Advances in Data Science and Artificial Intelligence Conference 2025

Please note that the agenda is subject to minor adjustments

Efstathia Soufleri is a postdoctoral fellow with the Archimedes Unit at the Athena Research Center, working under the supervision of Prof. Sophia Ananiadou. She earned her Ph.D. in Electrical and Computer Engineering from Purdue University, USA, specializing in Efficient and Privacy-Preserving Machine Learning Algorithms under the guidance of Prof. Kaushik Roy. Her research has been integral to the Center for the Co-Design of Cognitive Systems (COCOSYS) and the Center for Brain-Inspired Computing (C-BRIC). Her work has been published in top-tier venues, including ICML, NeurIPS, TMLR, and DATE, with several co-authored papers in efficient machine learning, privacy, memorization, and multimodal models. She also holds an M.Sc. in Computer Science from the University of Thessaly, where she developed efficient algorithms for video compression. Her academic journey began with a B.Sc. in Applied Mathematics from the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, which she completed in just 3.5 years, graduating with honors. In recognition of her academic excellence, Efstathia has received numerous awards, including the Gerondelis Foundation Award for Academic Excellence, the Academic Excellence Scholarship from the Greek State Scholarships Foundation, and the distinction of being named Valedictorian at the University of Thessaly.

Find out more here: Home – Efstathia Soufleri

Talk Title: “Efficient Machine Learning Algorithms”

Neil Lawrence is the DeepMind Professor of Machine Learning at the University of Cambridge and author of The Atomic Human. A leading voice on the real-world impact of artificial intelligence, Neil brings over 25 years of experience in machine learning research and deployment to his insightful talks.

As a former Director of Machine Learning at Amazon, Neil offers a unique perspective on the practical challenges of implementing AI in large-scale industrial systems. His work spans from the cutting edge of AI research to its applications in developing nations, giving him a global view of AI’s potential and pitfalls.

Neil is known for his ability to demystify complex AI concepts for non-technical audiences. He explores thought-provoking questions about the future of human-AI interaction, data privacy, and the ethical implications of AI deployment. His book, ‘The Atomic Human,’ explores what AI means for our identity and society.

A compelling and engaging speaker, Neil combines technical expertise with a broader understanding of AI’s societal impact. He challenges audiences to think critically about our AI-driven future and offers valuable insights for businesses navigating the rapidly evolving landscape of artificial intelligence.

Talk Title: Bridging Innovation’s Supply and Demand in the AI Era

Nirav Ajmeri is a Senior Lecturer in Artificial Intelligence at the University of Bristol’s School of Computer Science. He is the deputy director of the UKRI AI for Collective Intelligence Hub and the responsible AI co-lead for the UKRI Centre for Doctoral Training in Practice-Oriented AI. Nirav’s research interests are in AI, intelligent agents and multi-agent systems, emphasising ethics, fairness, and privacy in socio-technical systems of humans, organisations, and software agents. His research seeks to design ethical socio-technical systems and develop socially intelligent computational agents that support their users in decision making considering societal norms and human values and preferences.  

Find out more here:  https://niravajmeri.github.io [niravajmeri.github.io

Talk Title: Prosociality and Ethics in AI.

 Yukun Lai is a Professor in the School of Computer Science & Informatics, Cardiff University, UK, where he was the Director of Research for 2019-2022. He is currently the Cardiff lead for EPSRC AI Hub in Generative Models, and a co-lead for the Multimodal Models working group. He received his bachelor’s and PhD degrees from Tsinghua University in 2003 and 2008, respectively. He has published over 200 research papers in major venues in Computer Graphics, Computer Vision and related areas with over 12K citations and many of the published papers are in leading journals and conferences. He is an associated editor for IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics and The Visual Computer.  He was conference co-chair of Eurographics Symposium on Geometry Processing (SGP) 2014, Computational Visual Media (CVM) 2016, program co-chair of Eurographics Workshop on 3D Object Retrieval (3DOR) 2021, an associate editor for Computer Graphics Forum (2019-2022), and program committee member of many international conferences.

Talk Title: Learning Joint 2D/3D Models for 3D Reconstruction and Generation

Antoine Bosselut is an assistant professor in the School of Computer and Communication Sciences at the École Polytechnique Fédéral de Lausanne (EPFL). Previously, he was a postdoctoral fellow at Stanford University and a Young Investigator at the Allen Institute for AI (AI2). He received his PhD at the University of Washington in 2020. His work focuses on developing AI reasoning methodologies that can be effectively translated to important societal problems in health, education, and helping underserved communities. He is an ELLIS Scholar and was named as one of the Forbes 30 under 30 list for Science and Healthcare in 2021. He is also on the steering committee of the Swiss AI Initiative, which builds capacities in Switzerland for advanced and large-scale AI systems for the benefit of society.

Talk Title: Democratizing Open LLMs for Global Sovereign AI Applications

Ed is a co-founder and Chief Scientific Officer at Xyme – a AI startup in the field of enzyme design which he has now helped to grow to over 30 people working across AI method development, computational science and engineering, and experimental disciplines.  Previously, he was Head of Research Innovation at IBM UK and Ireland, providing leadership on the convergence of HPC, AI and Quantum Computing to accelerate scientific discovery.

He is interested in the use of powerful emerging technologies to help to answer some of the biggest challenges of our time, especially through the lens of modelling and simulation. He obtained his PhD from the University of Cambridge, and then moved to Harvard University, finally leaving to help start the IBM Research Lab in the UK in 2015. He holds an honorary Professorship at the University of Liverpool (held since 2018), and is also Editor in Chief of the Wiley journal Applied AI Letters. He has authored more than 90 papers and conference proceedings, filed multiple patents, and has authored a textbook on the use of AI for physical science, published by Wiley in 2021.

Ed was elected to the UK Young Academy in 2023, and was appointed to the Executive Group as co-chair of the UK Young Academy in the same year – a position to which he was recently re-elected.  In 2024, Ed was appointed a Fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry (FRSC), one of the most prestigious awards the Society confers.

Talk Title: Materials discovery in the age of AI

Keeley Crockett [mmu.ac.uk] SMIEEE SFHEA is a Professor in Computational Intelligence at Manchester Metropolitan University and Chair of the IEEE Technical Committee SHIELD (Ethical, Legal, Social, Environmental and Human Dimensions of AI/CI). She has over 28 years’ experience of research and development in Ethical and responsible AI (for both SME’s and an advocate for citizen voice), computational intelligence algorithms and applications, including adaptive psychological profiling, fuzzy systems, semantic similarity, and dialogue systems. Keeley has led work on Place based practical Artificial Intelligence, facilitating a parliamentary inquiry with Policy Connect and the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Data Analytics (APGDA), leading to the inquiry report “Our Place Our Data: Involving Local People in Data and AI-Based Recovery”. She obtained STRENGTH IN PLACES POLICY funded engagement work with Greater Manchester businesses on “SME Readiness for Adoption of Ethical Approaches to AI Development and Deployment”. She is currently the Principal Investigator (PI) on the EPSRC “PEAs in Pods: Co-production of community based public engagement for data and AI research.” Grant, Co-I on Manchester City Council funded Peoples Panel for AI, which is a follow on from funding obtained from The Alan Turing Institute “People-powered AI: responsible research and innovation through community ideation and involvement”. She is currently CI on two Innovate UK KTPs with COUCH and GMCA. Keeley is currently on the Steering Group of the Government Inquiry on AI and Skills in the Digital Age co-chaired by Lord Clement-Jones and Lord Chris Holmes, with Policy Connect and a collaborator on the UK Governments AI Playbook. Keeley was appointed to the UKRI’s AI & Robotics Strategic Advisory Team (SAT) on 1st April 2024.  She is a member of the IEEE Computational intelligence Society ADCOM (2023-25), an active IEEE CIS volunteering in numerous subcommittees and a UK STEM Ambassador.

Talk Title:  Empowering AI with Human Insight: Navigating Challenges and Opportunities in Responsible, Trustworthy, and Participatory AI Development

Rika Antonova is an Associate Professor at the University of Cambridge. Her research interests include data-efficient reinforcement learning algorithms, active learning & exploration​, ​and ​robotics. Earlier, Rika was a postdoctoral scholar at Stanford University upon receiving the NSF/CRA Computing Innovation Fellowship from the US National Science Foundation. Rika completed her PhD on simulation-to-reality transfer learning at KTH. Earlier, she obtained a research Master’s degree from the Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon University. Before that, Rika was a senior software engineer at Google.

Talk Title: The Ingredients for Efficient Robot Learning and Exploration