My friend Helen has this crazy idea and crazy ideas can be infectious so now I have it too. Next door to where she lives there are two perfectly good four bedroom homes, but nobody lives in them. One has been empty for over a year whilst the owners are building an extension and modernising the inside before they move in; […]
Do you give staff time off for volunteering?
Does your organisation give staff time off for volunteering? Only 15% of volunteer days actually get used in the UK each year, but right now the Royal Voluntary Service urgently needs more volunteers to help steward people at COVID vaccination centres. So can you let everyone where you work know and encourage people to use their volunteer time so we can get […]
Here’s how we avoid the digital skills disaster
You know that disaster movie feeling – when you can see what’s going to happen but there’s nothing you can do to stop it? That’s how it feels for many of us in the AI and digital field right now. At the upper echelons there’s great work being done developing incredible new technology and (my field) pushing ahead to define data ethics […]
Bitcoin, hen’s teeth and my weekend
Some of the artificial intelligence (AI) projects I’ve been working on lately have proved a bit too much for my seven year old HP laptop. When a seemingly straightforward image classification project needs to be left running for 12 hours overnight in order to crunch hundreds of thousands of images through machine learning code, then you know you have a […]