university-of-birmingham-alumni

"With this in mind, we need to think about how we can give guarantees that the actions the vehicle will perform are safe with respect to its integrity and the environment. Let’s remember that we do not only have to consider the passengers but also the environment, which will be diverse and complex, encompassing other vehicles, pedestrians, cyclists, buildings, weather conditions, and more."

"A major challenge in deploying ML-based systems, such as ML-based computer vision, is the inherent difficulty in ensuring their performance in the operational design domain. The standard approach consists in extensively testing models against a wide collection of inputs. However, testing is inherently limited in coverage, and it is expensive in several domains."

"To provide guarantees, we’ll of course perform extensive testing. This will give us some confidence about the way in which the vehicle will behave over a broad range of standard and corner cases. But testing is necessarily incomplete however extensive our testing, it can never be exhaustive. There are only a finite amount of situations one can test."

"The general public will experience the car as a vehicle that performs journeys on our cities’ roads, getting people from A to B quickly and affordably. But, under the proverbial bonnet, there will be plenty more going on. These are not cars as we’ve known them. They’re autonomous in the sense that the car will be taking a number of decisions independently during the journey."

"I’m here to help Five tackle the challenge of verifying autonomous vehicles. I have a clear aim: to help Five find ways of giving guarantees that Five’s cars are safe, so passengers can step inside the vehicle knowing it will do no harm to them or those around them."

"Peter James wrote as recently as 2012, ‘scientists and archaeologists are still learning how to apply the radiocarbon method properly.’"

"Centuries of Darkness was particularly critical of modern Egyptologists. ‘Early Egyptologists were usually more tentative about their chronology, continually revising their opinions in the light of fresh evidence. Sadly the study of Egyptian chronology seems to have become so ossified that it cannot question its fundamental assumptions, accepted more for familiarity than for any basis in fact.’"

": ' A family of shrubs and trees, chiefly tropical and subtropical. Many have bitter bark; that of ' Linnaeus, a South American species, provides the quassia chips of commerce. ... of about 28 genera only Ailanthus is likely to be seen in Britain … Two or three species are now cultivated in Britain, but all except the following are exceedingly uncommon. Ailanthus is a latinized form for ailanto, the native name of ; it means 'a tree tall enough to reach the skies.'"

"At one time trees were , principally to provide fuel. Such are the famous , ... pollarded from about 1500 to 1820, when the use of became general; such, too are the numerous pollards in ."

"Of the geologically younger s, the is mainly to be found in Yorkshire; , built like so many s with stone found on its own estate, is a fine example. ... ... has been used extensively in and especially Cornwall; it dictates its own forms—gritty, grainy, sparing in ornamentation but magnificently durable."

"... in 1722 was made head gardener at , the director at the time was a certain —a learned but hot-tempered and difficult man, whose reputation was soon quite eclipsed by the fame of his gardener, for in 1724 was issued the first volume of Philip Miller's ."

"... when the was formed, and at times seemed inclined to devote a preponderance of its activities towards the study of vegetables and fruit, was there to urge the merits of botany and s. For a time, too, he acted as its honorary secretary ..."

"was a doctor, a self-sacrificing man who lived and practised in not far from the . In spite of the grimy surroundings of his home, he was an ardent naturalist."

"... until his tragic end on 13th July 1834 when, in Hawaii, he fell into a trap and was crushed to death by the wild bull that it had ensnared, devoted his life to exploration. To described the adventures and extreme hardships of this adventurous young botanist, ornithologist, and, in his later trips, surveyor, is beyond our scope. He was temperamental and, though lionized on his visits to London, was inclined to be quarrelsome when the urgency of travel and exploration did not keep him occupied."

"s enabled 'sculpture', ornaments, and fountains to be produced cheaply in quantity; Felix Austin of the Artificial Stone Works, New Road, , offered a range of fountains, all designed in the best taste."

"Cheese & Onion, Salt & Vinegar, Ready Salted."

"Sometimes the pphysical mannerisms of someone who’s autistic, cause others to perceive us as ‘shifty’ or ‘trouble’. Many people like me find that as adults we can’t buy something in a shop without being followed around by a security guard, which is ironic given that we are typically painstakingly law-abiding."

"There is truth in the tale of the Ugly Duckling. If you are a swan and unrecognised as such, living with a duck family, that thinks you are a duck, expects you to behave like a duck, and at times might coerce you to be more like a duck – you have a problem… You will have poor self-esteem and the need to isolate yourself at the same time that you try not to be isolated. Indeed, if things get bad enough, you will eventually decide that further attempts at communication will only bring on more trouble, so you stop trying to communicate."

"The book (62 images and quotes) sold 1,200 copies and was ordered from every continent in the world"

"I also wanted to give voice to autistic adults and so I interviewed and included their words of their experiences of being autistic, alongside the images."

"There were an incredible amount of text books about autism, which were really only being read by people already with a vested interest in studying or understanding this little known (at the time), complex condition. I wanted to create something quite different in the awareness, understanding and acceptance of autism. I wanted to create a new visual language, a book that would be able to reach ‘under the skin’ and allow others outside of the autism community, to get a feeling about what it might feel like to be autistic"

"I was always struck by the frequent comment ‘he looks fine to me, you’d never know’. It made me realise that the invisibility of autism was going to be the biggest challenge for him to be accepted for who he was, and to be able to live his life happily, without judgement."

"When someone is walking towards me smiling, I have no understanding of whether they are happy, pleased to see me, or laughing at me”."

"I love objects that are shiny, glittery, colourful. Anything that has a strong sensory input. I consider them my friends."

"I have a bond with objects because they give me what I want and I give them a purpose in return. They make me happy”. Paul"

"I am a documentary photographer from London, making images and stories about family, disability/difference and community. I also have a particular interest in making work about the environment and our relationship with the natural world. I have had a number of documentary story commissions for Guardian Weekend magazine amongst others and also had work exhibited in galleries and festivals in the UK and across Europe including the National Museum of Photography and TV, the National Portrait Gallery. Also in Frankfurt, Paris, Bratislava, Landskrona (Sweden) and Lishui (China)."

"I published Understanding Stanley – Looking through Autism in 2014, a highly personal, long term project about my eldest son, reviewed extensively in international press and on Photomonitor and Firecracker. It was widely praised both within and outside the autism community, for bringing a new and up to date understanding about autism to a wider audience. I have recently completed a commission from the Wellcome Collection, extending a 4 year project about autistic women."

"Another long term project A Peculiar Convenience, a tragi-comedic study of our cultural relationship with the natural world, was included in Val Williams’ show New Natural History (1999). I have continued with the work and it was more recently awarded as winner at the Urbanautica International Awards 2020. In 2021 fifteen images from A Peculiar Convenience, were shown in a group show of 13 international artists – un/natural, curated by Format’s Louise Fedotov-Clements and Niamh Treacy at the Lishui Photography Festival in China."

"In 1998, when my first born was 18 months old I exhibited some new work – A Boy’s Eye View. I was exploring notions of scale, reality, emotion, perception and perspective to try to understand how a young child makes sense of the world they find themselves inhabiting. Another 18 months on, Stanley was diagnosed as autistic and those images I’d made suddenly became incredibly poignant. I had been making work about him and his life as an autistic person, without realising it. The concepts that I’d grappled with were very much part of his life."