From June 19th to June 22nd 2025, the King’s E-Lab hosted its second annual Hackathon with Hack the Law in partnership with Stanford’s CODEX. The weekend brought together over 150 students from 14 countries representing 43 universities and produced exciting collaborations and innovative solutions to legal challenges set out by our sponsors. In this week’s blog, hear from VibeLegal on their experience as a fully ‘non-tech’ team in a hackathon competition.

On the 30^th of October 2025, the E-Lab hosted HealthTech founder, CEO Coach, and Chairman Kevin McDonnell for a discussion on key lessons for HealthTech startups. HealthTech sounds like the perfect career path for the ambitious entrepreneur – a chance to improve lives and build a successful business. But most founders quickly learn: selling into the NHS is nothing like traditional startups. In this week’s blog, read Coco Newtons’s reflections from her conversation with Kevin about uncomfortable truths in NHS entrepreneurship, how founders should re-design their strategies to adapt to these realities, and what we can hope for when we learn to build trust.

Each September, the E-Lab hosts a residential week as a part of its core residential programme. This year, we welcomed 62 students from across 12 Cambridge Colleges keen to learn how to take their innovative ideas forward. Through workshops, lectures and socials students learnt everything from the basics of finance, marketing and IP to how to creatively communicate their proposals and build meaningful stakeholder maps. In this week’s blog, read PhD student Maryam Bham’s reflections on the women who inspire her understanding of entrepreneurship and on how the week left her with a sharpened mindset and a renewed sense of purpose to build something meaningful.

When Alan Turing proposed the imitation game in 1950 the question, ‘can machines think?’ provocatively probed the boundaries of artificial intelligence. To mark the 75th anniversary of Turing’s Turing Test, the E-Lab and the Centre for the Future of Intelligence hosted a two-day conference at King’s College, Cambridge to ask a deceptively simple question: what should we test now? In this week’s blog, read Part Two of our write up from the conference from PhD students Bernardo Villegas Moreno, Drew Calcagno and Noah Broestl.

In 1950, Sir Alan Turing’s seminal paper “Computing Machinery and Intelligence” probed the question ‘Can machines think?’ and introduced the concept of what is now known as the Turing test to the world. Today, the question of what computers can do – now, next year, or in 5 years or 20 – has become an urgent one. To mark the 75th anniversary of Turing’s remarkable publication, to honour his foundational part in the establishment of the field of artificial intelligence, and to press the questions of AI’s problems and possibilities, the King’s E-Lab and the Centre for the Future of Intelligence hosted a two-day conference at King’s College, Cambridge. In this week’s blog, read Part One of our write up from the conference from PhD student and E-Lab member Jacob Forward as he reflects on Day One.

The essence of judicial process is inextricably linked to its human element. As technological legal tools and the innovative solutions which employ them rapidly advance, attention is required for the debate on how to balance the hope and enthusiasm of change, with the considerations of the social ramifications that processes of ‘disruption’ can bring. In this week’s blog, read Part II of the essay by Demetrius Floudas as he questions the place human judgement in the era of legal AI, and investigates the role that initiatives like the LLMxLaw Hackathon and organisations like the E-Lab must play as these debates continue.

At the end of June, the King’s E-Lab ran its annual LLM x Law Hackathon, in partnership with Stanford University CodeX and the Cambridge Judge Business School. The four-day event brought together over 150 students from 14 countries representing 43 universities. For a second year running, it produced an array of exciting collaborations and innovative solutions to legal challenges set out by our sponsors. In this week’s blog, hear from DialogueAI, the team who placed second in the Hacker Track, not about a product but about a solution to a new-found friend’s problem.

At the beginning of July, Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta President, Raphael Bostic, joined Gillian Tett at the E-Lab to talk about the U.S. economy, monetary policy and the state of the economics profession. An avid believer in inclusive leadership and working with your passion, in this week’s blog, President Bostic reflects on the role an entrepreneurial frame of mind has played, even for his work in less assumingly entrepreneurial institutions, and on the benefits of embracing the unexpected.

In June, the second E-Lab LLMxLaw Hackathon brought together over 150 students from 14 countries and 43 universities. Across lightning talks, workshops, networking and hacking, these students interacted with mentors and experts from a variety of local and international sponsors and partner organisations. In this week’s blog, read the reflections of Ashik Kay, a member of the team that represented Google Cloud, on the democratisation of AI, human-led intelligence and the need to ‘Mind the Gap’ in such fast evolving environments.

From June 19^th to June 22^nd 2025, the King’s E-Lab hosted its second annual Hackathon with Hack the Law in partnership with Stanford’s CODEX. The weekend brought together over 150 students from 14 countries representing 43 universities and produced exciting collaborations and innovative solutions to legal challenges set out by our sponsors. In this week’s blog, hear from the winners of the special category Access 2 Justice on their solution: KnowYourRights.

Sandi Toksvig took to the lectern in Keynes Hall at King’s College on the 8th of May to deliver the annual Alan Turing lecture. The subject of the speech, a consideration of bias in the era of AI, was prefaced by an extensive archival display of mementos of Turing’s time at King’s, letters from the course of his extraordinary life, and traces of the stories which make up the road (still being trodden) to equality in Cambridge. In this week’s blog, E-Lab Member Sophie Harbour reflects on the lessons from Toksvig’s talk about how to use notably human talents to tackle the challenge of bias in AI.

On the 10^th of June, the King’s E-Lab hosted Ambassador Maulidah Hassan, a distinguished Tanzanian diplomat and the current Personal Assistant for Diplomatic Affairs to President Samia Suluhu Hassan – the first female Head of State in Tanzania’s history and a transformative figure in African and global politics. In conversation with Uduak Jesuthasan, Ambassador Hassan provided insight into what can we learn from navigating complex, patriarchal systems that do not ordinarily set the ground for women to hold the highest office. In this week’s blog, read Nageen Qasim’s reflections on the night.

From June 19^th to June 22^nd 2025, the King’s E-Lab hosted its second annual Hackathon with Hack the Law in partnership with Stanford’s CODEX. The weekend brought together over 150 students from 14 countries representing 43 universities and produced exciting collaborations and innovative solutions to legal challenges set out by our sponsors. In this week’s blog, hear from the third-place winner Daria on her experience of the weekend and on her approach to addressing challenges in litigation: No Human Intelligence.

How can we improve civil services with modern technology so that municipal governments can provide citizens with the best service possible with limited resources? This is exactly the question that Magan Chin and Stan van Baarsen are trying to answer with their venture, FIG. On Tuesday 27 May, the pair participated in the final Pitch@King’s of the year with the hope of articulating their mission and sharing how they aim to address the bottlenecks in local government services. In this week’s blog, read the founders’ reflections on the development of their partnership, their journey to Pitch@King’s, and their hopes for their venture.