AI in Behavioural Economics Research and Policy

Dr Mohamed A. El-Erian is the President of Queens’ College, Cambridge. He also serves as the Chief Economic Advisor at Allianz, Chair of Gramercy Fund Management and the Rene M. Kern Professor of Practice at The Wharton School. He formerly served as chief executive and co-chief investment officer of PIMCO (2007-14).

A columnist for Bloomberg Opinion and the Financial Times, he is a member of the boards of Barclays, Under Armour (Lead Independent Director) and several non-profits including the NBER (National Bureau of Economic Research). From December 2012 to January 2017, Dr. El-Erian chaired President Obama’s Global Development Council. Prior to PIMCO, he was an international civil servant at the IMF in Washington DC for 15 years and, for two years, president and CEO of Harvard Management Company, the entity that manages Harvard’s endowment. Between the IMF and PIMCO, he worked at Salomon Smith Barney in London.

He was named to Foreign Policy’s list of “Top 100 Global Thinkers” for four years in a row and has published widely on international economic and finance topics. His 2008 book, “When Markets Collide,” was a New York Times and Wall Street Journal bestseller, won the Financial Times/Goldman Sachs Business Book of the Year and was named a book of the year by The Economist and one of the best business books of all time by the Independent (UK). His 2016 book, “The Only Game in Town: Central Banks, Instability and Avoiding the Next Collapse,” also a New York Times bestseller, was listed by Inc.as one of the “25 of the Most Inspiring Books Everyone Should Read.” His latest book, “Permacrisis: A Plan to Fix a Fractured World,” was coauthored with Gordon Brown, Ried Lidow and Michael Spence.

He has held several advisory roles with international organisations, governments, and corporates, including chairing Microsoft’s Investment Advisory Committee for almost 15 years. He holds a master’s degree and doctorate in economics from Oxford University and received his undergraduate degree in Economics from Cambridge University.

Neil Lawrence is the DeepMind Professor of Machine Learning, the Senior AI Fellow at the Alan Turing Institute, a Professorial Fellow at Queens’, and the Visiting Professor of Machine Learning at the University of Sheffield.

He is also the academic lead of AI@Cam, the University’s flagship mission on AI and advises the YNOT Institute at Queens’ College.

Neil has distinguished himself both in academia and industry, including as Director of Machine Learning at Amazon, during more than 25 years of work and insights on machine learning models.

Earlier in his career, he also managed to fit a stint as a field engineer on oil rigs in the North Sea and at Microsoft Research.

The impact of his work on how best to deploy machine learning in the physical world, and how best not to, has been felt far and wide, including in end-to-end solutions in Africa where, in collaboration with several local institutions, he organises the annual Data Science Africa Workshop and summer school.

His contributions to the field go well beyond research and teaching, including in advisory work and as the founding and series editor for the Proceedings of Machine Learning Research.

His influence has been felt widely, including through opinion pieces targeted at machine learning and related communities and broader ones published in newspapers, including The Guardian.

His recent book, published on June 6th of this year, is “The Atomic Human: Understanding Ourselves in the Age of AI”.

The book deals with fundamental issues such as what AI means for our identity and for humans’ position at the centre of the world, based on what has been viewed for centuries as the uniqueness of human intelligence.

The thesis of the book is that “by slicing away at the facets of human intelligence that can be replaced by machines, AI uncovers what is left: an indivisible core that is the essence of humanity.”

In various reviews, the book has been described as “an enlightening read on AI,” “an utterly absorbing account of humans” and “a brilliantly panoramic celebration of the vast expanses of human cognition” written by “one of the world’s foremost authorities on AI and one of the few that deployed AI in large-scale industrial systems.”