Inside the AI Revolution: Academic, Industry, and Startup Perspectives

AI is reshaping industries, institutions, and everyday life faster than most anticipated. But what does this moment actually mean, and where might it lead?

Join distinguished Churchill College alumni and Fellows for a Zoom panel discussion bringing together academic, industry, and startup perspectives on the opportunities and risks of today’s AI landscape. From scientific breakthroughs to questions of governance and displacement, our panellists will explore what this period of rapid change demands of individuals, organisations, and society.

The panellists will be:

Dr Allison Bishop (G06) – Allison Bishop is co-founder and President of Proof Trading, a fintech startup, as well as an adjunct associate professor of computer science at City College, CUNY. She also currently serves as the President of the International Association for Cryptologic Research. She has a BA in mathematics from Princeton University, a masters in mathematics from the University of Cambridge, and a Phd in computer science from the University of Texas at Austin.

Dr Tim Harris (U&G94) – Tim Harris is a Member of Technical Staff at OpenAI, based in London. At OpenAI, and previously at Microsoft, he has worked on the performance of large-scale AI serving systems. More broadly, his work has focused on performance analysis and optimization across computer systems. Earlier in his career, he was a faculty member in the Computer Laboratory at the University of Cambridge and a Fellow of Churchill College.

Dr Anna Korhonen (Senior Research Fellow) – Anna Korhonen is Professor of Computational Linguistics and the co-director of the Language Technology Laboratory (LTL) and director of the Centre for Human Inspired Artificial Intelligence (CHIA). Anna serves on the United Nations’ Independent International Scientific Panel on AI, the first global scientific body on AI. Her research focuses on Natural Language Processing and AI more broadly, with over 25 years of experience developing computational approaches to intelligent systems.

Dr Tianhui Michael Li (G07) – Michael Li is a tech entrepreneur (Aerial, AI legal-tech SaaS; The Data Incubator, data science training, sold to Pragmatic Institute).  Michael’s experience combines technical leadership with hands-on-keyboard engineering expertise, which he shares as a regular contributor to major publications (e.g., Wall Street Journal,  Tech Crunch,  Wired, Harvard Business Review). He has led data science for monetization data science at Foursquare and has worked at Google, Andreessen Horowitz, J.P. Morgan, and D.E. Shaw.  Michael was a postdoc at Cornell Tech, a PhD at Princeton as a Hertz Fellow , and a Marshall Scholar at Cambridge.

Dr Antonio Weiss (U05) – Antonio Weiss is an award-winning technology expert and best-selling author. He has advised the Office for Artificial Intelligence, the UK Space Agency and NHS AI Lab, the Government Digital Service, and other pioneering organisations on AI adoption and digital transformation. He currently sits as an appointed member of the UK Government Digital Service Responsible AI Panel. He is also an Affiliated Researcher at the University of Cambridge’s Bennett School of Public Policy and the exited co-founder of Thomas Clipper. He holds a PhD from Birkbeck, University of London