DIRDI Easter Term Dinners

As part of DIRDI’s Easter Term calendar, we hosted two dinners at The Polish Club, Ognisko, in London. Both events were well attended by a diverse group of Members and Fellows representing leading UK Universities, elements of Industry, Government, and the Armed Forces. 

As events that are intended to cohere and introduce Fellows from differing academic backgrounds and professions, these dinners provide a vibrant atmosphere stimulated by talks between courses from Fellows on topics of their choosing. Typically these short addresses function as intellectual provocation for the attendees, guiding discussion and raising emergent points of interest across scientific and academic fields.

We are very grateful to those Fellows who were kind enough to deliver such speeches, including:

• Professor Chris Philips, Imperial College London – Digistain, a tumour profiling technology designed to assess the risk of recurrence in breast cancer patients following surgery.
• Professor Peter McBurney, King’s College London – The legal and technical definitions of AI, statistical process and required considerations for future regulation at the emerging frontier of AI.
• Professor Martin Albrecht, King’s College London – How methodological questions about social science in the field of information security bring value to analysis of post-quantum cryptography as a social science. 
• Professor Simon Bland, Imperial College London – The future of fusion and how the often referenced 20-year and 30-year horizons for exploitable fusion energy technologies may be closer than we think.
• Professor Marc Deisenroth, University College London – An overview of the field of Machine Learning and his role as DeepMind Professor at UCL.
• Professor Alistair Greig, University College London – Work at the cutting edge of ship concept design and improvements in ship efficiency, including the challenges of student education and academic development in today’s environment. 

DIRDI would like to thank all those who attended and particularly those who spoke at our dinners this term. These will be continued and expanded for the 2025/2026 academic year within a growing institutional calendar including Lunch & Talk events and our Third Annual Impact & Invention Conference.

Read the Director of DIRDI’s speech below on the philosophical legacy of the intelligentsia and how it functions as an inspiration for DIRDI’s intellectual fora at Ognisko.