James Hetherington

Fiction: “I have instructed my AI to remove all unnecessary politesse and verbiage from all incoming messages. There will thus be no manipulative value to you in not getting to the point. Just say what you want without the schmooze.”

I argue for relevance to society’s needs. I don’t think student-as-consumer will survive the AI wave.

Delighted to join today’s UCL Policy Lab Roundtable on AI, the future of Work and the Role of the University. There was a broad panel of participants with distinctive & fascinating perspectives. HE mist be relevant to student needs, but what is ‘relevant’ increasingly is difficult to predict

We have funded 10 ambitious Challenge-led Awards through the @UCL Grand Challenge Data Empowered Societies, University College London www.ucl.ac.uk/grand-challe...

Do they not do “bringing random things from the supermarket to church day”?

I thought it was Awkwardly Timed Harvest Festival?

This is a classic format. The last time I saw this, the subject was signal-to-noise ratio. It is interesting to consider that math is the signal, and 'magic' is the noise.

At the SC25 trusted research environments BOF. Sadaf Alam presenting our work on Federated Research Infrastructures through Data Governance Extension (FRIDGE). With @bristoluni.bsky.social @ucl-arc.bsky.social Turing Institute and Cambridge

Sorry, I’d misremembered the year of yours when I met this chap. Yep, you’re still champion!

Come to UK Universities booth at #SC25 to find out more about the UK's #DRI programme and pick up some merchandise!

Extremely impressed by what U Illinois have achieved with in house LLM services using their local HPC investments and open source models and tools. This is what I’ve been advocating for UCL and they’ve proved it can be done.

Please visit us later this week at the UK Universities booth to learn more about our research and activities.

It’s fascinating how hard we had to work to get computers to be bad at maths.

Causing this to occur has been an ambition of mine since 2019:

We did it! A joint uk universities booth at Supercomputing! Congrats to the team.

What would you think if offered citizenship of a state? What state would you choose? Would you vote?

What does this do to the role of (public sector in particular) CIO? What changes in the balance of skills and priorities? How do IT org cultures change? I think, not back to the nerdy cottage industry of the 00s but also cannot sustain the tech-clueless mainly-a-consumer culture of 10s and early 20s

What does this do to the moat of platforms like Dynamics or Salesforce vs just doing things with open source libraries? I’m not sure.

Consider especially the work to go from your orgs org model, business processes and culture to a good IT soln, as expressed in configuration and integration of platform solutions, bespoke tweaks to platforms… this is large. Seems likely to be very reducible by LLM as config files to shared base.

Even before LLM, cost of supplier managers, procurement, service and delivery orgs in IT is huge. Nontechnical CIO orgs are not cheap at all, and SaaS costs are very hard to control.

Suppose cost of software does fall 20x because of LLMs. (jury is out, but let’s explore).

What does that do?

It might make bespoke software for each org competitive with platform solutions.

The value of better org-sol fit might be bigger than cost of build.

Makes IT orgs builders not buyers.

Arsenal WFC vs Chelsea. #coyg

Uk hpc, what is your contingency planning around US ATC issues for SC25?

I’m wondering if I can rebook through Toronto as that would be more robust?

Repair Café Bring your broken or damaged possessions to our UCL Repair Café event at UCL East Marshgate on Friday, 7th November.

We have people booked to bring broken food processors, favourite jumpers with damaged zips, and ailing plants. Don't miss this opportunity to repair your stuff with the help of 40 technicians and makers. Repair Café | Sustainable UCL - share.google/2qFlWYPHRPLs...

arxiv.org/pdf/2510.22254 “Ten Simple rules for Ai assisted coding in science” is very good. poldracklab.org/10sr_ai_assi... .

Hackney, London. Newham, London. Waltham Forest, London.

I am the cowpox of grumpy professors. Work with me so it’s safe to work with the real ones.

“Places I would like to work” is also a factor.

Honestly, I was assuming most of your answers would be mostly American so was being European as a counterpoint. But no one else replied yet. So now I feel exposed.

CSCS, BSC, LRZ, EPCC, A*STAR