Our Session Speakers

Dr Frédéric Bosché
HEA Fellow, Senior Lecturer in Construction Informatics

Dr Frédéric Bosché

Frédéric is Senior Lecturer in Construction Informatics in the School of the Engineering at the University of Edinburgh. He is a member of the Centre for Future Infrastructure (CFI) and the Edinburgh Centre for Robotics. Frédéric leads the CyberBuild Lab whose research covers two main areas:

Processing of reality capture data to enhance asset construction and life cycle management (scan-to-BIM, scan-vs-BIM, digital twin)
Development and use of virtual and mixed reality technology, to support collaborative and engaging design, construction and engineering works, as well as training.

Frédéric has published over 70 peer-reviewed papers in internationally-recognised journal and conferences, and his research has received a few international research and innovation awards, including two CIOB International Research & Innovation awards in 2016, and the IAARC Tucker-Hasegawa Award in 2018 for “distinguished contributions to the field of automation and robotics in construction”. Frédéric is the current President of the International Association for Automation and Robotics in Construction (IAARC), and he is Associate Editor of the journal Automation in Construction (Elsevier).

Dr Francesco Pomponi
Associate Professor of Sustainability Research at Edinburgh Napier University and Academic Tutor at the University of Cambridge’s Institute for Sustainability

Dr Francesco Pomponi

Dr Francesco Pomponi is Associate Professor of Sustainability Research at Edinburgh Napier University and Academic Tutor at the University of Cambridge’s Institute for Sustainability Leadership. An industrial engineer by training, he holds an MSc in Engineering Management and a PhD in Civil Engineering, with a focus on quantitative sustainability assessments in the built environment. He worked for six years in the construction industry both in Italy and the UAE before returning to academia to help address with his research the practical challenges of enhancing the sustainability of buildings and construction.

At Edinburgh Napier University, he created and leads the Resource Efficient Built Environment Lab (REBEL), an interdisciplinary research group addressing questions linked to sustainable materials and resource efficiency as well as future cities in a circular economy. He is the UK member for the Annex 72 of the International Energy Agency (IEA), and expert advisor to the IEA Policy Division. Francesco co-authored over 90 scholarly outputs in his career to date and published in most world-leading journals in the field of sustainable buildings and environmental sustainability. He currently serves as Editor of Sustainable Production & Consumption, and Editorial Board Member of Sustainability, Structures, Circular Economy & Sustainability, and World.

In the past couple of years he started exploring the role that Artificial Intelligence can have in addressing unanswered questions linked to sustainability in the built environment

Dr Simon Powers
Lecturer in Computer Science

Dr Simon Powers

Dr Simon T. Powers is a lecturer in the School of Computing at Edinburgh Napier University. He obtained a BSc (Hons) in Computer Science from the University of Birmingham (2005), and an MSc in Natural Computation from the University of Birmingham (2006). For his PhD (University of Southampton, 2010) he became interested in computational biology, and developed evolutionary models of cooperative group formation, using agent-based modelling and evolutionary game theory. He further developed this work during his postdoc (Department of Ecology & Evolutionary Biology, University of Lausanne), where he modelled the evolution of institutions that support cooperative behaviour in human societies. Since 2016 his research has focussed on applying this understanding of human institutions to design socio-technical systems that help to solve social dilemmas such as climate change. His current work uses agent-based computing to help households in community energy systems to self-organise to reduce their electricity consumption, and to manage their own renewable energy sources

Dr Rik Sarkar
Lecturer in the School of Informatics at University of Edinburgh

Dr Rik Sarkar

Dr. Rik Sarkar is a lecturer in the School of Informatics at University of Edinburgh. He is the Deputy director of the Laboratory for Foundations of Computer Science. He completed PhD from State University of New York at Stony Brook, and M.Tech for Indian Institute of Technology at Bombay, India. His research interests are in areas of cyberphysical information processing, social networks, privacy and fairness and trustworthy machine learning algorithms

Dr Vaishak Belle
Chancellor’s Fellow and Faculty at the School of Informatics, University of Edinburgh

Dr Vaishak Belle

Dr Vaishak Belle is a Chancellor’s Fellow and Faculty at the School of Informatics, University of Edinburgh, an Alan Turing Institute Faculty Fellow, a Royal Society University Research Fellow, and a member of the RSE (Royal Society of Edinburgh) Young Academy of Scotland. At the University of Edinburgh, he directs a research lab that specializes in the unification of symbolic systems and machine learning, with a recent emphasis on explainability and ethics. He has given research seminars at numerous academic institutions, tutorials at AI conferences, and talks at venues such as Ars Electronica and the Samsung AI Forum. He has co-authored over 50 scientific articles on AI, at venues such as IJCAI, UAI, AAAI, MLJ, AIJ, JAIR, AAMAS, and along with his co-authors, he has won the Microsoft best paper award at UAI, the Machine learning journal best student paper award at ECML-PKDD, and the Machine learning journal best student paper award at ILP. In 2014, he received a silver medal by the Kurt Goedel Society. Recently, he has consulted with major banks on explainable AI and its impact in financial institutions)

Prof Fernando Pereira
Department of Electrical and Computers Engineering of Instituto Superior Técnico and with Instituto de Telecomunicações, Lisbon, Portugal

Prof Fernando Pereira

Fernando Pereira is currently with the Department of Electrical and Computers Engineering of Instituto Superior Técnico and with Instituto de Telecomunicações, Lisbon, Portugal.

He is Area Editor of the Signal Processing: Image Communication Journal and Associate Editor of the EURASIP Journal on Image and Video Processing, and is or has been member of the Editorial Board of the Signal Processing Magazine, Associate Editor of IEEE Transactions of Circuits and Systems for Video Technology, IEEE Transactions on Image Processing, IEEE Transactions on Multimedia, and IEEE Signal Processing Magazine. In 2013-2015, he was the Editor-in-Chief of the IEEE Journal of Selected Topics in Signal Processing.

He was an IEEE Distinguished Lecturer in 2005 and elected as an IEEE Fellow in 2008 for “contributions to object-based digital video representation technologies and standards”. He has been elected to serve on the Signal Processing Society Board of Governors in the capacity of Member-at-Large for a 2012 and a 2014-2016 term. Since January 2018, he is the SPS Vice-President for Conferences.

Since 2013, he is also a EURASIP Fellow for “contributions to digital video representation technologies and standards”. He has been elected to serve on the European Signal Processing Society Board of Directors for a 2015-2018 term. Since 2015, he is also an IET Fellow.

He has been the MPEG Requirements Subgroup Chair from 2002 to 2007 and since February 2016 he is the JPEG Requirements Subgroup Chair.
He is/has been a member of the Scientific and Program Committees of many international conferences and workshops. He has been the General Chair of the Picture Coding Symposium (PCS) in 2007, the Technical Program Co-Chair of the Int. Conference on Image Processing (ICIP) in 2010 and 2016, the Technical Program Chair of the International Workshop on Image Analysis for Multimedia Interactive Services (WIAMIS) in 2008 and 2012, and the General Chair of the International Conference on Quality of Multimedia Experience (QoMEX) in 2016.

He has contributed more than 300 papers in international journals, conferences and workshops, and made several tens of invited talks at conferences and workshops. His areas of interest are visual data analysis, coding, description, adaptation, quality assessment and advanced multimedia service

George Weir
Lecturer in Computer Science at the University of Strathclyde

George Weir

Dr George R S Weir is a lecturer in Computer Science at the University of Strathclyde, where he has taught for over twenty years. He holds degrees in philosophy from the University of Glasgow and the University of Edinburgh. His academic research has focused mainly on Cybercrime, Security, Digital Forensics, Corpus Linguistics and Readability, and he has published extensively on these topics. He is General Chair for the Cyberforensics conference, held annually in the UK, and has research links to institutions in Australia, Canada, Japan and Sri Lanka.

Dr Catherine Happer
Senior Lecturer in Sociology and Deputy Director of the Glasgow University Media Group

Dr Catherine Happer

Dr Catherine Happer is a Senior Lecturer in Sociology and Deputy Director of the Glasgow University Media Group. Her research examines the role of media and communications in the construction of public understanding and belief. She has conducted audience research across four continents. She is published in international journals and is co-author of Communicating Climate Change and Energy Security: New Methods in Understanding Audiences (Routledge) and co-editor of Trump’s Media War (Palgrave). Catherine has given evidence at the House of Commons Select Committee on Climate, Policy and Public Understanding, presented to the Scottish Government and at national and international conferences. She previously worked as an Audience Researcher and later Factual programme-maker at the BBC

Dr Hannah Rudman

Dr Hannah Rudman

Dr Hannah Rudman’s digital and data innovation applied research and development work is grounded in interdisciplinary Participatory Action Research, which is practice-led rather than practice-based, and typically helps to create actionable knowledge with participants. It is about working out how digital tools and data can best assist in assuring, strengthening and proving Scotland’s natural economy’s – and its agriculture and land-based sectors’ – impact on grand challenges. It is also investigating the question: can distributed ledger technologies (DLT), digital technologies and digital data build human trust in the reporting of food quality and security, supply chain, natural economy and climate truths? Hannah has interests in Digital Ethics, and is a member of The Scottish Government’s Digital Identity Scotland Technical Expert Group, and was a former member of the Scottish Government’s 2020 Climate Group. She co-authored Distributed Ledger Technologies (DLT) in Public Services commissioned and published by The Scottish Government in 2018, and is an Expert Evaluator for the European Commission’s European Innovation Council. She was Special Advisor to the Cultural Enterprise Office and Scottish Arts Council/Creative Scotland. She is also an experienced non-executive director and serves as Board Trustee for the National Galleries of Scotland. She has a PhD in Information Systems (Computer Science), and is a highly experienced Digital Transformation expert and entrepreneur, and creative practitioner. Hannah will also take on the role of Data Policy Lead across the Centres, she will innovate around how we can utilise data to prove SRUC’s positive impact on the natural economy.

Website | Pure | LinkedIn | Twitter | Email

Dr Neil Burns

Dr Neil Burns

Dr Neil Burns is a quantitative ecologist specialising in population and ecosystem health. His research explores population processes related to animal distributions, movements, and connectivity in marine environments. Exploring marine spatial, and population processes allows us to understand how human activities influence environmental change and the effects these perturbations have on ecosystem health and services. Although dynamic marine ecosystems are often typified by high levels of connectivity, the need for habitats to be considered part of a wider landscape is seldom considered in marine ecology. Neil aims to explore the importance of linked habitats to populations, ecosystem health, and ecosystem services and develop the field of marine landscape ecology. His current research projects on the sustainability of wrasse fishing in Scotland, sustainable fisheries management in mangrove habitat in Bangladesh and coral reef health in Egypt adopt an interdisciplinary approach by working with social-science colleagues to combine state-of-the-art statistical methods with qualitative techniques. While fisheries and marine ecosystems are integral to the survival and livelihoods of millions of people worldwide, they also represent some of the least understood systems and environments on the planet. Neil’s research findings can provide immediate practical benefits addressing challenges to food security and environmental change, as well as allowing broadscale ecological, population and community ecology concepts to be tested.

Pure | ResearchGate | Email

Dr Bingjie Li

Dr Bingjie Li

Dr Bingjie Li is a computational biologist specializing in quantitative genetics and breeding. Her research focus on exploring the genetic architecture of complex traits through integrating diverse data sources, developing statistical methods to investigate genetic differences in livestock population, and developing new phenotypes to facilitate sustainable and precise breeding. She has been working in competitive international environment with excellent teams in Europe, North America, and Asia in the area of animal genetics and breeding. Her education and work experience cover quantitative genetic and functional genomics on dairy complex traits (e.g., production, health, feed efficiency, fertility, confirmation), genomic prediction applied to economically important traits in national genomic evaluation, and integrated studies for complex traits using genomic, transcriptomic, epigenomic data.

Email | LinkedIn | Pure | ResearchGate

Dr. Vijai Kumar Gupta

Dr. Vijai Kumar Gupta

Dr. Vijai Kumar Gupta holds a doctoral degree in Microbiology and the expert in the area of Biomass Valorisation, Microbial Biotechnology, and Environmental Sustainability. He is the Secretary of European Mycological Association and also the International/ Visiting Professor of- Institute of Food Science and Technology & South China Botanical Garden, China; Ton Duc Thang University, Vietnam; Szent István University, Hungary; Sam Higginbottom University of Agriculture, Technology and Sciences, India. He is a Fellow of- Linnaean Society, UK; Mycological Society of India; National Academy of Biological Sciences India; Indian Mycological Association; Academic Member of Mexican Academy of Sciences, Arts, Technology and Humanities, Mexico, Fellow of Academy of Microbiological Sciences India and Member of Royal Society Biology, UK. He is the Grant Evaluator for the International Funding Agencies including European Science Foundation; NWO, The Netherlands; AgreenSkills, France; Endeavour Fellowships, Australia; Minerva Weizmann Projects Program, Israel. He has established intense international research and academic collaborations. He has several publications in his hands and also the editor of few reputed journals including Biomolecules-MDPI, Microbial Cell Factories, Scientific Reports, Microbiome, and Biotechnology Advances. His challenge focussed research aims to develop technologies to valorise available bioresources and its potential to address the key challenges in the agri-food-pharma-energy and relevant sectors. He will be focused on- microbial glycobiotechnology, biomass to biorefineries towards sustainable product development and bioprospecting of bioresources.

ResearchGate | GoogleScholar | Email

Dr Jacqueline Stroud

Dr Jacqueline Stroud

Jackie Stroud is a soil scientist piloting information architecture strategies to support on-farm experimental processes. The challenge is bridging two knowledge systems that use different conceptual approaches to uncertainty (axiomatic rationality vs ecological rationality) which she has approached using collaborative benchmarks (same environmental cue, pluralistic approaches to data processing). Working with farmers she has co-developed a farmland earthworm survey to inform their soil management practices which has been used in every continent (except Antarctica); and an aggregate stability test used in England and Wales to inform inappropriate tillage and soil carbon management. This research uses social media and the principles of fast and frugal heuristics (what information do people use to inform their pro-environmental behaviours? When is this appropriate? What are useful decision aids? ) to support collective action in environmental management.

Email | Pure

Leroy (Lee) Cronin

Leroy (Lee) Cronin

Leroy (Lee) Cronin FRSE is the Regius Professor of Chemistry in Glasgow. Since the age of 9 Lee has wanted to explore chemistry using electronics to control matter, understand the origin of life, and generally confuse people with ideas that may or may not make sense one day. He strives to use his imagination to create new ideas that might tell us something about the universe, after all, the imagination is housed in a chemical brain and thus does exist. His research has four main aims 1) the construction of an artificial life form / work out how inorganic chemistry transitioned to biology / searching for new life forms; 2) the digitization of chemistry; and 3) the use of artificial intelligence in chemistry including the construction of ‘wet’ chemical computers; 4) The exploration of complexity and information in chemistry. He runs a team of around 60 people funded by grants from the UK EPSRC, US DARPA, Templeton, Google, BAe, JM. Finally, Lee likes to run a transparent and progressive group. Lee does not like hierarchy but likes organisation and well-defined actions. He likes to mentor researchers using a problem-based approach to solving big ideas. Nothing is impossible until it is tried.

Dr Tomas Lebl

Dr Tomas Lebl

Dr Tomas Lebl is the liquid-state NMR facility manager at the University of St Andrews since 2004. Besides managing the walk-up automated NMR service provided by 6 fully automated NMR spectrometers (nmr.st-andrews.ac.uk), he collaborates as NMR expert on various research projects across the chemical and biological sciences. He is a co-author of 64 publications (H-index 18, WOS). His main areas of expertise cover various aspects of liquid state NMR, namely conformational analysis of small molecules, RDC analysis, reaction monitoring, diffusion ordered spectroscopy etc. In addition, his interest in data management of high throughput NMR laboratories is driving force behind NOMAD project (nomad.wp.st-andrews.ac.uk).

Amol Deshmukh

Amol Deshmukh

Dr Amol Deshmukh is a postdoctoral research associate at the University of Glasgow. His expertise is in social signal processing, non-verbal behaviour generation, user-centered design, and machine learning. He has built robust robotic systems, deployed and evaluated social robots for 4 European Union projects in real-world environments such as workplaces (long-term interaction), schools, and public spaces. He has published 46 peer-reviewed papers and journal articles internationally. Dr Deshmukh has pioneered human-robot interaction research in developing countries. His research has received global media coverage such as, the BBC, The Telegraph, IEEE Spectrum, and numerous media articles. He also chaired the inaugural workshop for Social Robots For Developing Countries at IEEE International Symposium on Robot and Human Interactive Communication (RO-MAN) conference in 2019

Dr Rachel Menzies

Dr Rachel Menzies

Dr Rachel Menzies is a UX researcher and Senior Lecturer in Computing at the University of Dundee. She co-directs the UX’d research group with the aim to understand how people use technology and develop new solutions to improve accessibility. Her goal is to help her students learn to be socially aware developers who create accessible solutions by default.

Dr Daniel Rough

Dr Daniel Rough

Daniel has recently joined the University of Dundee as a lecturer in Computing and a member of the User Experience group there. Previously he was a postdoctoral research fellow at University College Dublin, investigating end-users’ perceptions on tailoring their voice user interfaces. The commonfare.net project discussed in the talk was the result of a three-year social innovation project, which Daniel worked on in its final year, as a postdoctoral researcher at Abertay University, to develop the platform’s reputation system and visualisations.

Broadly, Daniel is interested in HCI, especially end-user development and visual programming.

Professor Mike Chantler

Professor Mike Chantler

Mike Chantler, Professor of Computer Science at Heriot-Watt University, will represent SICSA with a presentation on topic modelling and data visualisation to identify content and trends within large free-text datasets. Examples will include models of 60,000 Covid publications and UKRI grants databases.

Dr Patrizia Franco

Dr Patrizia Franco

Dr Patrizia Franco is Principal Technologist in Demand Modelling at Connected Places Catapult ( formerly known as Transport Systems Catapult), interested in research and innovation in new and emerging mobility services, Agent-based, Activity-based Modelling, demand forecasting and multi-modal modelling.

Currently working on “Assessing Sustainable Transport Solutions (AsSeTS) for Rural mobility” and DeMAND (Demand Modelling and Assessment through a Network Demonstrator) collaborative Projects to improve the knowledge base around data-driven demand modelling tools to de-risk the uptake of new mobility services in Urban and Rural Mobility.

Former researcher in Transport Modelling and Data Analysis at Newcastle University, she has more than 15 years’ experience in transport planning and policy, transport modelling and is specialised in Agent-based and Activity-based Modelling to model Mobility as a Service and Demand Responsive Transit.

Dr Graciela Muniz Terrera

Dr Graciela Muniz Terrera

Dr Graciela Muniz Terrera is Senior Lecturer in Biostatistics and Epidemiology at University of Edinburgh. She leads the Centre for Dementia Prevention Translational Research Group in Biostatistics and Disease Modelling, focussing on factors that may affect the estimation of trajectories of cognitive and functional decline. She has extensive experience in developing and applying statistical methods in ageing and dementia research, and harmonising evidence synthesis and research reproducibility.

Bettina Platt

Bettina Platt

Prof Bettina Platt is Chair in Translational Neuroscience at University of Aberdeen. She heads a multi-disciplinary research team that investigates aspects of brain function and malfunction from the single molecule to the systems level. She has extensive experience in translational modelling of dementia and in particular electrical signal measurement for brain activity.

Prof Ekaterina Komendantskaya

Prof Ekaterina Komendantskaya

Ekaterina Komendantskaya,
BSc and MSc Moscow State University (1998 — 2003);
PhD University College Cork (2004- 2007); current position:
Professor and the lead of the Lab for AI and Verification, Heriot-Watt University.

Komendantskaya’s work lies on the intersection of AI and Machine Learning, Types and Programming Languages, all these themes contributing to the now popular research topic of Verification of AI.

She has published over 60 papers and received over £4.5 million of grant funding, including a prestigious EPSRC Fellowship in Theoretical Computer Science (2008-2011), and more recently, the National Cyber Security Centre “Security for AI” award (2019-20), the grant “Continuous Verification of Neural Networks” (2020-2021) funded by the UK Research Institute in Verified Trustworthy Software Systems (VETSS), and the grant “AISEC: AI Secure and Explainable by Construction” (2020-2024) funded by the EPSRC ”Digital Economy” scheme.

She has a strong international track-record in formal methods and automated reasoning, as witnessed by her chairing the leading international symposia PPDP’19 and PADL’20, and invitations to over 60 conference programme committees.

She has given over 35 invited talks, served as an editor of 6 volumes of international conference proceedings, and has supervised 28 postgraduate students and RAs.

Komendantskaya has substantial experience of research group building: she led the Theory of Computation group at the University of Dundee 2014–2016, the SICSA Research Theme “Theory, Modelling and Computation” in 2016–2019, and in 2019 she established the Lab for AI and Verification (LAIV.uk), an interdisciplinary research group that works with colleagues in the National Robotarium and the Edinburgh Center for Robotics on novel methods of AI Verification.

Nick Nayfack

Nick Nayfack

Nick manages partnerships, and open innovation for IOHK. IOHK is a 200+ member organization with a top 10 blockchain solution worth over $300M in assets with a focus on financial inclusion through open technologies. Previously, Nick worked with charities, nonprofits and NGOs to develop software for online fundraising via mobile devices. As part of this work, thousands of charities were able to collect 100% of donations via mobile network operators which enabled $30-100M of fundraising. With a strong background in financial services via the credit card industry, Nick’s mission is to help co-create a world where fair, open and transparent financial systems exist and fair opportunities are provided to all.

Professor Roma Maguire

Professor Roma Maguire

Roma Maguire is a Professor of Digital Health and Care at the University of Strathclyde and Director of the Health and Care Futures initiative. She is also co-lead of the Health Technology Cluster and holds an Honorary Nurse Consultant post in Digital Health at NHS Lanarkshire. Her research interests include Digital Health, Remote Patient Monitoring, Supportive Care, Predictive Modelling and Values Based Medicine. She has significant experience in the co-design, development, evaluation and implementation of person-centred remote patient monitoring systems using patient reported outcome measures (PROMS) to optimise symptom management, promote adherence to medicines, support wellbeing and improve quality of life. Her research spans several clinical specialities including cancer, dementia, cardiac and respiratory disease and palliative/end of life care. She has led several multi-site supportive care and digital health studies in the UK and across Europe.

Professor Nick Bailey

Professor Nick Bailey

Nick Bailey is Professor of Urban Studies at the University of Glasgow. He has long-standing interests in the analysis of social welfare in urban areas and how the geography of welfare is changing. His work examines urban planning in a broad sense, encompassing areas including housing and social policy. He is Director of the ESRC-funded Urban Big Data Centre (UBDC) and Associate Director of the Scottish Centre for Administrative Data Research (SCADR), also ESRC-funded. Both Centres are involved in pioneering the use of novel forms of data and analytical approaches for policy-relevant urban research.

Juliana Bowles

Juliana Bowles

Juliana Bowles is a Senior Lecturer in the School of Computer Science, University of St Andrews, where she also leads the health informatics group. Her research interests lie in automated formal verification techniques and their application in healthcare. She coordinates the EU Horizon 2020 research project SERUMS, which deals with the security and privacy of future-generation healthcare systems, putting patients at the centre of future healthcare provision, enhancing their personal care and maximising the quality of treatment they receive.

Our Session Speakers

More to follow...