“You can never have enough time in Cambridge,” quoted my wise MBA classmate Sandiran Pillay.
Highlights of another outstanding week in and out of the Cambridge MBA classroom.
A major highlight was definitely catching another great guest speaker series by the El-Erian Institute of Behavioural Economics and Policy, where I had the privilege to hear from Elisabeth Costa, Managing Director of the Behavioural Insights Team UK, about their work on applying behavioural nudges to tackle online harms (think gambling, hate speech, e-commerce fraud etc). I first came across the “Nudge Unit” when I was working in the Singapore Civil Service and that gave me a whole new perspective on tackling policy challenges ranging from raising recycling rates, to encouraging organ donations in the event of death to improving cyber hygiene. So glad to be able to learn firsthand about the creative application of nudges to improve online safety, a topic close to my heart.
A very informative AI ethics workshop by the researchers at Centre for Human-Inspired Artificial Intelligence (CHIA) and the Cambridge University AI Ethics Society, where I took away so much in a short hour and it left me pondering about some of the issues discussed (e.g. material constrains and anthropomorphising of AI). As an interested learner in this area, I don’t pretend to know a lot about this topic and I am always glad to meet new people and learn from the experts. So glad that CHIA and CU AIES have so generously opened up these events across the University of Cambridge community for anyone interested to learn about AI Ethics.
In the same week, with my MBA entrepreneurship team Harry Toumazis, Calvin Liew, John Stathis, Kaviraj Khurana, we pitched a business idea for a GPT agent (did anyone say AI hype). Entrepreneurship is not for everyone, but never say never.
Finally a Formal Hall dinner together with Shi Yunn Chua. As engineering graduates (albeit from Imperial not Cambridge), it was nice to join an Engineering formal and reminisce about those Matlab/ Simulink days (and the horrors when the code does not work) over a nice meal. Thanks to my recent MBA/ESG accounting lecture, I can’t help but now take a second look at the carbon impact figures on the menu.
