Paul Taylor is professor of health informatics at UCL.
Research into the generation and interpretation of what computer scientists call natural language processing has made extraordinary progress over the last ten years, and powerful systems now have an astonishing capacity to emulate written thought. I decided to ask the new AI chatbot, ChatGPT, some of the exam questions I’d written for a course on using digital technology in...
The pension fund for university lecturers, unlike those for teachers, civil servants or NHS workers, has no government backing and is the UK’s largest private sector scheme, providing for more than 500,000 working or retired academics. It is also one of the few pension funds that still offers new members a ‘defined benefit’, meaning that the size of your pension is...
Senior staff at universities are increasingly concerned that the faction of the Tory Party now in government is significantly less interested in science than the one that wrote the manifesto on which it was elected.
The results of REF2021, the latest iteration of the Research Excellence Framework assessing the quality of research at UK universities, were published last week. My institution, UCL, is boasting that it came second, above Cambridge and beaten only by Oxford. Cambridge is boasting that it came third, but behind Imperial and the Institute of Cancer Research; institutions that shouldn’t quite count, it implies, since neither covers the full range of academic endeavour. Imperial, however, is clear that it has been shown to be the UK’s top university. The same claim is made by Oxford.
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