
at the universities and, you know,
because I want to have a career
maybe in the northern hemisphere somewhere.
I want to get started with university over here first.
- What did you find was the most surprising thing
coming from New Zealand to the UK?
- People specialize a lot more here.
So in New Zealand, you know, you might do a
bachelor of science but you get to choose
which sciences afterwards whereas at most
universities in the UK you just pick
your subject when you go in and
then you study it for three years.
So it's definitely the case that you want to have
a pretty good idea of what you want to
study before you apply for your degree.
- And you knew that you wanted to do
computer science before you arrived at Oxford?
- That's right but I actually, you know,
it took me awhile to figure that out and
I like went in to study engineering for a year.
I was in the States actually before I realized
that wasn't for me and so I decided to come here and do
computer science and also for the philosophy
as well just to keep it, mix it up a little.
I think the main thing is there are so many
opportunities at the universities over here
that you really need to figure out, you know,
what you want out of it and go for that.
So a lot of the time, you know, there are a lot of
research opportunities if you want to do PHDs.
There are a lot of opportunities to get into acting
if you want to go into theater or something like that
but you sort of need to know what
you're going for and figure that out.
So I think that's the main thing.
Like sit down and seriously think
about those sort of questions.
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