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The foundations of world-leading artificial intelligence

The University of Manchester’s new Centre for AI Fundamentals is a key component of a number of significant recent investments The University of Manchester has made into AI education, innovation and industrial collaboration.

We focus on fundamental AI research, which includes probabilistic modelling, deep learning, reinforcement learning, causal modelling, human-in-the-loop ML, explainable AI, ethics, privacy and security.

The fundamentals are in motion – in particular, deployment and collaboration with people are centrally important fundamental AI problems, not only post-hoc issues. We develop AI that works well with humans and in deployment.

This centre brings together renowned academic expertise in AI with the latest research taking place across our growing institutes including The Institute for Data Science and AI (IDSAI) and The Christabel Pankhurst Institute and our partnerships with The Alan Turing Institute and the European Laboratory for Learning and Intelligent Systems (ELLIS).

Staff

There are experts in the fundamentals of AI working across The University of Manchester. As part of this new research centre, we have already recruited a number of new specialists:

Mauricio Alvarez

Dr. Álvarez López received a degree in Electronics Engineering (B. Eng.) with Honours, from Universidad Nacional de Colombia in 2004, a master degree in Electrical Engineering (M. Eng.) from Universidad Tecnológica de Pereira, Colombia in 2006, and a Ph.D. degree in Computer Science from The University of Manchester, UK, in 2011.

After finishing his Ph.D., Dr. Álvarez López joined the Department of Electrical Engineering at Universidad Tecnológica de Pereira, Colombia, where he was appointed as an Associate Professor until Dec 2016.

From January, 2017 to April 2022, Dr. Álvarez López was Lecturer in Machine Learning at the University of Sheffield.

You can find out more on his personal site here.

Samuel Kaski

Samuel Kaski is Professor of Artificial Intelligence at the University of Manchester and at Aalto University, Helsinki. In Manchester, he is Director of the Manchester. In Helsinki, he leads the Finnish Center for Artificial Intelligence Research FCAI and ELLIS Unit Helsinki. 

Professor Kaski is an ELLIS Fellow and Turing Fellow of the Alan Turing Institute.

In July 2021, Samuel Kaski was appointed among the first Turing Artificial Intelligence (AI) World-Leading Research Fellows. The fellowships, named after AI pioneer Alan Turing, are part of the UK’s commitment to further strengthen its position as a global leader in the field. You can find out more about this fellowship here

You can view Professor Kaski’s research profile here.

Anirbit Mukherjee

Anirbit completed an undergraduate degree in physics at the Chennai Mathematical Institute (CMI), India and a masters in theoretical physics at the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research (TIFR), India. He did his Ph.D. in the department of applied mathematics and statistics at the Johns Hopkins University (JHU), under the guidance of Prof. Amitabh Basu, During his PhD., Anirbit became intrigued by the ongoing rise of deep-learning and went on to prove first-of-its-kind theorems about the neural function space, convergence of RMSProp and ADAM algorithms, provable training of small nets and PAC-Bayes approaches to generalization bounds on neural nets.  

Before joining The University of Manchester in November 2021, Anirbit worked as a postdoctoral researcher at Wharton, the Department of Statistics at the University of Pennsylvania. There he started building a theory for the newly discovered property of local elasticity of neural nets and its relationship to another newly uncovered phenomenon, that of neural collapse. Most recently he is pursuing research on solving differential equations using neural nets, particularly in the direction of building theoretical foundations for Deep Operator Networks. You can find more about his work at his personal site, https://sites.google.com/view/anirbit/home 

Wei Pan

After completing degrees in Harbin Institute of Technology and University of Science and Technology of China, Wei Pan gained industry experience in China and then in London whilst completing a PhD in Bioengineering at Imperial College London.

Wei Pan moves to Manchester from TU Delft, where he was Assistant Professor in the Department of Cognitive Robotics, Faculty of Mechanical, Maritime and Materials Engineering and was also co-director of Delft SELF AI Lab.

See Wei Pan’s personal website here.

Mingfei Sun

Mingfei is a lecturer at Computer Science. He is generally interested in artificial intelligence, with a particular focus on machine learning techniques such as deep reinforcement learning and learning from demonstrations. His research covers large-scale deep reinforcement learning, policy gradient methods, and optimization theory. He is applying these methods to problems in video games, robotics and multi-agent systems. Before joining Manchester, Mingfei Sun was a researcher at Microsoft Research Cambridge. He was also a research associate at University of Oxford. Mingfei Sun obtained his PhD degree from the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (HKUST), and his bachelor degree from University of Science and Technology of China (USTC). You can find out more on his personal site here.

Join us!

As we develop our centre, we are recruiting more researchers and academics. Visit the link below to see our latest vacanices.

Our network:

The University’s large – and growing – data science and artificial intelligence community provides a deep, diverse and well-embedded base on which to deliver on our vision. Visit the links below to find out more about just some of the institutes and hubs we will be collaborating with.

We have set up a mailing list for researchers interested in AI Fundamentals which we will use to inform colleagues about events, projects, funding opportunities etc. If you would like to be added, please get in touch