The Future of Work
Ivana Bartoletti, Kallum Pickering, Tony Prescott, Jon Timmis and Sir Malcolm Grant (Chair)

• Saturday 16 June 2018, 4.30PM to 6.00pm
• Free admission
  Booking required
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• Ron Cooke Hub, University of York (map|getting to campus)
• Wheelchair accessible

Event details

In the near future, an increasing number of autonomous systems will be placed in roles and given functions that were previously the domain of skilled humans. What are the implications of this for the world of work? Our expert speakers include Ivana Bartoletti, the Head of Privacy and Data Protection at Gemserv, Kallum Pickering, Senior Economist with Berenberg, Tony Prescott of the University of Sheffield and Jon Timmis of the University of York.

The session is chaired by Sir Malcolm Grant, Chancellor of the University of York and Chairman of NHS England.

Brought to you in collaboration with the Assuring Autonomy International Programme, which is supported by the Lloyd’s Register Foundation and the University of York.

Assuring Autonomy International Programme

The Assuring Autonomy International Programme is a £12 million initiative funded by Lloyd’s Register Foundation and the University of York to spearhead research, training and standards in the safety of robotics and autonomous systems (RAS). Our vision is to further enable the widespread and beneficial uptake of RAS by overcoming the obstacles to achieving regulatory and public acceptance.

About the speakers

Ivana Bartoletti heads up the privacy and data protection practise at Gemserv. She helps businesses harness the data they hold and advises on compliance with privacy legislation at UK, EU and global level.  She works across all sectors and also focuses on the privacy challenges surrounding the Internet of Things and Artificial Intelligence. A keynote speaker at industry events in the UK and internationally, she is also Chair of the Fabian Women’s Network, helping women to achieve in public life as well as influencing policy on the economy, tech, healthcare and foreign affairs. She regularly writes and features in the media in both the UK and overseas, commenting on privacy, data ethics and innovation.  

Professor Sir Malcolm Grant is currently Chairman of NHS England, which has responsibility for holding and investing the NHS budget to secure continual improvement in the quality of the health and healthcare for the population of England. He is also Chancellor of the University of York.  He served for 10 years as President and Provost of UCL, from 2003 to 2013, and was previously Pro Vice Chancellor of Cambridge and Professor and Head of Department of Land Economy. He is an Honorary Fellow of Clare College Cambridge.

Past roles have included service as Chairman of the Russell Group, of the Local Government Commission for England, and of the Agriculture and Environment Biotechnology Commission. He has been a member of the Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE), of the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) and of the University Grants Committee of Hong Kong.

He has a strong interest in higher education globally, and is currently senior adviser to the President of Arizona State University; and President of the Council for the Assistance of At-Risk Academics (CARA); Chairman of the PLuS Alliance advisory board (Australia, USA and UK), and a member of the International Advisory Council of the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology; and of the International Council on Global Competitiveness of Russian Universities (for the 5-100 project). He is a trustee of Somerset House; a Governor of the Ditchley Foundation; a Bencher of Middle Temple; a British Business Ambassador; and an Honorary Fellow of the Royal College of Physicians, the Royal Town Planning Institute and the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors. 

Kallum Pickering is Senior Economist with Berenberg, Germany’s oldest private bank, where he leads on UK and global macroeconomic commentary and analysis. Prior to joining Berenberg in August 2015, he was a UK economist at BNP Paribas. Kallum regularly contributes to the public debate through interviews on Bloomberg, CNBC, the BBC and CNN. He writes a column for The Telegraph and has written for the Evening Standard and City AM. He holds a Master’s degree in economics from the University of Warwick. 

Tony Prescott is a Professor of Cognitive Robotics at the University of Sheffield and Director of Sheffield Robotics, an inter-disciplinary research institute across both Universities in Sheffield.  His research aims both to advance the understanding of biological life, and to create useful new technologies such as assistive, educational and collaborative robots. With his collaborators he has developed the whiskered robots 'Scratchbot' and 'Shrewbot' and the pet-like companion robot 'MiRo'. He is currently working as a partner in the EU Human Brain Project to develop brain-like control systems for the iCub humanoid robot that will provide the robot with a human-like autobiographical memory. As the co-founder of the University of Sheffield spin-out company Consequential Robotics, he is also engaged in commercial projects to develop assistive robots that will enhance the experience of life as we age.  Tony regularly writes and talks about the societal and cultural impacts of future robotic, AI, virtual reality and telepresence technologies.

Tony is a Fellow of the British Psychological Society (FBPsS), Director of Research for Consequential Robotics, Editor of Connection Science, a Distinguished Fellow of the Sage Center for the Study of Mind, Co-founder of the 'Living Machines' International Conference Series, and Co-founder and Director of Sheffield Robotics. He is editor of Living Machines: A Handbook of Research on Biomimetic and Biohybrid Systems (Oxford University Press). His research has been covered by the BBC One Show, Radio 4’s Today Programme, Material World, Costing the Earth and World at One, Discovery Channel, CNN the Guardian, the Telegraph, the Observer, The Economist, Science Magazine, New Scientist, Focus Magazine and American Scientist. 

Professor Jon Timmis is the Pro-Vice-Chancellor for Partnerships & Knowledge Exchange at the University of York. He provides the strategic leadership for developing new collaborations with key partners for the University, including business, government and alumni and the strategic leadership for the development of the University's broad knowledge exchange activities. 

After a career in catering, Jon studied Computer Science as a mature student at the Department of Computer Science, Aberystwyth University and then studied for a PhD in the same department in the area of artificial intelligence.  He moved to the University of Kent in 2000 as a Lecturer, then Senior Lecturer at the School of Computing at the University of Kent.  He moved to York in 2005 to take up a position of Reader in a joint appointment between the Departments of Computer Science and Electronic Engineering.  In 2008, he was promoted to Professor and in August 2013, he moved full-time to the Department of Electronic Engineering. From 2015 to 2017, he served as the Head of Department for Electronic Engineering, before taking up the PVC role. He was a holder of a Royal Society-Wolfson Research Merit Award (2011 to 2016) and a Royal Academy of Engineering Enterprise Fellowship (2014 to 2015) which helped him spend time to start up his own company, SimOmics, for which he is currently CEO. 

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