Paul Taylor

As​ the UK moved into lockdown in March, Gavin Williamson, the education secretary, announced that this summer’s GCSE and A level exams would be cancelled. The exams regulator, Ofqual, was instructed to put in place an alternative system to allow students to move on to further study or employment while ensuring that they would be neither advantaged nor disadvantaged compared to those...

When​ I first studied artificial intelligence in the 1980s, my lecturers assumed that the most important property of intelligence was the ability to reason, and that to program a computer to perform intelligently you would have to enable it to apply logic to large bodies of facts. Logic is used to make inferences. If you have a general rule, such as ‘All men are mortal,’ and a...

Estimated weekly excess deaths in England and Wales in 2021.

One of the tactics​ used over the past few weeks by Boris Johnson at Prime Minister’s Questions, and by loyal MPs and dutiful ministers touring broadcasting studios, has been to claim that his successful management of the pandemic is more worthy of the public’s attention than trivial issues of garden parties or...

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...

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...