Mark Ashworth Photography

As the 40th iteration of the Darwin College Lecture Series gets underway, its first speaker has a sense of purpose that will be music to the ears of attendees.

“I don’t like talks that are very waffly,” says Simon Peyton Jones. “So I want to not waffle, and provide lots of concrete ideas and examples.”

Simon’s career as a computer scientist straddles industry, research and educational  outreach, strands which are held together by his palpable passion for the subject.

“I think people are quite alienated by computers a lot of the time,” he recognises.

“They’re sort of remote, and magic, and for other people, and too hard. And they don’t feel a sense of agency about computing. So I’m really keen for young people particularly, but for everybody really, to feel that computers are their servants! That they can amplify and give extra oomph to what they do. But to do that you need to have some level of understanding about how they work.”

That understanding is something which Simon has spent a lifetime pursuing. After studying Maths at Trinity College, Cambridge, followed by a postgraduate diploma in Computer Science, which was yet to be offered as an undergraduate discipline, he taught at UCL and at Glasgow University, before taking up a role at the emergent Microsoft Research in 1998. For the past three years he has been employed as an Engineering Fellow at Epic Games, the makers of Fortnite, while keeping a foot in the world of academia as a Distinguished Affiliate Scholar at Pembroke, and a Distinguished Honorary Fellow of the Computer Science Department. For Epic he is busy designing Verse, a new programming language for the metaverse.

Twenty years ago, Simon was driven by his own now adult children’s experience of the lack of computer education to launch Computing at School, an initiative which has had a transformative effect on the national approach to the subject.

“If you were a professional biologist, the subject that children learn at school is recognisable to you. Whereas the subject they were then learning at school was not really recognisable to me, as the subject I thought was so interesting and fascinating I devoted my professional life to it…So we formed Computing at School which is this sort of guerilla group, grassroots organisation. Initially it was only four people and then it was 40, and then 400, and then 4,000 and now it’s 30,000.”

Benefitting from the timing of the then Education Minister Michael Gove’s curriculum review, Simon was eventually asked to chair the group writing the new national curriculum for computing, which was introduced in 2014. As a result, the UK is now the only country which mandates that all children, from primary school onwards, must be taught computer science.

“That’s quite remarkable. Mostly they say ‘digital technology’. ‘Computer science’ not so much. So we’re the only country in the world that says that’s the subject discipline, that’s the bit that underlies it. That’s the bit that’s exciting and rich and deep.”

His own fascination for the discipline began long before it was offered as a subject. With just one computer at his school, he regularly took a 20-mile bus journey to a local technical college where he was allowed access to an under-used computer which “took up an entire room”, as no one really knew what to do with it.

“I always knew I was going to study computing, really. Even while I was at school I was writing computer programs for these things that were barely available. I always had a fascination with the idea that by scaling up very simple things you can make very complicated things.”

Computers now dominate our lives to an extent which would have been unimaginable at the beginning of Simon’s career. But while he understands the concerns many feel over the growth of AI or, more mundanely, the compulsive nature of gaming, his optimism and enthusiasm supersede his hesitation.

In his Darwin College Lecture, Simon plans to address computing from its foundational level, exploring bits – the most basic unit of information – and their ability to “evolve in interesting and unexpected ways.”

Used to addressing specialist groups, he’s excited by the chance to share the joy and beauty of the computational universe with a broader audience.

“I want people to go away thinking that is really cool, and beautiful, and elegant.”

Join us for Simon’s lecture, Bits With Soul, at 5.30pm on Friday 24th January.


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