Archive for February, 2012

Join us for good times and good conversation at Dr Duncan's in Liverpool City Centre. Don't be shy, come along and say hello!

Maybe it was an asteroid impact, a nuclear war, or a viral pandemic. Whatever the cause, the world as we know it is over and humanity must start again. What would you need to know to not only survive in the immediate aftermath, but avert another Dark Ages and accelerate the rebooting of civilisation from scratch? The Knowledge is a grand thought experiment on the behind-the-scenes fundamentals of how our world works, and what drove the progression of civilisation over the centuries.

Dr Lewis Dartnell is a research fellow at the University of Leicester, working in the field of astrobiology and the search for life beyond Earth. He has written three books: Life in the Universe: A Beginner's Guide, My Tourist Guide to the Solar System and The Knowledge: How to Rebuild our World from Scratch.

Please note that this event will be on the fifth Thursday of April, rather than our normal third Thursday of the month slot.

Dr. Hall will relate her always frustrating and often hilarious experiences as the token skeptic in a local community discussion group, and will follow up with a useful list of anti-science memes that refuse to die (like “science doesn’t know everything”) and will show how skeptics can answer them effectively.

Dr Harriet Hall is a retired family physician and former Air Force flight surgeon who writes about medicine, alternative medicine, science, quackery, and critical thinking. She is one of the founders and editors of the Science-Based Medicine blog, a Fellow of the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry, and co-author of the textbook Consumer Health: A Guide to Intelligent Decisions.

In this talk Katie will provide an insight into the field of Artificial Intelligence (AI) to show how current research on the topic breaks many of the moulds found in numerous depictions of AI in sci-fi literature and films. She will provide an overview of the main techniques used to represent aspects of intelligent thought and behaviour, and discuss some of the landmark success stories and current state-of-the-art. Katie will further pinpoint some of the challenges that AI researchers face, covering technological, legal and ethical aspects.


Dr Katie Atkinson is a Reader in the Agent Applications, Research, and Technology (Agent ART) Group of the Department of Computer Science at the University of Liverpool. The Agent ART Group carries out both pure and applied research in the area of autonomous agents and multi-agent systems. In the 2014 Research Excellence Framework, the Computer Science department was ranked 1st in the UK for 4* and 3* research, with 97% of their research being rated as world-leading or internationally excellent.

Her research concerns computational models of argument, with a particular focus on persuasive argumentation in practical reasoning and how this can be applied in domains such as e-Democracy, law and agent systems. She has published over one hundred articles on these, and closely related, subjects. She received her PhD from the University of Liverpool in 2005.