Turing at Southampton Research Showcase 2022

To celebrate the partnership, the Turing at Southampton Research Showcase Event was recently held, bringing together researchers and academics from across the university. Professor Dame Wendy Hall gave the keynote talk From AI to Eternity and was introduced by the Vice-Chancellor, Professor Mark Smith.

Organised by the WSI, the event was an opportunity for academics and students to showcase their current research.

The showcase include a experts talks and presentations by Southampton at Turing Fellows with a panel discussion about the different perspectives of AI and data science. Chaired by Dr Samantha Kanza the panel included colleagues from areas such as engineering, maths and social sciences. Samantha, a Senior Enterprise Fellow at the University of Southampton, is currently researching the digitisation of scientific research, and is the coordinator of the AI 4 Scientific Discovery Network. She is also part of the Turing ECR Network which holds regular meetings for ECRs to meet and discuss their work. She said: “In today’s society data science and AI is evolving rapidly and has an impact across many different disciplines. It drives everything from the communications we use, to the drugs we receive if we’re ill, to our nation’s defences. Researchers across these different areas, however, experience some of the same challenges; lack of access to good quality data and the different ethical implications of these technologies to name a few. It was interesting to hear about the different projects taking place across the university that were all so diverse in their demonstration of the potential of these technologies.”

The showcase also included a PhD poster competition presentation, prizes were awarded to:

First prize

David Massegur: Deep-Learning modelling for Aerofoil Icing

Runners up

Joseph Early: Non-Markovian Reward Modelling via Interpretable Multiple Instance Learning

Thomas Davies: Detecting Malicious Behaviour in Host-Based Computer Logs with Topological Data Analysis

About his Turing Doctoral Student experience, Joseph Early said: “The Turing has been a fantastic outlet for collaboration during my PhD; I’ve been able to work on diverse projects with other PhD students and researchers during my time with the Turing. Alongside my PhD research, I was able to co-found the Turing’s Entrepreneurship Interest Group, which has grown over the past two years due to support from the Turing.”

Turing at Southampton

For the past five years, the University has been a member of The Alan Turing Institute, the UK’s national institute for data science and artificial intelligence.
Our academics and early career researchers work alongside the Turing’s industry, government and third sector partners to accelerate AI and data science research to tackle real-world problems. We have welcomed 41 Turing Fellows across all five faculties since 2018, including Professor Sebastian Stein, who is one of only 15 AI Acceleration Fellows in the UK. Find out more in the University Staff Matters magazine.