astronomy

Toby Walsh

Toby Walsh is a astronomy topic covered in the lgStudy science library. This page brings together a partial reference excerpt, illustrations, worked examples, real-world applications and a short study plan, so you can understand Toby Walsh rather than just read about it. In short: Toby Walsh is a British computer scientist who is Chief Scientist at UNSW.ai, the AI Institute of UNSW Sydney. He is a Laureate fellow, and professor of artificial intelligence in the UNSW School of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of New South Wales and Data61 (formerly NICTA).

Key takeaways

Toby Walsh belongs to astronomy; place it in that map before memorising details.
Learn the definition first, then one example that makes the definition concrete.
Connect Toby Walsh to a quantity you can measure, compute or draw — that is where exam questions come from.
Reproduce the core statement of Toby Walsh from memory before moving on to harder problems.

Reference excerpt

Toby Walsh is a British computer scientist who is Chief Scientist at UNSW.ai, the AI Institute of UNSW Sydney. He is a Laureate fellow, and professor of artificial intelligence in the UNSW School of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of New South Wales and Data61 (formerly NICTA). He has served as Scientific Director of NICTA, Australia's centre of excellence for ICT research. He is noted for his work in artificial intelligence, especially in the areas of social choice, constraint programming and propositional satisfiability. He has served on the Executive Council of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence.

Career He received an M.A. degree in theoretical physics and mathematics from the University of Cambridge and a M.Sc. and Ph.D. degree in artificial intelligence from the University of Edinburgh. He has held research positions in Australia, England, Ireland, Italy, France, Germany, Scotland, and Sweden. He has been Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research, and of AI Communications. He was chaired several conferences in the area of artificial intelligence including the International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence. He is Editor of the Handbook of Constraint Programming, and of the Handbook of Satisfiability. He proposed the idea of Turing red flag laws, which require any AI system to identify itself as a computer program to prevent human confusion.

In 2015, he helped release an open letter calling for a ban on offensive autonomous weapons that attracted over 20,000 signatures. He later gave a talk at TEDxBerlin on this topic. In 2017, he organized an open letter calling for a ban signed by over 100 founders of AI and Robotics companies. Also in 2017, he organized a letter to the Prime Minister of Australia calling for Australia to negotiate towards a ban signed by over one hundred researchers from Australia working on artificial intelligence. In 2022, he was one of 121 prominent Australians banned from travelling to Russia indefinitely for his outspoken criticism of the use of AI by the Russian military. In 2018, he chaired the Expert Working Group of the Australian Council of Learned Academies (ACOLA) preparing a Horizon Scanning Report on the "Deployment of Artificial Intelligence and what it presents for Australia" at the request of Australia’s Chief Scientist, Dr Alan Finkel, and on behalf of the Commonwealth Science Council. Additionally, he was interviewed on ABC Comedy by Tom Ballard, discussing the "robot revolution". He is the author of four books on artificial intelligence for a general audience: "It's Alive!: Artificial Intelligence from the Logic Piano to Killer Robots", which looks at the history and present of AI, "2062: The World that AI Made", which looks at the potential impact AI will have on our society, and "Machines Behaving Badly: the Morality of AI", which looks at the ethical challenges of AI. His latest book is Faking It: Artificial intelligence in a Human World, was published in 2023. All four books are published by Black Inc. The books are available in ten different languages: Chinese, English, German, Korean, Polish, Romanian, Russian, Taiwanese, Turkish and Vietnamese.

Honors and awards In 2023, Walsh won the Celestino Eureka Prize for Promoting Understanding of Science for his work on artificial intelligence. In 2020, he was elected a Fellow of the ACM and a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. In 2018, he was runner up in the Arms Control Association's annual Person/s of the Year Award. In 2016, he was elected a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Science, won the NSW Premier's Prize for Excellence in Engineering and ICT, and was made Scientia Professor at UNSW. In 2015, the Association for Constraint Programming presented him with their Research Excellence Award, which identifies and honours the most influential people in the field. In 2014, he won a Humboldt Prize. In 2008, he was elected a Fellow of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence for "significant and sustained contributions to automated deduction and constraint programming, and for extraordinary service to the AI community". In 2003, he was elected a Fellow of the European Association for Artificial Intelligence in recognition of "significant, sustained contributions to the field of artificial intelligence".

References

External links

Toby Walsh's homepage

Illustrations

Worked examples

Example 1 — a first encounter with Toby Walsh

Start with the simplest possible case. Write down what Toby Walsh claims or describes in one sentence, then invent the smallest concrete situation in which that sentence is true. In astronomy, the smallest case is usually a single object, a single equation or a single measurement. Check that every symbol or term in your sentence has a meaning in that case.

Example 2 — changing one variable

Take the situation from Example 1 and change exactly one quantity: double it, halve it, or set it to zero. Predict what should happen to Toby Walsh before you calculate. Comparing your prediction with the result is the fastest way to find out whether you understand the idea or only the words.

Example 3 — an exam-style question

Typical questions about Toby Walsh ask you to (a) state it precisely, (b) apply it to given data, and (c) explain a limitation. Practise writing all three answers in under five minutes; the third part is what separates a full-mark answer from an average one.

Applications of Toby Walsh

In research: Toby Walsh appears in astronomy research whenever the underlying quantities have to be modelled precisely. Papers usually cite it as a starting assumption and then explore where it breaks down.
In technology and industry: Engineering practice reuses Toby Walsh in design rules, simulations and safety margins. Knowing the idea lets you read a specification sheet and understand why the numbers look the way they do.
In the classroom: Toby Walsh is common in secondary-school and first-year university syllabi. It links to neighbouring topics Alumni of the University of Cambridge, Alumni of the University of Edinburgh, Artificial intelligence researchers, so understanding it makes those chapters shorter.
In everyday life: Look for Toby Walsh outside the textbook — in sport, cooking, traffic, electronics or the sky above you. An example you found yourself is remembered far longer than one you were given.

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How to study Toby Walsh in 20 minutes

Read the reference excerpt below once, without taking notes.
Close the page and write down what Toby Walsh means in your own words.
Compare your version with the excerpt and mark what you missed.
Work through the three examples above with pen and paper.
Explain Toby Walsh out loud to somebody else — or to Teacher Smith in the lgStudy chat.

Frequently asked questions

What is Toby Walsh in simple terms?

Why does Toby Walsh matter?

Because it connects several astronomy ideas at once: it gives you a definition you can apply, a quantity you can calculate, and a way to check whether a result is plausible.

How should I study Toby Walsh?

Read the excerpt, restate it from memory, then work through the examples and applications listed on this page. The five-step study plan above takes about twenty minutes.

What does this page cover?

It gives you a compact reference excerpt plus original lgStudy explanations, examples, applications and study material on Toby Walsh.