Hilary Term 2026 Strachey Lecture with Professor Ion Stoica, An AI stack: from scaling AI workloads to evaluating LLMs Large language models (LLMs) have taken the world by storm, enabling new applications, intensifying GPU shortages, and raising concerns about the accuracy of their outputs. In this talk, I will present several projects I have worked on to address these challenges. Specifically, I will focus on Ray, a distributed framework for scaling AI workloads, vLLM and SGLang, two high-throu...
Feb 26, 2026•56 min
MT25 Strachey Lecture - Professor Rafail Ostrovsky: Advances in Garbled Circuits Nearly 40 years ago, Andy Yao proposed the construction of “Garbled Circuits,” which had an enormous impact on the field of secure computation -- both in theory and in practice. In Garbled Circuits, two parties agree on a Boolean circuit that they want to evaluate, where both parties have partial, disjoint inputs to the circuit, and neither party is willing to disclose to the other party anything but the output. In ...
Oct 27, 2025•48 min
Kevin Buzzard: Will Computers prove theorems? Will computers one day replace human mathematicians? Is this just around the corner, or decades away? Can neural networks spot patterns which humans have missed? Currently language models are great for brainstorming big ideas but are very poor when it comes to details. Can integrating a language model with a theorem prover like Lean solve these problems? Is the modern mathematical literature riddled with errors, and is it feasible to hope that a mach...
May 15, 2025•46 min
Leo De Moura: Formalizing the Future: Lean’s Impact on Mathematics, Programming, and AI How can mathematicians, software developers, and AI systems work together with complete confidence in each other’s contributions? The open-source Lean proof assistant and programming language provides an answer, offering a rigorous framework where proofs and programs are machine-checkable, shared, and extended by a broad community of collaborators. By removing the traditional reliance on trust-based verificat...
May 15, 2025•47 min
Strachey Lecture: Privacy, Verification, Robustness: A Cryptographer's perspective on ML Cryptographic tools enable the safe use of technology platforms controlled by worst case computationally bounded adversaries.In this talk I will show how cryptographic paradigms and tools can be used to address trust issues in various phases of the machine learning pipeline. We will touch on approaches for achieving privacy, correctness, and robustness in presence of adversaries.
Mar 11, 2025•1 hr 4 min
Strachey Lecture: From probabilistic bisimulation to representation learning via metrics - Professor Prakash Panangaden Bisimulation is a fundamental equivalence relation in process theory invented by Robin Milner and with an elegant fixed-point definition due to David Park. In this talk I will review the concept of bisimulation and then discuss its probabilistic analogue. This was extended to systems with continuous state spaces. Despite its origin in theoretical work, it has proved to be usefu...
Dec 02, 2024•55 min
The talk will emphasize the diversity of mathematical tools necessary for understanding blockchain protocols and their applications The talk will emphasize the diversity of mathematical tools necessary for understanding blockchain protocols and their applications (e.g., distributed computing, game theory, mechanism design, and continuous-time stochastic processes) and the immediate practical impact that mathematical work on this topic has had (e.g., Ethereum's EIP-1559 and LVR for automated mark...
May 16, 2024•1 hr 2 min
Professor Christel Baier delivers the Hillary Term 2024 Strachey Lecture Abstract: The classical stochastic shortest path (SSP) problems asks to find a policy for traversing a weighted stochastic graph until reaching a distinguished goal state that minimizes the expected accumulated weight. SSP problems have numerous applications in, e.g., operations research, artificial intelligence, robotics and verification of probabilistic systems. The underlying graph model is a finite-state Markov decision...
Feb 06, 2024•57 min
In this term's Strachey lecture, Professor Monika Henzinger gives an introduction to differential privacy with an emphasis on differential private algorithms that can handle changing input data. Decisions are increasingly automated using rules that were learnt from personal data. Thus, it is important to guarantee that the privacy of the data is protected during the learning process. To formalize the notion of an algorithm that protects the privacy of its data, differential privacy was introduce...
Nov 13, 2023•55 min
It’s said that Henry Ford’s customers wanted “a faster horse”. If Henry Ford was selling us artificial intelligence today, what would the customer call for, “a smarter human”? That’s certainly the picture of machine intelligence we find in science fiction narratives, but the reality of what we’ve developed is far more mundane. Car engines produce prodigious power from petrol. Machine intelligences deliver decisions derived from data. In both cases the scale of consumption enables a speed of oper...
Sep 04, 2023•50 min
An introduction to algorithmic aspects of symmetry and similarity, ranging from the fundamental complexity theoretic "Graph Isomorphism Problem" to applications in optimisation and machine learning Symmetry is a fundamental concept in mathematics, science and engineering, and beyond. Understanding symmetries is often crucial for understanding structures. In computer science, we are mainly interested in the symmetries of combinatorial structures. Computing the symmetries of such a structure is es...
Feb 16, 2023•1 hr 1 min
An overview of work on probabilistic soft logic (PSL), an SRL framework for large-scale collective, probabilistic reasoning in relational domains and a description of recent work which integrates neural and symbolic (NeSy) reasoning. Our ability to collect, manipulate, analyze, and act on vast amounts of data is having a profound impact on all aspects of society. Much of this data is heterogeneous in nature and interlinked in a myriad of complex ways. From information integration to scientific d...
Oct 27, 2022•1 hr 4 min
There has been a proliferation of technological developments in the last few years that are beginning to improve how we perceive, attend to, notice, analyse and remember events, people, data and other information. There has been a proliferation of technological developments in the last few years that are beginning to improve how we perceive, attend to, notice, analyse and remember events, people, data and other information. These include machine learning, computer vision, advanced user interface...
Mar 16, 2022•54 min
Mixed Signals: audio and wearable data analysis for health diagnostics Wearable and mobile devices are very good proxies for human behaviour. Yet, making the inference from the raw sensor data to individuals’ behaviour remains difficult. The list of challenges is very long: from collecting the right data and using the right sensor, respecting resource constraints, identifying the right analysis techniques, labelling the data, limiting privacy invasion, to dealing with heterogeneous data sources ...
Jan 06, 2022•52 min
The advantages of computing for society are tremendous. But while new technological developments emerge, we also witness a number disadvantages and unwanted side-effects. The advantages of computing for society are tremendous. But while new technological developments emerge, we also witness a number disadvantages and unwanted side-effects: from the speed with which fake news spreads to the formation of new echo-chambers and the enhancement of polarization in society. It is time to reflect upon t...
Nov 04, 2021•1 hr 9 min
As AI technologies enter our everyday lives at an ever increasing pace, there is a greater need for AI systems to work synergistically with humans. As AI technologies enter our everyday lives at an ever increasing pace, there is a greater need for AI systems to work synergistically with humans. This requires AI systems to exhibit behavior that is explainable to humans. Synthesizing such behavior requires AI systems to reason not only with their own models of the task at hand, but also about the ...
May 12, 2021•1 hr 15 min
Innovation is the main event of the modern age, the reason we experience both dramatic improvements in our living standards and unsettling changes in our society. Innovation is the main event of the modern age, the reason we experience both dramatic improvements in our living standards and unsettling changes in our society. Forget short-term symptoms like Donald Trump and Brexit, it is innovation itself that explains them and that will itself shape the 21st century for good and ill. Yet innovati...
May 12, 2021•55 min
Medicine and Physiology in the Age of Dynamics: Newton Abraham Lecture 2020 Lecture by Professor Alan Garfinkel (2019-2020 Newton Abraham Visiting Professor, University of Oxford, Professor of Medicine (Cardiology) and Integrative Biology and Physiology, University of California, Los Angeles)
Apr 02, 2020•1 hr 10 min
Can we build on our understanding of supervised learning to define broader aspects of the intelligence phenomenon. Strachey Lecture delivered by Leslie Valiant. Supervised learning is a cognitive phenomenon that has proved amenable to mathematical definition and analysis, as well as to exploitation as a technology. The question we ask is whether one can build on our understanding of supervised learning to define broader aspects of the intelligence phenomenon. We regard reasoning as the major com...
Dec 11, 2019•1 hr 5 min
Professor Leslie Kaelbling (MIT) gives the 2019 Stachey lecture. The Strachey Lectures are generously supported by OxFORD Asset Management. We, as robot engineers, have to think hard about our role in the design of robots and how it interacts with learning, both in 'the factory' (that is, at engineering time) and in 'the wild' (that is, when the robot is delivered to a customer). I will share some general thoughts about the strategies for robot design and then talk in detail about some work I ha...
Mar 29, 2019•55 min
Why has AI been so hard and what are the problems that we might work on in order to make real progress to human level intelligence, or even the super intelligence that many pundits believe is just around the corner? In his 1950 paper "Computing Machinery and Intelligence" Alan Turing estimated that sixty people working for fifty years should be able to program a computer (running at 1950 speed) to have human level intelligence. AI researchers have spent orders of magnitude more effort than that ...
Dec 20, 2018•59 min
This talk is about the experience of providing privacy when running analytics on users’ personal data. The two-sided market of Cloud Analytics emerged almost accidentally, initially from click-through associated with user's response to search results, and then adopted by many other services, whether web mail or social media. The business model seen by the user is of a free service (storage and tools for photos, video, social media etc). The value to the provider is untrammeled access to the user...
Apr 16, 2018•1 hr 1 min
Stroustrup discusses the development and evolution of the C++, one of the most widely used programming languages ever. The development of C++ started in 1979. Since then, it has grown to be one of the most widely used programming languages ever, with an emphasis on demanding industrial uses. It was released commercially in 1985 and evolved through one informal standard (“the ARM”) and several ISO standards: C++98, C++11, C++14, and C++17. How could an underfinanced language without a corporate o...
Dec 12, 2017•59 min
Éva Tardos, Department of Computer Science, Cornell University, gives the 2017 Ada Lovelace Lecture on 6th June 2017. Selfish behaviour can often lead to suboptimal outcome for all participants, a phenomenon illustrated by many classical examples in game theory. Over the last decade we developed good understanding on how to quantify the impact of strategic user behaviour on the overall performance in many games (including traffic routing as well as online auctions). In this talk we will focus on...
Aug 22, 2017•56 min
Professor Kraus will show how combining machine learning techniques for human modelling, human behavioural models, formal decision-making and game theory approaches enables agents to interact well with people. Automated agents that interact proficiently with people can be useful in supporting, training or replacing people in complex tasks. The inclusion of people presents novel problems for the design of automated agents’ strategies. People do not necessarily adhere to the optimal, monolithic st...
Jun 23, 2017•41 min
Professor Zoubin Ghahramani gives a talk on probabilistic modelling from it's foundations to current areas of research at the frontiers of machine learning. Probabilistic modelling provides a mathematical framework for understanding what learning is, and has therefore emerged as one of the principal approaches for designing computer algorithms that learn from data acquired through experience. Professor Ghahramani will review the foundations of this field, from basics to Bayesian nonparametric mo...
Mar 15, 2017•51 min
Students undertaking undergraduate (first) degrees in Computer Science, Computer Science & Philosophy and Maths & Computer Science undertake a Group Design Practical as a compulsory part of the course. The Group Design Practical, which runs from January, sees teams of four to six undergraduate students battling it out with their chosen project. Many of the challenges having been set, or sponsored by industry partners, which in 2016 included Research, Oxford Asset Management, Bloomberg an...
Nov 08, 2016•2 min
Professor Andrew Hodges author of 'Alan Turing: The Enigma' talks about Turing's work and ideas from the definition of computability, the universal machine to the prospect of Artificial Intelligence. In 1951, Christopher Strachey began his career in computing. He did so as a colleague of Alan Turing, who had inspired him with a 'Utopian' prospectus for programming. By that time, Turing had already made far-reaching and futuristic innovations, from the definition of computability and the universa...
Nov 02, 2016•1 hr 7 min
Dr Scott Aaronson (MIT, UT Austin) gives the 2016 Strachey lecture. In the near future, it will likely become possible to perform special-purpose quantum computations that, while not immediately useful for anything, are plausibly hard to simulate using a classical computer. These "quantum supremacy experiments" would be a scientific milestone---decisively answering quantum computing skeptics, while casting doubt on one of the foundational tenets of computer science, the Extended Church-Turing Th...
Jun 14, 2016•1 hr 12 min
In this talk Demis Hassabis discuss's what is happening at the cutting edge of AI research, its future impact on fields such as science and healthcare, and how developing AI may help us better understand the human mind. Strachey Lecture 2016, generously supported by Oxford Asset Management. Dr. Demis Hassabis is the Co-Founder and CEO of DeepMind, the world’s leading General Artificial Intelligence (AI) company, which was acquired by Google in 2014 in their largest ever European acquisition. Dem...
Feb 26, 2016•55 min
