"I'm writing a book called 'The Indisputable Existence of Santa Claus' about the maths of Christmas: how to set up a secret Santa so it's totally fair; how to decorate your tree mathematically; how to win at Monopoly."
"There's actually an awful lot of mathematics that goes into designing a railway, keeping it running, making sure everything runs optimally. Every time you need something to be optimal there's going to be some mathematics at play."
"The Gottman Institute's study about arguments in long-term relationships concludes that couples with the best chance at long-term success are the ones with a low negativity threshold: if something's wrong, they speak up about it immediately. That's something I've taken on board."
"There's barely any aspect of our modern lives that hasn't had a mathematical contribution at some point and yet, if you asked the average person, they might think that maths is just difficult, irrelevant and uninteresting."
"One of the first things I did when I finished my Ph.D. was work with the police to look at what happened during the London riots in 2011, which took over the city."
"Everything we're doing online is being not just monitored, but that information is being packaged up and sold and resold to manipulate us."
"Writing about 'What is art?' is not something I ever thought I'd be doing."
"Curating our data is valuable. Like 23andMe - while selling us the chance to know whether we're Vikings or whatever, they're amassing these huge DNA databases that are unimaginably valuable. Get people to pay you to add their DNA to this database. Genius!"
"I'm an academic. I did my PhD in fluid dynamics and now I work at the University College London in an interdisciplinary department looking at patterns of human behaviour in urban settings."
"I think people have this hang-up from school that maths is this dusty old textbook that was finished hundreds of years ago, and all the answers are in the back. Whereas in my job I struggle to find anything that maths can't offer an interesting perspective on."
"When designing algorithms as a business owner, your incentive is your profit, something for your business, it's not an incentive to maximise something for the individual."
"And anytime a programmer makes a decision about how to deal with data, how to average it or clean it, you're imparting more of your own bias on it."
"Imagine life without any algorithms at all, you wouldn't be able to do anything. This is already completely encompassing. We have a habit of over-trusting what mathematics or computer scientists tell us to do, without questioning it, too much faith in the magical power of analysis."
"Algorithms and data should support the human decision, not replace it."
"I spend quite a lot of time thinking about how curated our information is. What we watch, what we read, what we buy, often who we talk to, is all shaped and influenced by some kind of a mathematical algorithm."
"What seems obvious to one person wouldn't occur to another. Your perspective is hard coded into the work that you create."
"When you don't have diversity in the creative process, you inevitably end up with a single, narrow perspective in the output."
"I do think we're at a point in our history where almost all of the big, grand, challenges faced by the human race are those that demand a scientific solution: climate change; access to clean water; over-crowding; plastic waste."
"Once you see the problems that algorithms can introduce, people can be quick to want to throw them away altogether and think the situation would be resolved by sticking to human decisions until the algorithms are better."
"Every criminal-justice system has to find some kind of balance between protecting the rights of innocent people falsely accused of crimes and protecting the victims of crimes."
"I certainly think there are some skills we'll lose as we hand things over to automation. I can barely remember my own phone number now, let alone the long list of numbers I used to know, and my handwriting has completely gone to pot."
"People are often quite lazy. We like taking the easy way out - we like handing over responsibility, we like being offered shortcuts that mean we don't have to think."
"You can harvest any data that you want, on anybody. You can infer any data that you like, and you can use it to manipulate them in any way that you choose. And you can roll out an algorithm that genuinely makes massive differences to people's lives, both good and bad, without any checks and balances."
"We have this imbalance where the people who are making algorithms aren't talking to the people who are using them. And the people who are using them aren't talking to the people who are having decisions made about their lives by them."
"But as soon as Facebook decided that they wanted to become purveyors of news, suddenly you have these highly personalized newsfeeds where everything is based on what your friends like, what you like, things that you've read in the past."
