Emma Byrne
NationalityBritish
Alma materUniversity College London
Occupation(s)Writer and scientist

Emma Byrne is a contemporary British writer and scientist, working in the fields of swearing, artificial intelligence and robotics.

Career

Scientist

Byrne completed her PhD in Expectation Violation Analysis[1] at the University College London, UCL, Department of Computer Science in 2005. Her work showed how it is possible to automatically identify and rank unexpected, and therefore interesting, news from the large volumes of news are available around the clock and around the world.

She later worked at the University of Aberystwyth as part of a team that created a robot scientist.[2] This robot used artificial intelligence to generate functional genomics hypotheses about the yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae and experimentally tested these hypotheses by using laboratory automation. During this time, she also won the British Computer Society AI group's annual machine intelligence award.[3]

As part of her work in medical informatics, she studied the introduction of the summary care record, a centrally stored, shared electronic patient record and made recommendations about the implementation of large scale information technology projects in health care.[4]

Writer

Byrne has written about science, business and culture for Wired,[5] the FT,[6] The Guardian[7] and many others.[8]

Her first book was a popular science book called Swearing is Good for You,[9] published in 2017. The book outlines the science behind swearing: how it affects us both physically and emotionally, and how it is natural and beneficial. She concludes that often, including swear words in our language can actually help us gain credibility and establish a sense of camaraderie. The book has been described as "entertaining and often enlightening"[10] and has been translated into multiple languages.

Her second book is called How to Build a Human: What Science Knows About Childhood.[11] This reviews what science can teach about childhood and Byrne suggests that parents can adopt the methods of science to help raise their children. This includes focusing on the variance, as well as the average, of behaviours and characteristics, rather than following prescriptive instructions for parenthood.

Media and events

As an expert in swearing, robotics and artificial intelligence, Byrne has made numerous appearances on Sky News, BBC news and radio,[12] and at science festivals and literary festivals.[13] She was featured in the documentary "Holy F***"[14] presented by Ardal O'Hanlon on RTE One, where she discussed gender differences in swearing.

References

  1. ↑ Byrne, Emma (2005). The expectation violation analysis framework: the analysis and evaluation of interesting news by means of inconsistency with expectations. London: UCL. Retrieved 21 May 2021.
  2. ↑ King, Ross; Rowland, Jem; Oliver, Stephen; Young, Michael; Aubrey, Wayne; Byrne, Emma; Liakata, Maria; Markham, Magdalena; Pir, Pinar; Soldatova, Larisa; Sparkes, Andrew; Whelan, Kenneth; Clare, Amanda (3 April 2009). "The Automation of Science". Science. 324 (5923): 85–89. Bibcode:2009Sci...324...85K. doi:10.1126/science.1165620. PMID 19342587. S2CID 14948753. Retrieved 21 May 2021.
  3. ↑ Byrne, Emma; Whelan, Ken. "Electrolux Sponsored Machine Intelligence Awards 2006 goes to 'Adam - the Robot Scientist'". BCS SGAI. BCS. Retrieved 21 May 2021.
  4. ↑ Greenhalgh, Trisha; Stramer, Katja; Bratan, Tanja; Byrne, Emma; Mohammad, Yara; Russell, Jill (2008). "Introduction of shared electronic records: multi-site case study using diffusion of innovation theory". BMJ. 337: a1786. doi:10.1136/bmj.a1786. PMC 3269664. PMID 18948344. S2CID 1063210.
  5. ↑ Byrne, Emma. "From ethics to accountability, this is how AI will suck less in 2019". Wired. Condé Nast. Retrieved 21 May 2021.
  6. ↑ Byrne, Emma (14 June 2012). "Accolades for pioneers in world of science". Financial Times. Retrieved 21 May 2021.
  7. ↑ Byrne, Emma (24 October 2017). "Philip Pullman's swearwords are a useful lesson for children". The Guardian. Retrieved 21 May 2021.
  8. ↑ Byrne, Emma (10 February 2017). "Writing". Emma Byrne. Retrieved 21 May 2021.
  9. ↑ Byrne, Emma (2 November 2017). Swearing is Good For You. Profile Books. p. 240. ISBN 9781781255780. Retrieved 21 May 2021.
  10. ↑ "The power of profane language". The Economist. The Economist Newspaper Limited. 27 January 2018. Retrieved 21 May 2021.
  11. ↑ Byrne, Emma (1 July 2021). How to Build a Human. Profile Books. p. 354. ISBN 9781788164917. Retrieved 21 May 2021.
  12. ↑ Marr, Andrew (20 November 2017). "Start the Week". BBC. Retrieved 21 May 2021.
  13. ↑ Byrne, Emma (18 January 2017). "Speaking". Emma Byrne. Retrieved 21 May 2021.
  14. ↑ "HOLY F***". RTE Press Centre. RTE. Retrieved 21 May 2021.
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