Meet the Board: Neil Lawrence

Neil Lawrence, ELLIS Board Member and ELLIS Fellow, is the inaugural DeepMind Professor of Machine Learning at the University of Cambridge 🇬🇧 and a leading expert in uncertainty and machine learning methods. With over two decades of experience in the field — spanning academia, industry, and public engagement — his work increasingly focuses on how machine learning interacts with the physical world and affects people, institutions, and society.

In this episode of Meet the Board, Neil answers our rapid-fire questions — from “AGI: 5 years or 50 years?” to “Do we need more data or better algorithms?” — consistently grounding his responses in solutions that support people in their work and daily lives, rather than AI development for its own sake.

📘 Book recommendation:
Neil recommends Information Theory, Inference and Learning Algorithms by David J.C. MacKay — a book he describes as deeply inspiring for the way it unifies ideas from machine learning and information theory. For Neil, it offers a broader perspective that encourages intellectual humility and reminds researchers that today’s challenges are often connected to earlier thinking across disciplines.

Curious to hear Neil’s views on responsible, impact-driven AI? 👇 Watch the full video now