Yesterday’s FT provides a fascinating article (available here) on the role algorithms may increasingly plan in price-rigging and collusion. While previously humans have colluded to fix prices, today’s algorithms which seek profit maximization may end up colluding in a way which is hard to detect and difficult to stop. Indeed a recent OECD report states: […]

The best computer is a man, and it’s the only one that can be mass-produced by unskilled labour.” (Wernher von Braun) Last night I began to think further about the role of AI and humans in society while attending Future Advocacy’s launch of a report on “Maximising the opportunities and minimising the risks of artificial […]

Integrating digital systems to help city residents plan seamless journeys
Many elements of the needed information infrastructure don’t exist yet. Will Venters and Ayesha Khanna studied Berlin’s prototype.

Join me in attending Eric Schmidt (Executive chairman of Alphabet (Google)) in conversation with my colleague Prof Chrisanthi Avgerou on the 14th October here at the LSE. (Note getting a ticket will be difficult – see below for applications) Click for full details : From LEO to DeepMind: Britain’s computing pioneers – 10 – 2016 – Events […]

I am joining a panel tomorrow at the AI-Summit in London, focused on practical Artificial Intelligence (AI) for business applications. I am to be asked the question “What can Artificial Intelligence do for business?”, so by way of preparation I thought I should try to answer the question on my blog. Perhaps we can break […]

I gave a talk at Cloud Expo at the London Excel centre yesterday on the need for a much more dynamic perspective towards cloud computing. V3.co.uk have written an article providing an excellent summary of the talk if you are interested: http://www.v3.co.uk/v3-uk/news/2454551/enterprises-must-be-ready-to-evolve-alongside-cloud-services Dr Will Venters, assistant professor of information systems at the London School of Economics, […]

Prof. Alan Brown of CoDE shared the following Wired article with me. The article discusses why platforms are a complex value-evaluation activity, and why companies seek to control the ecosystem upon which they rely. “In fleeing the cloud, Dropbox is showing why the cloud is so powerful. It too is building infrastructure so that others don’t have […]

I was chairing a panel at the Internet of Things Expo in London today. One of the points for discussion was the rise of platforms related to the internet of things. As, by some estimates, the number of connected devices is predicted to exceed 50bn by 2020 so there is considerable desire to control the internet based […]

I read an interesting article on Fog Computing and thought readers might like a short precis: Applications such as health-monitoring or emergency response require near-instantaneous response such that the delay caused by contacting and receiving data from a cloud data-centre can be highly problematic. Fog Computing is a response to this challenge. The basic idea […]

It was great to be at the Shard earlier this week to hear Peter Evans and Annabelle Gawer talk about their new report “The Rise of the Platform Enterprise”. The overarching theme of the morning was (albeit not explicitly stated in the programme) “European Platform Anxiety” – that is, that the digital infrastructure central to […]