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June 16, 2008 9:40 PM
Posted By Peter Bentley
On July 9, 2007 I played "Dimbleby" to a debate in the Great Hall of the Natural History Museum. We'd invited Richard Dawkins, Steve Jones and Lewis Wolpert. (Richard did the foreword for my first book, Steve suggested I use his literary agent when I was writing Digital Biology- which I did, and Lewis collaborated with one of my PhD students). It was great fun, with our voices echoing out and reaching the ears of 600 people in the audience. The topic was evolution of compexity, and we covered a good range of topics. The occasion formed the keynote event for the Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference that I helped run at UCL at the same time. You can still download the audio or video of the whole event from here: http://www.cs.ucl.ac.uk/st aff/p. bentley/evodebate.html

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Categories: Digital Biology, On Growth Form and Computers, Creative Evolutionary Systems, Evolutionary Design by Computers, TV Radio and public talks
 
June 16, 2008 5:01 PM
Posted By Peter Bentley
In 2003 I was invited to give a keynote talk at Ars Electronica. The theme that year was "Code:The Language of our Time" and I discovered to my surprise that the talk was printed up and published with me listed as an author:

http://www.amazon.com/Ars-Electronica-2003-Code-Language/dp/3775713565

I forget how coherent I was in the talk, but while I was there I was interviewed for Austrian radio. Listening again some five years later I'm pleased to say I still agree with myself, although I'm slightly dismayed that all the research I describe in the EDBC, CES and OGFC books has not progessed us much further in this area. You can listen for yourself by clicking here.

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Categories: On Growth Form and Computers, Creative Evolutionary Systems, Evolutionary Design by Computers, TV Radio and public talks
 
June 16, 2008 4:23 PM
Posted By Peter Bentley
One advantage of writing popular science is that I get asked to do some fun things. On 8 June 2007 I was one of the speakers in the "You, Robot?" debate in Cheltenham Town Hall, at the Cheltenham Science Festival (with Lola Cañamero and chaired by Mark Miodownik). The title was me tipping my hat to Asimov, of course. In addition to sharing a VIP room with all kinds of famous "TV scientists" which was fun, UCL decided they would stick my image on the homepage for the entire university for a few weeks. Yikes!

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Categories: The Undercover Scientist (Why Sh*t Happens), The Book of Numbers, Digital Biology, TV Radio and public talks
 
June 16, 2008 4:11 PM
Posted By Peter Bentley
At the end of 2004 Robyn Williams of ABC National Radio came to my lab to talk about our research for a radio-based science magazine show. I described (and demonstrated) one of our little bug robots walking around and explained how its brain had been evolved rather than designed by a person. (The specific research behind this process is described in the first chapter of On Growth, Form and Computers for those with an interest in all the techie details.)

Later I was given the link to the transcript of the interview: http://www.abc.net.au/rn/science/ss/stories/s1292193.htm

It's one of those occasions when I wished they'd done a little light editing on my words - it's amazing how ungrammatical and repetitive we can be in normal speech, and how clumsy it looks when written down verbatim. Hopefully my words sounded better on the actual radio show.

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Categories: On Growth Form and Computers, TV Radio and public talks
 
June 16, 2008 3:56 PM
Posted By Peter Bentley
During the publicity tour for the US version of Digital Biology I had a 60-minute live interview on the David Brudnoy Show, WBZAM, Boston, USA, 16 July 2002. He was a lovely guy and it was a great pleasure to chat to him (and the telephone callers). I was greatly saddened to hear of his death just two years later. You can find out more about David here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Brudnoy
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Categories: Digital Biology, TV Radio and public talks
 
June 16, 2008 3:08 PM
Posted By Peter Bentley
In 2000 I helped to make a BBC radio documentary that described how researchers such as myself were combining ideas from biology with computer science. The producer of the piece thought our research was exciting and suggested I write a book. Digital Biology was the result. You can listen to the radio documentary "Natural Technology" broadcast May 2001, by clicking here.

Although I'd written a few academic books before, Digital Biology was my first venture into popular science so I was very pleased when it became successful in several countries.

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Categories: Digital Biology, TV Radio and public talks