The Oxford Artificial Intelligence Summit: Towards AGI



Overview

Over the last few years, the pandemic has vividly demonstrated the importance of face-to-face meetings.

Designed primarily for our past Artificial Intelligence course participants, but open to all, we are pleased to present the Artificial Intelligence Summit: Towards Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) on Friday 24 - Saturday 25 May 2024 at the University of Oxford.  

Now is an opportune time to reflect on the future of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and society, and how you can participate in building and moulding that future.

Despite the challenges of the last few years, the rise of GPT and chatGPT have democratised AI and placed humanity firmly on the road to AGI. 

However, these rapid tectonic shifts have created technological, economic, and societal challenges. 

To help demonstrate some of the concepts during the summit, there is a hackathon, which you can participate in, to learn how AI, and task based agents in particular can be leveraged to help architect and implement a solution.

This event will provide you a unique and exceptional opportunity to meet and network with your professional peers from the world of AI whilst also providing an educational element to enhance your skillset.

If the above themes resonate with you, we would be happy to see you at the AI Summit. 

Programme details

This conference is primarily concerned with building services for the new world of AGI and reskilling yourselves for a world dominated by AGI.  
In practice today, that means understanding the role of Large Language Models (LLMs) as an end-to-end application development platform. 

However, this goal has some implications:  

  • How can we develop AGI applications responsibly? 
  • How can we make AGI knowledge inclusive?
    During the summit, we will be thinking of the inclusivity of AGI knowledge in a broader sense, encapsulating geographies, inspiring the next generation and reskilling existing developers.  
  • How can we include more people in creating AI - especially domain experts / non-developers? 
  • Most importantly, how can we adapt education and learning itself to this new world?  

Implementing this vision today needs new approaches.

Prompt engineering has occupied a central place in the development landscape in a very short span.

We can develop AI services through prompt engineering by considering AI as a co-pilot/assistant.  

For the AI summit, we will be adopting prompt engineering as a framework to empower the development of AGI applications and make them more inclusive.

Generative AI Hackathon

The summit includes a hackathon, in which you can learn how simple solutions can be reached using AI autonomous agents.

Generative AI, via LLMs, have presented a seismic shift in how fast we can get work done while lowering the technical barriers for application and system creation.

There is a skills shortage in AI use, and to meet demand and ensure continued growth, there’s a need for technology and industry professionals to upskill within the area of generative AI.

Adopting generative AI means not only using the tools powered by it, but also to do so efficiently by learning "prompt engineering" and applying a methodology - a structured approach. This also includes a product management methodology for generative AI. This approach can then be applied by developers using GitHub Copilot, Open AI code interpreter or even plain ChatGPT itself.

To innovate on top of LLMs and applications, such as task-focused agents or other AI-powered software, it's important to leverage efficient tool "workbenches" that tie everything together. These tools include LangChain, Pinecone, Polyglot Notebooks, Semantic Kernel and others.

The hackathon will be based on a variety of LLM use cases with an emphasis on generative AI for code.
The solution will also include a product management function, making it possible for non-developers to also be part of the solution.

Note: Due to the fast-changing nature of AI, it is possible some updates will be made to the content and format of this event.

Attending this event 

Further details will be emailed to you two weeks ahead of the summit and will include registration information and an overview of the timetable.

Please get in touch if you have not received this information within five working days of the start date. 

In the meantime, you may wish to plan your travel: Travel information

Digital certification

Participants who attend the full summit will receive a University of Oxford certificate of attendance. This will be presented to you prior to the end of the two-day summit.

The certificate will show your name, and the title and dates of this event.

Fees

Description Costs
1) Standard fee £595.00
2) Standard fee, plus accommodation £835.00

Payment

1) Standard fee:

This fee includes attendance plus tuition, refreshments and lunches.

2) Standard fee, plus accommodation:

This fee includes attendance, tuition, refreshments and lunches plus two nights’ accommodation at our Residential Centre on nights of Thursday 23 May and Friday 24 May 2024 (see below for full details).

All courses are VAT exempt.

Register immediately online 

Click the “book now” button on this webpage. Payment by credit or debit card is required.

Request an invoice

If you require an invoice for your company or personal records, please contact the course administration team. 
Payment is accepted online, by credit/debit card, or by bank transfer. Please do not send card or bank details via email.

Accommodation

There is limited accommodation available as part of this summit, and this can be purchased for an additional £240 (a total of £835).

This covers two nights' stay, checking in on Thursday 23 May and departing Saturday 25 May 2024 and includes a full breakfast on Friday and Saturday morning. 

Accommodation is provided through our on-site Rewley House Residential Centre.
All bedrooms are en-suite and decorated to a high standard, and come with tea- and coffee-making facilities, free Wi-Fi access and Freeview TV. Guests can take advantage of the excellent dining facilities and common room bar, where they may relax and network with others on the programme.

Further information can be found on the Rewley House Residential Centre website. 

To purchase accommodation during your stay, please select the second option ("Standard fee, plus accommodation") at checkout. 

Tutors

The below list of tutors is subject to change

Ajit Jaokar

Conference Director and Speaker

Based in London, Ajit's work spans research, entrepreneurship and academia relating to artificial intelligence (AI) and the internet of things (IoT). 

Ajit is the Course Director and/or tutor for Continuing Education’s portfolio of artificial intelligence courses for professionals:

Ajit is also a Visiting Fellow in the Department of Engineering Science here at the University of Oxford.

He also works as a Data Scientist through his company feynlabs - focusing on building innovative early stage AI prototypes for domains such as cybersecurity, robotics and healthcare.

Besides the University of Oxford, Ajit has also conducted AI courses in the London School of Economics (LSE), Universidad Politécnica de Madrid (UPM) and as part of the The Future Society at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government.

He is also currently working on a book to teach AI using mathematical foundations at high school level. 

Ajit was listed in the top 30 influencers for IoT for 2017 along with Amazon, Bosch, Cisco, Forrester and Gartner by the German insurance company Munich Re.

Ajit publishes extensively on KDnuggets and Data Science Central.

He was recently included in top 16 influencers (Data Science Central), Top 100 blogs (KDnuggets), Top 50 (IoT central), and 19th among the top 50 twitter IoT influencers (IoT Institute). 

His PhD research is based on AI and Affective Computing (how AI interprets emotion).

Logan Kilpatrick

Guest Speaker

OpenAI 

Logan leads Developer Relations at OpenAI where he is focused on enabling developers building with the OpenAI API and ChatGPT Plugin ecosystem.  

Outside of OpenAI, Logan is on the Board of Directors at NumFOCUS and a teaching fellow at Harvard University.

Liu Jerry

Guest Speaker

Co-founder/CEO of LlamaIndex

Jerry is the co-founder/CEO of LlamaIndex, the data framework for building LLM applications. Before this, he has spent his career at the intersection of ML, research, and startups. He led the ML monitoring team at Robust Intelligence, did self-driving AI research at Uber ATG and worked on recommendation systems at Quora.

Chris Noring

Speaker

Chris is Senior Cloud Advocate at Microsoft with more than 15 years in the IT industry.
He's a published author on several books about web development as well as the Go language. He's also a recognized speaker as well as keynote speaker and holds a Google developer expert title. https://www.linkedin.com/in/christoffer-noring-3257061/

Mr Jesus Serrano Castro

Speaker

Jesus is an accomplished digital industry professional with 25 years of experience, including the last 16 years at Microsoft.

He specialises in digital transformation, innovation, artificial intelligence, human-computer interaction, and user experience, while also maintaining a strong technical background as a software engineer.

He is a leader in emerging forms of interaction such as extended reality, voice, and biometric interfaces.

In 2014, he was the inventor of one of Microsoft's protected patents for a virtual experience applied to public events, long before the term "metaverse" became popular.

Throughout his career, Jesus has been involved in a wide range of industries, including retail (Zara, IKEA), banking (Santander), insurance (Reale), media (Sony Pictures, 20th Century Fox), and telecommunications (Ooredoo).

He has also led the Sports and Entertainment Innovation team, managing 180 sports organisations in 35 countries and 23 sports (Real Madrid, Real Sociedad, Laliga, FIFA, FIVB, IAAF, Toyota WRC, WWE, Russia World Cup 2018, Qatar World Cup 2022 etc).

He has led the development of several successful consumer apps for iOS, Android, Windows and HoloLens, which have received millions of downloads.

He is a top Microsoft speaker, having delivered over 100 sessions and keynotes at global events, achieving the Microsoft Speaker Grand Slam (speaking at the five largest Microsoft global events). He is also an Associate Professor in various Master's programmes and a frequent collaborator with business schools, universities and bootcamps.

Jesus' favourite quote is "Do not follow where the path may lead. Go instead where there is no path and leave a trail" - Ralph Waldo Emerson. 

Dr Diego Colombo

Speaker

Principal Software Engineer heading the .NET Interactive and Polyglot Notebook team.

As the lead for the .NET Interactive and Polyglot Notebook team, Dr Diego collaborates with developers and partners to foster the Polyglot notebook ecosystem. 

He works on challenging projects and is keen on quality and reusability. 

Today, his main focus is polyglot notebooks. Through the capabilities of polyglot notebooks, multiple programming languages can be implemented to deploy functions within a single notebook. 

These components include:

  • Data exploration scenarios through the integration of SQL and KQL kernels.
  • Visually enriched displays using technologies such as mermaid js, JavaScript, and HTML.
  • System automation with the dynamic capabilities of PowerShell.
  • Developer tutorials.
  • integration of dot language, among other languages.
  • Connect kernels via cross-language data sharing.

In addition, through the integration of the Semantic Kernel platform, LLM components can be integrated and through the integration of the .NET Interactive ecosystem, we can facilitate agile processes. 

Thus, the polyglot notebook brings together a variety of LLM components including prompt templates, chains, and semantic memory access, without first familiarising themselves with specific frameworks such as Semantic Kernel or LangChain. The polyglot nature of the architecture, coupled with the sharing of values across disparate languages, empowers developers to embark on developing traditional code artefacts, intertwining them with the LLM components.

Dr Diego's work and research is based on building and enhancing the above ecosystem.

Marina Fernandez

Speaker

Digital Hive and Innovation consultant, Anglo American Plc

Marina is an Analyst Developer and Software consultant at Anglo American Plc working at the Digital Hive on innovative trading analytics and optimisation projects.

She has over 18 years’ experience in Software Engineering, Business Analysis, Data Science and full software development life cycle in a variety of business domains including Commodity trading and optimisation, Finance, Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence, e-commerce, e-learning, web-development.

Marina holds an MSc, with distinction, in Software Engineering from the University of Oxford and a degree in Applied Mathematics from Lomonosov Moscow State University. 

In February 2020, Marina completed the course "Data science for internet of things" from the University of Oxford.

Anjali Jain

Speaker

Digital Solutions Architect, Metrobank 

Anjali is a Digital Solutions Architect at Metrobank, where she helps to deliver advanced technology driven business solutions around diverse themes of Internet Banking, Mobile App, Business banking, and Open banking/PSD2, using agile methodology.

She has over 16 years of IT experience and worked across Banking, Telecom and logistics domains, from inception to the delivery of complex projects.

Anjali is passionate about AI and Machine learning and completed the course "Data science for internet of things" in February 2019 from the University of Oxford.

Ms Ayşe Mutlu

Speaker

Data Scientist

Ayşe Mutlu is a data scientist working on Azure AI and devops technologies. Based in London, Ayşe’s work involves building and deploying Machine Learning and Deep Learning models using the Microsoft Azure framework (Azure DevOps and Azure Pipelines).

She enjoys coding in Python and contributing to Open Source Initiatives in Python.

Application

Please use the 'Book' or 'Apply' button on this page. Alternatively, please contact us to obtain an application form.

Level and demands

While this summit has been primarily designed for those who have previously taken one of our past Artificial Intelligence courses, it is open to all. 

Accommodation

There is limited accommodation available as part of this summit, and this can be purchased for an additional £240 (a total of £835).
This covers two nights' stay, checking in on Thursday 23 May and departing Saturday 25 May 2024.
Breakfast on Friday and Saturday mornings is included. 

Accommodation is provided through our on-site Rewley House Residential Centre.
All bedrooms are en-suite and decorated to a high standard, and come with tea- and coffee-making facilities, free Wi-Fi access and Freeview TV. Guests can take advantage of the excellent dining facilities and common room bar, where they may relax and network with others on the programme.

Further information can be found on the Rewley House Residential Centre website. 

To purchase accommodation during your stay, please select the second option ("Standard fee, plus accommodation") at checkout. 

Terms & conditions for applicants and students

Information on financial support