Our first cohort of OpenAI Scholars has now completed the program.
OpenAI Five lost two games against top Dota 2 players at The International in Vancouver this week, maintaining a good chance of winning for the first 20–35 minutes of both games.
Yesterday, OpenAI Five won a best-of-three against a team of 99.95th percentile Dota players: Blitz, Cap, Fogged, Merlini, and MoonMeander—four of whom have played Dota professionally—in front of a live audience and 100,000 concurrent livestream viewers.
We’ve trained a human-like robot hand to manipulate physical objects with unprecedented dexterity.
Our first class of OpenAI Scholars is underway, and you can now follow along as this group of experienced software developers becomes machine learning practitioners.
Oxford is the highest placed UK university in ShanghaiRanking's Global Ranking of Academic Subjects 2018 for Computer Science & Engineering.
Professor Daniel Kroening from Oxford’s Department of Computer Science was among the winners of the CAV 2018 Award for SAT-based and Bounded Model Checking.
Senior Research Fellow Philippa Hopcroft and Senior Researcher Thomas Gibson-Robinson won an award for the Coco Platform plugin for MagicDraw at this year’s No Magic World Symposium in Dallas.
A department team has begun work on a project which aims to enhance large-scale probabilistic databases (and so unlock their full data modelling potential) by including more realistic data models, while preserving their computational properties.
Professor Sir Nigel Shadbolt has been awarded an honorary doctorate by the University of Wales Trinity Saint David. He received the honorary doctorate in science at a graduation ceremony on 6 July from Jeremy Smith, Dean for the Faculty of Humanities and Performing Arts.
We introduce Glow, a reversible generative model which uses invertible 1x1 convolutions. It extends previous work on reversible generative models and simplifies the architecture. Our model can generate realistic high resolution images, supports efficient sampling, and discovers features that can be used to manipulate attributes of data. We’re releasing code for the model and an online visualizatio
Whitfield Diffie, preeminent cryptographer and co-creator of public key encryption, is giving a talk on 9 July at 2pm at Said Business School.
We’ve trained an agent to achieve a high score of 74,500 on Montezuma’s Revenge from a single human demonstration, better than any previously published result. Our algorithm is simple: the agent plays a sequence of games starting from carefully chosen states from the demonstration, and learns from them by optimizing the game score using PPO, the same reinforcement learning algorithm that underpins
In the lead up to the Federated Logic Conference (FloC 2018), 98 researchers and students will be taking part in the (sold out) 2nd School on Foundations of Programming and Software Systems (FoPSS) on 1-6 July.
The next Strachey Lecture will be delivered on 10 July by Professor Stuart Russell from the University of California during July’s Federated Logic Conference (FLoC).
A ‘FakeNewsRank’ system that could show the likelihood of facts, articles, authors and websites being fake is to be developed with funding from the University of Oxford's EPSRC Impact Acceleration Account (IAA).
The first run of our Retro Contest—exploring the development of algorithms that can generalize from previous experience—is now complete.
The twelfth edition of the 'Inspired Research' newsletter has been published, showcasing the department's cutting-edge research
This year’s Group Design Practical culminated in an exhibition and formal presentation held in the department on 9 May. Teams of five to six second year undergraduates had worked on their chosen projects since January, battling it out for four £500 prizes.
The results of a public dialogue on Quantum Technologies, commissioned by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC), have just been published. The department’s Professor Marina Jirotka is on the oversight board for this public dialogue project.
The 2018 Oxford Computer Science conference took place on 1 June at the Department of Computer Science, University of Oxford.
We’ve obtained state-of-the-art results on a suite of diverse language tasks with a scalable, task-agnostic system, which we’re also releasing. Our approach is a combination of two existing ideas: transformers and unsupervised pre-training. These results provide a convincing example that pairing supervised learning methods with unsupervised pre-training works very well; this is an idea that many h
In a world where technological advances can create undesirable futures, there is an ever stronger need for more research into the ethical and societal consequences of technology
Three professors from the department have launched a spin-out, Oxford Semantic Technologies, with the aim of applying this technology to data integration and analysis
Quantum computing has the potential to transform a whole host of technologies, from cryptography to artificial intelligence
New ways of understanding and building basic structures in statistics and machine learning is the research area of Professor Sam Staton, a Royal Society University Research Fellow
DPhil students Jakob N Foerster and Gregory Farquhar describe a method developed by computer scientists and engineers which could make it possible to deploy learning multi-agent systems in the real world
apps track a notable amount of information, prompting an Oxford team to work on increasing parents' and children's awareness of privacy issues, as Senior Researcher Jun Zhao explains
Systems that crawl the web encountering new sources and adding facts to their databases have a huge amount of potential uses
It may feel like chatting with Alexa and Siri is fairly innocuous, but it can be disconcerting to know that your conversations are stored somewhere beyond your control
The first ever expo on artificial intelligence (AI) at the University of Oxford showcased the tremendous advances being made in the field, and looked at where Oxford’s research is likely to lead
DPhil student Matt Smith describes how the computer scientist team is using it to evaluate flight crew response to cyber-attacks
The department's Medical Imaging Group led by Irina Voiculescu has been developing software to improve support for early diagnosis and intervention, and to print 3D models to guide surgeons when preparing for hip replacement surgery
Despoina works as a software engineer with Facebook’s Account Integrity team. The fundamentals of Computer Science and core skills that she learned during her MSc and DPhil at the University of Oxford have stood her in good stead in her career
Maria Vanina Martinez, a former researcher in the department, has been included in IEEE Intelligent Systems' 'AI's 10 to Watch’ list for 2018.
We’re now accepting applications for the next cohort of OpenAI Fellows, a program which offers a compensated 6-month apprenticeship in AI research at OpenAI.
The department’s Professor Sadie Creese and Ana Mincholé will be at the Cheltenham Science Festival in June, discussing cyber security for critical infrastructure, and a project to build a virtual human respectively.
Members of Oxford’s Department of Computer Science have co-authored 11 papers that have been accepted for this year's International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML) 2018.
Undergraduates from the department showcased their project work at the House of Lords yesterday, as part of a launch event for a tool that predicts the cleanliness of the electricity supply.
The programme, including session timings and abstracts, has been released for the major Federated Logic Conference (FLoC) 2018 to be held in Oxford this summer.
We’re releasing an analysis showing that since 2012, the amount of compute used in the largest AI training runs has been increasing exponentially with a 3.4-month doubling time (by comparison, Moore’s Law had a 2-year doubling period)[^footnote-correction]. Since 2012, this metric has grown by more than 300,000x (a 2-year doubling period would yield only a 7x increase). Improvements in compute hav
In order to gain the public’s trust in artificial intelligence (AI) online systems, Oxford will be leading a project to develop a tool that allows users to evaluate and critique algorithms.
The quality of the department’s teaching and support staff was recognised at the Student-Led Teaching Awards on 10 May.
The department’s Professor Samson Abramsky is to receive the LICS Test-of-Time Award for a paper that he wrote in 1998 with Kohei Honda and Guy McCusker. The paper is entitled ‘A fully abstract game semantics for general references’.
The Digital Ape, co-authored by the department’s Professor Nigel Shadbolt, has been published today. The book looks at how smart machines are transforming our lives and societies, and what should be done about it.
We’re proposing an AI safety technique which trains agents to debate topics with one another, using a human to judge who wins.
Professor Bob Coecke and Dr Niel de Beaudrap have received funding from the EPSRC Impact Acceleration Account for a project developing a quantum computing compiler.
Students have shortlisted seven of our department’s teaching and support staff in four categories in the University of Oxford’s Student-Led Teaching Awards 2018.
Emeritus Professor Joan Eileen Walsh, the department’s first DPhil student, has passed away.
Members of the department’s Human-Centred Computer theme are out in force in Montreal this week. They and their collaborators are presenting four full papers, three DPhil student entries and one concept paper at The ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI 2018).
Three of the department’s academics - Irina Voiculescu, Andrew Ker and Andreas Galanis - have been shortlisted for the Outstanding Tutor Award in the Student-Led Teaching Awards 2018.
The annual Oxford Computer Science Conference will take place on Friday 1st June
Academics from the Department of Computer Science will be participating in the 2018 Hay Festival. Visitors to the festival will be able to take part in workshops to programme robots, build their own quantum computer, or attend talks on smart machines, the history of Computer Science and computational biology.
We’re launching a transfer learning contest that measures a reinforcement learning algorithm’s ability to generalize from previous experience.
The Ethical hackathon, a novel twist on the hackathon that highlights ethical issues alongside design features, made its debut in February.
Artificial Intelligence (AI) is the latest subject to be added to the iconic Ladybird series, in a book written by the Department of Computer Science’s Professor Mike Wooldridge.
The department’s Professor Marina Jirotka has been elected to the UK Computing Research Community (UKCRC), a highly selective grouping of the UK’s leading computing academics.
Dame Wendy Hall, Regius Professor of Computer Science at the University of Southampton, is to deliver the annual Ada Lovelace Lecture today as part of the Oxford Literary Festival
On March 3rd, we hosted our first hackathon with 100 members of the artificial intelligence community.
Department alumna Anne-Marie Imafidon won the Role Model of the Year prize at Booking.com’s inaugural Technology Playmaker Awards on 8 March.
The department’s Professor Tom Melham has been appointed to The Alan Turing Institute’s Board as the non-executive Director and Trustee for the University of Oxford.
The National Centre for the 3Rs (NC3Rs) – an organisation dedicated to replacing, refining and reducing the use of animals in research and testing – has awarded its top prize for a research paper by a team from the Department of Computer of Science.
A short film about future virtual humans incorporating material from research by Professor Blanca Rodriguez and her group has been released onto YouTube today.
Marius Gavrilescu, a 3rd year undergraduate student in Computer Science, has won a WCIT Outstanding Information Technology Student Prize 2018.
The department has added a women’s web page to its website to celebrate their achievements and highlight activities that support them.
We’ve developed a simple meta-learning algorithm called Reptile which works by repeatedly sampling a task, performing stochastic gradient descent on it, and updating the initial parameters towards the final parameters learned on that task. Reptile is the application of the Shortest Descent algorithm to the meta-learning setting, and is mathematically similar to first-order MAML (which is a version
We’re providing 6–10 stipends and mentorship to individuals from underrepresented groups to study deep learning full-time for 3 months and open-source a project.
The 2018 QS world university rankings for Computer Science and Information Systems put the University of Oxford in second place in Europe. It ranked seventh in the world.
Two of the department’s professors will be speaking at the Oxford Literary Festival on Monday 19 March, ahead of the publication of their books.
Oxford computer scientists have been awarded best paper at the 2018 International Workshop on Usable Security (USEC), which is a part of the prestigious 24th Network and Distributed System Security Symposium (NDSS).
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