The University of Bristol in the west of England is renowned for its pioneering research and digital-led approach. It is joint fifth in the UK for research. It has developed the UK’s fastest supercomputer, Isambard-AI, which is paving the way for AI advancements in research, and the university also has a reality emulator which is used for digital twinning. VMware’s cloud solutions have been integral to enhancing research. VMware Cloud Foundation gives the university the benefits of a public cloud but built on premises, which builds trust and security. Keith Woolley, Chief Digital Information Officer, University of Bristol, speaks about how the VMware by Broadcom partnership has helped the way academics work and also about how education needs to change.
What benefits have academics and the university seen since implementing VMware’s cloud solutions?
This whole journey started from a need to get good compliance. I walked into this organisation and I couldn’t answer a critical question, ‘What’s the total cost of ownership of technology in this organisation?’ I couldn’t answer it because I didn’t know where the technology was. I started speaking with the academics and asked, ‘Why don’t you use the IT department as the shop of choice?’ It really came down to two factors: you’re too slow and you cost too much. That was then when I said, ‘If, first of all, I can make it self-serve, and secondly, I can make it free at the point of entry, will you take it? And the answer to that was yes.’
The great thing is, we built a private cloud. What nobody realised is that the onion layer around it, we control. All the security, all the ways in which we can do compliance, the patching, everything, all the normal stuff we need to do, happens. I don’t have to worry now that an academic hasn’t patched the box for 30 years and leaves it on the public Internet. As far as they’re concerned, they go to a self-service portal. They pick the t-shirt size of the app of the actual server environments and the desktop environments that they need, they pick the operating systems they want, they pick the applications they want and deploy, which is exactly like going to the cloud. I’m sitting there very happy, because I can see what resources are doing, I know where my utilisation is. And then when those resources aren’t being utilised, I go and ask the question, ‘Do you still need it?’ And if the answer is no, rather than having a box sat under a desk that’s costing us a lot of money, we can put it back in the pool.
Our academics come and go with research projects and also there are so many variations to courses where most courses now will have an element of cybersecurity or AI within them, and being able to flex the courses in and out, it’s significantly important to us.
How do you face the question of how relevant will the university be in 2045, taking into account the advancements made in AI?
We, as a leadership team, are now discussing exactly what a relevant higher education establishment will look like. We’re thinking very long and hard around where does automation and AI fit into that? How is it going to alter the way students engage? We’re speaking with our student communities, because initially people said: ‘People will start cheating with AI.’ They don’t spend that amount of money to come to a university to cheat with AI. The student population are very intellectually fine young people that are now being very clear that they want to invest in their futures, and they want to invest correctly. Education, though, isn’t the only thing people come to a university for. They come for personal growth and interaction. How do we take not just the education side, but also the personal side, and make sure that that is futureproof from technology.
The Internet changed the way in which we operate. If you go all the way back in history, and you think about the Luddites and the weaving machines and the way it changed the way in which milling happened, we’re going to see another technology come around, and hopefully what it will do is it will enhance the way in which we operate, rather than remove the way in which we operate.
Now, some roles and responsibilities will change, but we’re quite clear about embracing Artificial Intelligence and teaching people how to use it properly and how to know when to trust or not to trust will be a significant driver for universities going forward. The art of creating knowledge, rather than the art of just being told an answer, will be significantly different, and I think that’s where we will need to change the way in which we educate.
What I’m saying now is that we can’t stop AI, and we had a lot of conversation around what type of adoptor do we want to be? Do we want to just be slowly drifting into it and just bumbling our way through AI with no real strategy, which I don’t think is a really good idea for a leading university that is at the forefront of innovation. Do we want to take what is already out there, but tweak it a little bit, which would give us a bit of competitive advantage for a short period of time, but doesn’t add any uniqueness to why you would come to Bristol. Or do we want to be bold? Part of our strategy is what we call Bold Bristolian. And do we want to be that Bold Bristolian who is going to turn around and say we’re going to embrace AI, we’re going to use it in our education. We’re going to build our own models to support our students that is actually better than what anybody else is doing. Let’s take that ability to be a world leading university with an open mind to how we educate and change our business model.
How do you see it all moving forward and where do you see the University of Bristol’s place in moving forward with AI and research?
The reason the UK Government entrusted Bristol with the Isambard-AI, which is £258 million pounds worth of supercomputer, is because we were able to demonstrate that we’ve taken things like cybersecurity and innovation absolutely seriously. It was quantifiable. We also have the best academics in the world working for us, which really helps when you’re trying to get credibility. We are so lucky to have a fantastic workforce, clear vision and leadership through our Leadership University Executive team under Evelyn’s [Welch, Vice-Chancellor and President ] leadership, and then we have clear governance, clear strategy. We are able to set ourselves out as a world leader in it, which is exactly where we should be.
You’re always going to see us pushing the boundaries of everything that we do. The reality is we still have to operate this technology. To operate this tech, we still have to work in partnership with all of our strategic partners and suppliers to understand their supply chain and what they’re doing in their world, so that we can find ways in which we can take that in and operate it. What I love about what I have been doing with Broadcom, they don’t build me products so that I can then find a problem to fix. What I do is I turn around saying, ‘Here’s the business problems I have’, and then they say, ‘This is how we can resolve them for you’. It’s a really different way around.
When you say, where do you think it’s going to go, how long is a piece of string? Let’s never stop imagining. I’m trying to build platforms now for business cases yet to be imagined. For example, how can we make sure that we can do full Virtual Reality and 3D reality? One of the aspirations I’ve always had for our universities is to be able to work with young adults anywhere in the world, where as long as they’ve got a device, they can connect to it and they feel that they’re in the lab. They feel part of the actual Virtual Reality. I think that’d be something fantastic – opening up education to everybody. That’s what I’m trying to do.
