Arnold House Spring Assembly 2020

ASSEMBLYSPRING 2020 From the Headmaster It is not the Arnold House way to cancel things but the COVID-19 pandemic did force us to do just that to sports events and fixtures, the Y3 play, the AH Proms at Cadogan Hall, a Y6 trip to Regents Park Mosque and even the Y7 Parent Evening in the final days of the spring term. It did strike me how much the staff and boys pack-in to each week at school and how

much there is to get enthused about during term time.

The summer term calendar is jampacked too and we will no doubt have to condense what we have planned into a shorter time-frame once the School is allowed to re-open. But open again we will…and just think about how exciting it

Top row left to right: Charity Day in aid of St John’s Hospice, U12 Rugby Tournament Allianz Park.

Middle row left to right: Y4 Darwin Rocks, Eco Council Open Afternoon, Y8 Simon Mole Poetry Workshop.

Bottom row left to right: Y6 Trip to London Transport Museum.

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will be to be together again; enjoying all the opportunities on offer and renewing the special bond we have between us …a bond between staff, boys and parents which makes Arnold House such a wonderful place to be part of!

Viv Thomas

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PROMS SUCCESS…. WELL ALMOST! When the idea was born over six months ago to bring Music and fundraising together for a concert at Cadogan Hall it would have been unfathomable to imagine that a worldwide pandemic would prevent the event from coming to life. However, Coronavirus can’t take away the work, enthusiasm and effort spent over the last two terms in bringing all the boys and staff together through the medium of music and so it seems right to celebrate what has been a big part of school life during the spring term of 2020.

It’s been a very exciting time in the Music Department with a vast range of sounds

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filling the second floor of the school. From classical to rock, percussion to trumpets and bins to brooms the boys have been inspired and have really enjoyed the experience of working together towards a big show.

Regardless of musical talent, every boy in the School embraced the idea of putting together an exciting performance. The boys were encouraged to bring forward their ideas whether it be choice of song, use of instruments, movements, positions, lighting or tech. They learnt to work together, listen to each other, experiment with different ideas and ultimately refine their performance. In addition, a whole

school performance was rehearsed each Wednesday during assembly and over thirty members of staff met twice a week to form a staff choir thoroughly enjoying the experience of putting together a Beatles Medley.

All is not lost. Whilst the boys will have a break from rehearsing their pieces over the next term, the Proms will be back in the autumn and we will complete this musical journey together with a celebration to remember.

Stephanie Miller (Head of External Relations) & Abi Oliphant (Director of Music)

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Interview with AH old boy Alan Yuille (1962-68) What you have done since leaving AH? After Arnold House I went to Westminster School. At Arnold House I’d been more interested in sport than studying and had done fairly well academically without working very hard.

At Westminster I struggled for a few years, started wondering about the purpose of life, and how I wanted to spend mine. At age sixteen I had an epiphany, inspired by reading about Einstein, and decided that I’d like to be a physicist and understand the basic laws of the universe. This motivated me to take my academic work more seriously and led to dramatic improvements in my performance to the surprise of my teachers. I specialized in mathematics, but with the goal of eventually working in physics. After Westminster I continued studying mathematics at Trinity College Cambridge. I still enjoyed playing sport but reached my athletic ceiling at college teams (we won the inter-college squash championship twice).

I did a PhD thesis at Cambridge on quantum gravity, which attempts to unify Einstein’s theory of gravity (known as the general theory of relativity) with quantum mechanics. I made little progress despite being supervised by Stephen Hawking who at that time was very highly respected

AHS 1964

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by physicists but not well-known to the general public. At the period he was in an electric wheelchair and could still speak but with difficulty (for people who have seen the movie, this would be half-way through the Theory of Everything). After my PhD thesis I went to the USA to do postdoctoral work in quantum gravity, but it seemed to me that nobody there was making much progress either. So I decided to leave physics and work on Artificial Intelligence (AI) instead. AI seemed far more exciting since it was just starting and only studied at a few universities. In hindsight, this was a good (or lucky) decision because quantum gravity remains unsolved almost forty years later while AI is now booming My AI career started at the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at MIT and has taken me though several universities: Harvard, the University of California at Los Angeles, and Johns Hopkins University (where I currently am). During my career it has been exciting to experience how the field of AI has developed and its interactions with many disciplines. In my career, I’ve been a Professor of Engineering, Psychology, Statistics, Computer Science and Cognitive Science. I like to joke that I’ve never been a Professor of any subject that I’ve actually studied. My main speciality is visual perception which, formally, is how to interpret the environment from patterns of light rays entering our eyes. This is core to building AI systems that can recognize faces or drive cars. Vision is humans “under-

appreciated super-power” because it is extremely difficult (from an AI perspective) but humans are so good at it that we take it for granted.

What are your memories of Arnold House?

I have many good memories of Arnold House and find it hard to remember any bad ones. The headmaster, Mr. George Smart, was a god-like figure who seemed to run the school very effectively with a light touch and a sense of humour. I particularly remember him telling us “not to be intelligent parrots”, meaning that we should understand the material and not simply memorize it (good advice which I use in lectures). The quality of teaching was high and there were many activities that I liked even those I wasn’t very good at like plays, singing, poetry reading, or playing chess (I recall once beating Jonathan Speelman, who was later one of the top players in the world, but suspect that it was a fake memory). I was much better at sports and played in the school cricket and football teams. I appreciate the teachers, like Mr. Robson, who helped organize them.

I also liked playing games during break and, apparently, told my mother that “my centre of interest is break” when she asked me what I liked best at school. One of my school reports captures my personality well: “Yuille was good at getting himself out of bad situations which he should never have got himself into”, although this was only about football. My fondness for sport may have helped my education in an indirect

AHS 1968 Cricket First XI

way. Due to a long commute from Highgate Village, I had a tendency to exaggerate my minor illnesses so that I could stay at home and read in bed. But obviously, I reasoned, I couldn’t be sick on match days or on practice days!

What was your favourite subject at School and why?

I liked Mathematics, which came very naturally to me. I did well in the subject without needing to work at it (I did my Maths homework quickly on the bus as I went home). I liked subjects which involved stories and enjoyed History and the parts of English which involved stories. I was less good at writing, and wonder what my teachers would think if they had known that I’d spend much of my life writing scientific papers.

Have you stayed in touch with any of your fellow pupils?

Very little, unfortunately. I had friends at the school, particularly some of my cricket and football teammates, but didn’t stay in contact after leaving. There were a few AH boys at Westminster but we weren’t close (though I played in the first eleven cricket team with Ian McKinnon one year and had a silly table tennis rivalry with Michael Hamlyn). I don’t recall meeting any when I was at Cambridge and after that I have been living in the United States. But I still remember several of my fellow pupils and occasionally try googling them to see what they have been doing. During the last few

years I’ve been in email contact with Peter Beckman, who was a friend and captain of many of the Arnold House sports teams I played in, and hope to go to a reunion sometime when I’m back in England.

What has been your greatest achievement to date?

Hard to say. I’ve written over four hundred academic papers and a few academic books. My work is highly cited and I’ve won a few prizes but nothing spectacular.

Describe an average day in your role?

My days are extremely varied. The main exception is when I teach courses, but this takes up only a limited amount of my time, and when I do academic committee work.

Most of my time is devoted to research, which was once defined as “what I do when I don’t know what I am doing”. This involves supervising graduate students, planning research projects, writing grant proposals, writing up research work and submitting it for scientific review. I prefer the times when I can brainstorm with students to develop ideas about how to implement these ideas and test them. An ideal day would combine discovering exciting new directions by brainstorming and being told that tests showed that our ideas were working out.

What advice would you give someone who would like to study to take up a career in Cognitive Science and Computer Science?

I think you should study a subject you are really interested in and not just the hot

topic of the day, although there are so many interesting things to do in Cognitive Science and Computer Science that they are good areas to go into. In my case, I first went into fundamental physics inspired by Einstein but gradually realized that physicists had been so successful that they by the time I started my PhD only very difficult problems remained. By contrast, AI was a much newer subject so there were many interesting topics to explore and problems to solve.

There are periods where scientific research goes fast in some areas and slows down in others. During a slow period in AI, a colleague of mine switched to Genomics (at that time a very new subject) and did extremely well because he was clever enough, and had inside information, that this field was ready to explode. Realize that science is a “social activity” and communicating your results is as important as obtaining them (I was slow to learn this).

At Cambridge, a sad and slightly drunk man told me to “always sit at the front of the class and ask questions” saying that he had wasted his life by sitting at the back.

I wouldn’t go so far (I was too shy to ask questions in class) but I would emphasize taking charge of your education, instead of relying on teachers (however good they are). For most subjects these days, skills in computer science and mathematics are important. I’d suggest that you read widely and think everything through for yourself and, in Mr. Smart’s words, “…don’t be an intelligent parrot”.

Arnold House School 1 Loudoun Road, St. John’s Wood, London NW8 0LH Telephone: 020 7266 4840 Email: office@arnoldhouse.co.uk Website: www.arnoldhouse.co.uk Arnold House School Ltd (Limited by Guarantee). Registered in London Number 889424. Educational Charitable Trust Number 312725

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