Tag Archives: Social Change

The next frontier is not artificial intelligence, it’s artificial societies

Professor Nick Jennings is an internationally-recognised authority in the areas of AI, autonomous systems, cyber-security and agent-based computing. He was awarded the 2026 Research Excellence Award by the International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence.
His research focuses on developing agentic AI systems for large-scale, open and dynamic environments. In particular, he is interested in how to endow individual autonomous agents with the ability to act and interact in flexible ways and with effectively engineering systems that contain both humans and software agents.
Nick is passionate about the real-world impact of research and his systems have been deployed to save lives in the aftermath of disasters, to win Olympic medals for TeamGB, and to monitor the impact of climate change on glaciers.
He has also been involved with a number of start-ups including Aerogility, Darktrace, Sentient Sports, Reliance Cyber Systems, Trans Humanity and is a board member of Midlands Mindforge.

Hiroshima is fading

Florian Coulmas is Professor of Japanese Society and Sociolinguistics at the IN-EAST Institute of East Asian Studies at Duisburg-Essen University. His book, ‘Identity: A Very Short Introduction’, was published in February 2019.

Harry Whitaker is a renowned psychologist and neurolinguist, researching in Cognitive Science, Differential Psychology and Neuropsychology.

In this feature they discuss their experience of Hiroshima.

Cyborgs v ‘holdout humans’: what the world might be like if our species survives for a million years

Anders Sandberg is a James Martin Research Fellow, at the Future of Humanity Institute & Oxford Martin School, University of Oxford. His research centres on societal and ethical issues surrounding human enhancement and new technology, as well as estimating the capabilities and underlying science of future technologies. Topics of particular interest include enhancement of cognition, cognitive biases, technology-enabled collective intelligence, neuroethics and public policy. He has worked on this within the EU project ENHANCE, where he also was responsible for public outreach and online presence. Besides scientific publications in neuroscience, ethics, and future studies, he has also participated in the public debate about human enhancement internationally. Anders also held an AXA Research Fellowship and is now the senior researcher in the FHI-Amlin collaboration on systemic risk of risk modelling.

The Sacred Balance: blending Western science with Indigenous knowledges, David Suzuki’s influential book has been updated for this moment

Jana Norman is an Alfred Deakin Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the Faculty of Arts and Education at Deakin University. Jana also teaches in the English, Creative Writing and Film Department at the University of Adelaide. Jana’s research interests in environmental humanities and legal theory focus on critical and creative approaches to collaborating across difference towards reparative shared futures. Her book, ‘Posthuman Legal Subjectivity: Reimagining the Human in the Anthropocene’ (Routledge 2021) received the Socio-Legal Studies Theory and History Book Prize in 2022 and the Chris Beasley Prize for Gender and Sexuality Theory from the Fay Gale Center for Research on Gender at the University of Adelaide in 2021.

The digital revolution could unlock a green transformation of the global economy

Prof. Dr. Dirk Messner is the director of the Institute for Environment and Human Security of United Nations University (UNU-EHS). He is also the Co-Director of the “Käte Hamburger Kolleg / Centre for Global Cooperation Research” at the University of Duisburg-Essen. He is an internationally recognized expert on the topics of global change, digitalization, and sustainable development, transformation towards the decarbonization of the global economy, global governance and evolution of human cooperation.

95% of the Universe is missing

Professor Malcolm Fairbairn is a member of the Theoretical Particle Physics and Cosmology Research Group, Kings College London. His research lies at the boundary between cosmology, particle physics and astrophysics. In particular, he is interested in dark matter, dark energy, cosmological inflation and particle astrophysics. He has been awarded an ERC consolidator grant running from 2015-2020 to study dark matter and particle physics in the early Universe.