Earlier this month, the National Physical Laboratory (NPL) opened a call for evidence on AI testing, evaluation and assurance in the UK. Run by its new Centre for AI Measurement, which forms part o…

This is a short post prompted by my Bristol colleague Oliver Johnson’s excellent 2024 piece, “The Final Cut”, which I came across again after Oliver recently reshared it on Linked…

Back in June, I wrote about being appointed as one of the Royal Statistical Society’s William Guy Lecturers for 2026/27. My lecture, aimed particularly at students aged 16 and over, asks a de…

Social media posts are being shared promoting conspiracy theories that the 1986 space shuttle crash was faked and that deceased crew members are out living secret lives.

Back in June, I wrote about being appointed as one of the Royal Statistical Society’s William Guy Lecturers for 2026/27. My lecture, aimed particularly at students aged 16 and over, asks a de…

Some people don’t understand my lifelong enthusiasm for roadside stop-offs – now visiting and cataloguing them is what I do for a living

Written in a personal capacity; views expressed are my own. WarGames came out in June 1983. I was born in 1981, so I didn’t see it at the cinema; I came to it later, probably in the early 199…

YouTube video by RoyalStatSoc

Reading’s Bayeux Tapestry is a full-size copy of the original 11th century tapestry. It was created in 1885-1886 by 35 women of the Leek Embroidery Society 'so that England should have a copy of its o...

YouTube video by RoyalStatSoc

The comedian dominated Saturday night TV in the 1980s, with his sketch shows attracting 18 million viewers. Next came the West End musicals and sitcoms. But in 2016 he quietly disappeared from the lim...

Written in a personal capacity; views expressed are my own. WarGames came out in June 1983. I was born in 1981, so I didn’t see it at the cinema; I came to it later, probably in the early 199…

The Civil Contingencies Act 2004 has provided the UK’s legislative framework for emergency preparedness for more than two decades. It establishes the roles and responsibilities of organisatio…

On 11 April 2011, I published a short post entitled “Hello, World!”. Fifteen years, three domain names and two changes of title later, this post brings the total to five hundred. I didn…

A useless machine is a device that performs a mostly useless task, such as switching itself off, performing no other practical function. In its modern form, the useless machine appears to have been…

Five Eyes cyber security agencies urge organisations to act on rapidly transforming cyber risk.

The Sun is about four hundred times wider than the Moon. It is also about four hundred times farther away. There is no reason for this. It is a coincidence, and it is the only reason a total solar …

The Sun is about four hundred times wider than the Moon. It is also about four hundred times farther away. There is no reason for this. It is a coincidence, and it is the only reason a total solar …

By now everyone has met the heuristic: if a piece of writing contains an em dash, a machine wrote it. It has a more precise origin than you might expect. Recruiters and LinkedIn posters were circli…

The CLEAR Task force is gathering information from conference and journal organizers about tools used or being developed to identify, investigate, or manage ethics and policy violations in peer review...

EU rules cited as reason for effort to trace AI output ancestry

By now everyone has met the heuristic: if a piece of writing contains an em dash, a machine wrote it. It has a more precise origin than you might expect. Recruiters and LinkedIn posters were circli…

Methodologically flawed, non-peer-reviewed vaccine studies can be amplified into misinformation. Using the Lamerato analysis as a case study, this Viewpoin

Academic research on the phenomenon suggests AI could be behind both trends

As Editor-in-Chief of The Computer Journal, published by Oxford University Press on behalf of BCS, The Chartered Institute for IT, it is my honour to select the recipient of the annual Wilkes Award…

Academic papers — especially ones that you’ve written — look different depending on when you read them. Papers written in 2019, before COVID, before generative AI, before agentic …

I was very sad to hear that Professor John Fitch, my undergraduate dissertation and PhD supervisor at the University of Bath, passed away in June 2026. This is a personal reflection on someone who …

From The Restaurant at the End of the Universe (Chapter 28), HHGTTG: The major problem — one of the major problems, for there are several — one of the many major problems with governing…

MC Hammer with some insight into machine learning, and specifically, OpenAI’s GPT-3:

The trial will assess the safety and immune response of the ChAdOx1 BDBV vaccine in 50 healthy adults aged 18–55 years.

For the first time, AI will be positioned at the very centre of government, thanks to the launch of the PM’s new AI Taskforce which will be chaired by Lord Vallance.

Today, the UK Government’s Department for Science, Innovation and Technology (DSIT) opened a call for evidence on Data regulation in the age of AI and other data-intensive technologies. Given…

What does it actually mean to be a scientist working at the heart of government? It’s a question the Government Office for Science’s Scientists at the Centre series puts to departmental…

The National Risk Register outlines the most serious risks facing the United Kingdom

Why these refreshed ARIs matter for research, policy and the sectors that shape national life. Today, the Department for Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) published its refreshed Areas of Research In…

I’ve been elected Secretary/Treasurer of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) for a two-year term beginning 1 July 2026, alongside incoming President Elisa Bertino (Purdue University…

An atlas of the vibrance of the real world

Academic papers — especially ones that you’ve written — look different depending on when you read them. Papers written in 2019, before COVID, before generative AI, before agentic …

A while back I wrote about language modeling without neural networks, where I generated Shakespeare with an unbounded n-gram model: no weights, no training, …

Applications during the year to May 2026 dipped below 400,000, ahead of tighter compliance regime

Noughts & Crosses author Malorie Blackman and Gruffalo creator Julia Donaldson are made dames, as the rugby league star is knighted.

The Bradford painter whose sun kissed visions of California broke world records at auction, has died

A new retrospective of the artist beloved by mathematicians opens this week. Get up close to the art with our interactive story

This dashboard provides a system-wide view of student numbers in SHAPE subjects across UK higher education covering the period from 2015/16 to 2024/25, the most recent year for which data are availabl...