The audience comprised of academic staff, postdoctoral researchers and students from CISC, as well as colleagues from across the School of EEECS, the wider university body and industrial partners. 

 

Professor Iain Styles, Centre Director, welcomed attendees to the event. He hoped the talks would spark interesting discussions and colleagues would avail of the networking opportunities. Professor Styles provided updates on CISC activities and strategy, and news of developments from:

• AI Collaboration Centre
• Northern Ireland HPC
• Momentum 1.0

The symposium programme consisted of presentations from:

• Professor Hui Wang, from CISC, who gave the first talk entitled 'Towards a Foundational General Probabilistic Model'. 
• Our second speaker was  Dr Sadaf Alam, Chief Technology Officer (CTO) for the Bristol Centre for Supercomputing (BriCS), University of Bristol, UK where she leads technical strategy for the Isambard supercomputing Digital Research Infrastructures (DRIs).  Dr Alam gave an overview of the creation of this infrastructure.
• Professor Nick Jones from Imperial College London discussed the establishment of a centre devoted to using AI to advance science. He used exemplars of research conducted by independent research fellows on topics from fusion physics to plant biology.
•  Dr Quingyuan Zhao from Cambridge University discussed the importance of design in statistics. Using examples such as biodiversity and the early outbreak analysis of COVID-19 in China, Dr Zhao demonstrated design remains an important, but elusive concept. 
• Our keynote speaker was Professor Zhi-Hua Zhou from Nanjing University. Professor Zhou's presentation on 'Big Models and Other Possibilities' was particularly well received.