Dave Page

Great article by Matt Burgess in WIRED today investigating the use of AI in the rail industry. Network Rail is prioritising safety and ethical considerations, and Purple Transform continually commits to working with them and other industries, to ensure AI serves and protects humans (and Turtles! 🐢 ). SiYtE is GDPR compliant and efficiently leverages and enhances existing infrastructure. 💜 🦋 #Betterhumanoutcomes #Aiforgood #RailSafety #EthicalTech

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With the advent of AI never before have a small group of specialists been able to deliver so much value to the companies we work with. I see this trend continuing not just in my company ClearSky Logic but across sectors in general. Supercharging your core team to be 100%s more productive and valuable.

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(Very) early doors thoughts from #BristolTechWeek 🌳 We’re kicking off in style with the Impact Conference and listening to the brilliant and ever inspiring Richard Potter. Already, the message is clear: 🌎 The world needs impact. 💷 Impact needs investment. 👩‍💻 AI, Innovation, and software are the keys to unlocking that investment and unlocking the impact. ⛓️‍💥 Democratisation is the word that keeps coming up - making the transformative power of tech available to all. And already I’m feeling 🤯

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UK FPTP (first past the post) electoral system vulnerabilities. Electoral Calculus is a well-regarded polling / MRP outfit in the UK. The image is their latest prediction of the most likely outcomes of the upcoming GE. It has the Tories on 23% of the vote, with a central prediction of 66 seats out of 650 (so about 10%) but with a massive range of uncertainty - anywhere between 37 and 225 of the seats. The fact that it's potentially so volatile, in terms of seat outcome, is apparently based on uncertainty as to the precise impact of Reform UK (Farage)'s 12% on sapping the Conservative vote. While in some ways I wouldn't exactly weep at a Conservative wipeout, the fact that the difference in seat outcome is *so much* more volatile than the likely overall % changes does seem to illustrate the vulnerability of FPTP as a voting system. Whichever party it is, I don't think one party winning 519 seats out of 650 on around half of the vote is a good outcome in a Parliamentary system, especially not the 'winner takes all' version which we have in the UK. This sort of system weaknesshas long been ignored when the two main parties still have representation in the 100s of seats, as it's only affected the 'lesser' parties and the two big ones seem to long for complete power without the tedium of coalition. I wrote a piece a while back noting that we've seen in microcosm already where things could end up, in the form of 2015 general election in Scotland, in which the SNP won over 90% (56 out of 59) Scottish seats in the House of Commons on just under 50% of the vote. Fortunately the existence of the Scottish Parliament and its proportional representation system kept the other parties alive and able to recover. But there won't be that safeguard in this case. And yes, of course the big parties are themselves coalitions in a certain sense, but privateish debates within Labour or Conservative factions are no substitute for public debates fronted by different parties, whatever one may think of the quality sometimes. Links: EC's main table - https://lnkd.in/etWPkX_T EC's April 2024 voter migration analysis - https://lnkd.in/ey44AZRX EC's June 2024 commentary (before today's announcement by Farage) - https://lnkd.in/eUaydqD6 2015 UK GE in Scotland - https://lnkd.in/eAUTzr27

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wow, this is quite a significant digital twin investment by the US government into an industry with a strong financial underpinning. Mind you, UK Government is investing into the UK National Digital Twin, be interesting to see how different countries evolve digital twin markets. #digitaltwin #simulation Simon Evans FIMechE Neil Thompson Jonathan Eyre Mark Girolami Carsten Maple Tony Baines https://lnkd.in/e_6XESTx

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If you want to understand how AI and automation can help your business, drive ROI and growth take a look at our blog and sign up to the free roundtable if you're local to Bristol. If you want more tailored advice, drop me a DM!

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The Bank of England has published the findings of our point-of-sale experiment which we completed last year. The experiment aimed to assess the technical feasibility of using existing point-of-sale hardware, as currently used in the UK, to initiate #digitalpound payments. The point-of-sale experiment did not involve real money payments. But it demonstrated that, from a technology perspective, existing point-of-sale terminals in the UK could, in principle, be used to initiate digital pound payments, and those terminals do not appear to require modification in order to make the payments. As stated in the consultation response we intend to publish reports setting out the findings of the Bank’s experiments and proofs of concept. This report does not indicate a decision to build a digital pound, or design choices for a digital pound. We expect to publish other reports in the coming months. https://lnkd.in/edd6KF49 #payments #digitalcurrencies #innovation

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When you have mapped the UK's social housing stock with environmental and spatial context, you then need resident consent mechanisms and immutable provenance for the use of their data. Only then can #IoT scale with meaningful applications running on the data. Oh, and it needs to be free or revenue generating for the data owner (the resident). Let me show you #Oct24

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‘Sensational’ Proof Delivers New Insights Into Prime Numbers https://lnkd.in/eCC6aPJ6 Two particular points I'd like to highlight: (1) the authors' use of a "gambit", which presumably has much wider applicability; (2) is the question of existence of zeros with real part 3/4 set on a path similar to the question of existence of odd perfect numbers?

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Looking for a blog recommendation? If you haven’t visited the Daysium blog yet, now’s a great time to check it out. We’ve recently explored key topics like the UK’s split year treatment and non-dom changes to support your compliance journey. I particularly recommend reading our Senior Advisor, Paul Aplin OBE's latest post. He delves into the fascinating role of digital footprints in tax compliance—definitely worth a read. Here’s the link to Paul’s article: https://lnkd.in/e8Ns_8ZT I’d love to hear about your favourite blogs too, so feel free to share!

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More unicorns please! 🦄 Lets get more high-risk, high-reward investment in UK semiconductor companies from VCs, and large scale infrastructure investment from UK gov - this has made some progress recently, but let's keep this going "Don't stare at the pothole, look at where you want to go" - lets stop talking about obstacles in what the UK can't do, and start focusing on finding a path to success, and keeping the valuable assets after they are created "Stop worrying about what you are going to sell, and start worrying about what people are going to buy" - technology should be driven by market fit, a new semiconductor technology is only valuable once someone wants to buy a device that uses it. Preferably millions of them These are some headlines and quotes from a fantastic morning at Cambridge Tech Week's deep dive in Semiconductors. #CTW24 #Semiconductor

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https://lnkd.in/eWK3ZVsM RAGs have become the standard architecture for providing LLMs with context in order to avoid hallucinations. However even RAGs can suffer from hallucination, as is often the case when the retrieval fails to retrieve sufficient context or even retrieves irrelevant context that is then weaved into the LLM’s response.

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The UK Home Office is running an initiative to develop solutions to detect #deepfake content generated by #AI - its Accelerated Capability Environment (ACE) is collaborating with the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology and The Alan Turing Institute on the #Deepfake #Detection #Challenge in response to the risks caused by deepfakes in activities such as the generation of fake news, financial fraud, revenge porn and child sexual abuse. https://lnkd.in/de459bcm

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This is a fascinating blog post from my CCS Insight colleague Simon Bryant about the unforeseen consequences of the EU's Radio Equipment Directive. This has been instrumental in forcing manufacturers (in particular Apple) to adopt USB-C in new devices. However, as it includes imported second-hand devices, we estimate that the market lag means that more than 60% of the European second-hand market won’t support USB-C when the ruling comes into force. CCS Insight predicts that in 2025 it’ll cut two out of five units from supply, or 8 million units worth €2 billion in sales. This will deprive people of low-cost and perfectly usable premium smartphones, encouraging them to buy new devices over second-hand devices. Not a great environmental story... Follow the link below for more details.

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Interesting 1st day at the AI World Conference, yesterday. The Keynote speakers did a great job covering lots of AI territory, that included, the good, bad and the unfortunate. After going to the same event last November, was interested to see progress. With the technology and real world capability, certainly, Oliver King-Smith of Smarter AI included a demo of what is possible today. Oscar Rovira of Mystic AI articulated how to manage the technical challenges for the non technical. Although early days, there is no doubt Gen-AI (all-AI), can be a powerful tool, however I came away with two big concerns. History is clearly and understandably repeating itself... or one should say, human behaviour is repeating itself. When something new comes along, it takes time for people... society, to understand, trust, then adopt it...usually years! From the first commercial steam engine of James Watt and Matthew Bolton, to wide spread industrial adoption was around 27 years. Fast forward to the birth of the Internet to date, around 27 years. Do we have that long to leverage AI in our companies? Keynote speakers SIMRAN JINDAL of IBM did very good audience interaction. One question Simran asked, hands up those that conduct AI proof of concept projects, driven by outcome focussed investment? In other words, deliver capabilities aligned with enterprise strategy and priorities... applies to SMEs too. Brett StClair this was a much more serious question, than the one you asked last year... which was meant to be fun, however, I was a little dismayed to be the only one to put my hand up to Simran's question. It's quite clear, business has a long way to go, to understand, trust and adopt this new technology. It does not help that Gen-AI is being thrown at everything to see what sticks! When Xero, the cloud accountancy company do a survey that finds only 27% of SME business leaders are satisfied with their technology purchase and 73% are not, that should tell the technology sector, there is a long way to go on this...could be 27years... and yet, is it different this time? Exponential compute and all that! The other concern of history repeating itself is, we are working with partners to deliver real-world AI capability in business operations... a desert for AI at the moment... it is very difficult... review our recent company video's for an idea of what is available now. Users of our application can talk to their database and their database talks back.. real-time, no hallucination, real business KPIs, including supplier performance information. A good AI User Experience (UX), should require little effort from the user, otherwise the AI application is dumb, at least for now. Not sure I have 27 years for others to catch onto this, but will give it a good go! Here's to the Brave New World! Time for a coffee, then out the door for Day 2. #AI #ArtificialIntelligence #Callaboration #Innovation #DataScience 

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A Digital Information and Smart Data Bill has been announced on 17th of July as part of the new UK government’s programme of legislative priorities. The bill is among 39 bills presented in the King’s Speech, which sets out the Labour administration’s parliamentary agenda and kicks off a new parliamentary year. The Department for Science, Innovation and Technology is expected to be the lead department on the DISD bill, according to a 105-page 2024 Kings Speech government document published. The bill will be aiming to ‘enable new innovative uses of data to be safely developed and deployed and will improve people’s lives by making public services work better by reforming data sharing and standards. The document refers to the establishment of ‘smart data schemes’, which it defines as ‘the secure sharing of a customer’s data upon their request, with authorised third-party providers’. #disd #uk #datasharing #dataschemes #thirdparty #provider

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Amnet ContentSource organized this very well attended online #panel with Martin Delahunty, Rahul Dhavale and Oleg Ruchayskiy earlier this week. We spent time discussing the many facets of #researchintegrity and what #researchers, #funders, #institutions and #publishers need to do to protect the core of #academicpublishing. Have a look yourself! ReviewerCredits Nvcleus Prophy

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Just completed an Ascender course on business case creation - this quote below from the course content is so profound and relevant: https://lnkd.in/eQ3FDas6

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