Sir Alan Wilson
Doctor of Science
Thursday 10 November 2022 - Orator: Professor Richard Harris
Listen to the full oration and honorary speech on Soundcloud
Pro-Vice Chancellor,
Members of this audience will know of a geographic hazard. It is not tectonics, flooding, crime or some other risk to personal safety. It is the expectation that being a geographer you will know, for example, what is the capital city of Bhutan or the length of the longest river in Malawi.
Such knowledge undoubtedly is useful for pub quizzes, but it gives the mistaken impression that geography is just a collection of facts and figures about people and places, and that the role of geographers is only to report them.
Sir Alan Wilson, throughout his prolific career, has exemplified a greater sense of purpose. As a pioneer in city science and urban analytics, long before such terms were fashionable, he has infused science and explanation into our understanding of socio-economic systems, and done so with an acute appreciation of what has been described as the spatial variable, which takes many forms – the importance of spatial interaction, for example.
His approach is not without its own hazard. Science is hard enough when practised within a laboratory where the conditions for experimentation are relatively controlled. Socio-spatial systems are complex and changing, at multiple geographic and temporal scales. Sir Alan himself has estimated the number of variables needed for a comprehensive model of a city of one million people. His answer is around 10 trillion. Whilst that could be regarded as the epitome of big data, what it necessitates is not data, per se – at least, not at the outset – but careful consideration of what the key components are of the system under study; of how they may be linked together and modelled.
One of many methods that Sir Alan has pioneered within the social sciences is entropy maximisation. Its applications are numerous; one is to model flows from origins to destinations – it could be commuters travelling from home to work, or consumers to supermarkets. The exact flows are likely unknown. They do not yet exist in retail applications where, for example, it is the suitability of a new store location that is under assessment. What the model seeks to find is the most probable distribution of flows, dependent on available information that can be used as constraints. And the hazard of this undertaking is increased by placing the veracity of the model on the line by offering predictions as to the future outcomes of the system or how the system might evolve. But the models Sir Alan has developed have proven successful in applications including transport, population, migration, retail, banking and – in an example of how knowledge developed in one field can, with imagination and collaboration, cross over into another – archaeology.
It is impossible to do justice to Sir Alan’s career in the time available. Here is a very small flavour. Local councillor in Oxford. Mathematical Advisor at the Ministry of Transport. Professor of Urban and Regional Geography at Leeds. Co-founder of what became a multimillion-pound company with clients including WH Smith, Toyota, Ford, BP, SmithKline Beecham and the Halifax Building Society. Vice-Chancellor at Leeds. Director General for Higher Education at the Department for Education. CEO of the Alan Turing Institute for data science and artificial intelligence.
This career has taken him from a graduate of mathematics into geography via particle physics and economics, on to complexity science, data science and AI. He recounts that, on appointment to Leeds, a trade newspaper ran a headline to the effect that ‘Leeds appoints Geography Professor with no qualifications in Geography!’. However, he was eminently well qualified and geography was to be his home; not his only home, to be sure, but a place where Being Interdisciplinary – the title of his recent book – was well nurtured and developed because, as Sir Alan observes, geography is itself internally interdisciplinary.
Three final reflections.
The first is that the capital of Bhutan is Thimphu and the longest river in Malawi is the Shire.
Second, I hope today’s graduates will find in Sir Alan’s example the ambition to think big, to think systematically and to make connections both intellectual and personal.
The final is tinged with melancholy but still something I would like to share. Covid has delayed today’s award. Had it occurred sooner then the person standing here would not have been me but my colleague and Alan’s friend, Professor Ron Johnston. Sadly Ron is no longer with us, but thanks to the University’s prodigious capacity for paperwork, I can leave the last words to him. Here is some of what he said:
Alan Wilson is a distinguished scholar with major, long-lasting impact not only on his chosen disciplines and their practical applications but more widely on the deployment of big data across a range of disciplines dedicated to research advancement and social application. He has been a highly successful administrator in and for the country’s university system, and has led major research institutes and programmes.
Pro Vice-Chancellor, I present to you Sir Alan Wilson as eminently worthy of the degree of Doctor of Science honoris causa.