Seminar Archive

2023

March

• Towards Closed-Loop Interactive Autonomous Systems: Understanding People and their Impacts on Decision Making

  15 March 2023, 09:00 - 11:00

  At my dissertation defense, I presented Planning and Recognition Together Close the Interaction Loop (PReTCIL) as one of the first ways to integrate algorithms from artificial intelligence (AI) planning and plan, activity, and intent recognition into a single method for adaptive closed-loop interaction in autonomous systems. Despite PReTCIL working out...

• What's next for nematic liquid crystals?

  09 March 2023, 13:00 - 14:00

  Professor Helen Gleeson OBE from the University of Leeds' Soft Matter Physics Group

• ChatGPT "passing" things: A(nother) story of cherry-picking, ignoring errors and hope

  01 March 2023, 14:00 - 15:00

  In Nov 2022 OpenAI released the new ChatGPT language model, taking the world by storm with it. Today, we are flooded by tweets and articles claiming ChatGPT is reaching human-level performance in many tasks. But what tasks? Is ChatGPT ready to assist (or replace) humans? In this talk, we'll cover...

February

• Natural products as a treasure trove against COVID-19

  16 February 2023, 13:00 - 14:00

  Dr Mostafa Rateb, University of the West of Scotland COVID-19 is a recent pandemic that put all nations under a major panic, with many mortalities in 2020 and 2021. Although vaccine development was ongoing, finding treatment that affects the virus would be of great help to combat the viral mutation. Once...

• Achieving collective action through explicit reasoning about expectations

  15 February 2023, 14:00 - 15:00

  Abstract: This work studies the collective action problem: identifying and implementing mechanisms that allow members of a community to coordinate their actions in order to achieve a social, rather than individual, benefit. Rather than applying the traditional tools of game theory, we are investigating how maintaining explicit social knowledge encoded in...

2022

October

• An information-theoretic framework for grounded dialogue modelling

  12 October 2022, 14:00 - 15:00

  What are the decision making processes by which humans choose words to achieve goals in their environment? Can we replicate them in a computer system? These are the core questions of grounded dialogue modelling, the study of interactive language use in context. We will start by looking at a few...

September

• Aligning the use of AI in business to real world opportunities

  21 September 2022, 12:00 - 13:00

  A session to present how organisations with their in-built challenges need to be carefully managed to accept the inevitably of AI systems in their daily work processes.   Examples will be shared of real world scenarios and where AI is already adding value and what the future could look like as...

June

• Accelerating Research Software Understandability Through Knowledge Capture

  15 June 2022, 14:00 - 15:00

  Research Software is key to understand, reproduce and reuse existing work in many disciplines, ranging from Geosciences to Astronomy or Artificial Intelligence. However, research software is usually difficult to find, reuse, compare and understand due to its disconnected documentation (dispersed in manuals, readme files, web sites, and code comments) and...

• Decolonising science

  08 June 2022, 14:00 - 15:00

  The phrase “decolonising the curriculum” very much seems like a buzzword, but what does it really mean?   In particular, what does it mean for sciences?   I intend to explore the background to “decolonising science”, address some of the issues that this raises, and look at some ideas which not only...

• A Personal Perspective on Impact

  01 June 2022, 14:00 - 15:00

  Most of our funders would like to see non-academic "impact" from the projects they support. In this talk, I'll give a personal perspective on impact, looking at both successes such as the Arria NLG spinout company and the simplenlg open-source package, and failures where expected impact did not materialise, such...