Two-day event in Oxford launches exciting year ahead for the hub
The Erlangen AI Hub kicked off its second year with an informative and enjoyable two-day event at the Mathematical Institute in Oxford.
The hub’s first year has flown by, and we were delighted to bring our growing team together for the Year 2 Kick Off event. We have been busy building our team of multi-talented Postdoctoral Research Associates (PDRAs) from across our partner institutions over the past year, and the event provided the perfect opportunity to get to know them and showcase their fascinating research.
Hub Co-Directors Michael Bronstein (Oxford) and Anthea Monod (Imperial) introduced the two-day event, before our PDRAs were given the floor to present a wide range of research projects at the intersection of Maths and AI. These included:
- Edward Pearce-Crump (Imperial): Learning with Symmetries
- Francesco Fabiano (Oxford): Thinking Fast and Slow in AI
- Thom Badings (Oxford): Robust Verification of Stochastic Systems
- Oliver Clarke (Durham): Non-Archimedean Optimisation
- Eng-Jon Ong (QMUL): Topological Data Analysis on DNNs
- Sara Veneziale (Imperial): AI and Pure Maths
- Benedikt Fluhr (Aberdeen): Inclusion-Exclusion Aligned Neural Networks
- Kate Zhu (Oxford): Beyond Second Order Methods for Nonconvex Optimisation with Applications to ML and AI
“I enjoyed attending the Year 2 Kick Off event. As a new postdoc who only joined in March, it was a fantastic opportunity to meet my new colleagues face to face for the first time, which was especially valuable given that the Hub is structured across six different nodes. I really enjoyed learning about their research and came away with a much clearer picture of the exciting projects and collaborations that we have planned for the year ahead.”
Edward Pearce-Crump, Postdoctoral Research Associate (Imperial)
The event also included a workshop highlighting the hub’s goals and its ways of working, led by Anthea Monod (Imperial) and Ran Levi (Aberdeen). Peter Grindrod CBE (Oxford) led a session about the importance of the hub’s industry stakeholders, emphasising the opportunities for working with our commercial partners. He also discussed the skills, leadership and career development opportunities available to our PRDAs through the hub’s research programme. The event closed with a highly informative Careers Panel organised by Yue Ren (Durham), where PDRAs were able to present a range of career-related questions to our Board of Directors.
“The Year 2 Kick Off was a great event full of inspiring talks and allowed me to get to know all of the others involved in the project.”
Thom Badings, Postdoctoral Research Associate (Oxford)
The Year 2 Kick Off was a highly successful and collaborative event, where team members old and new were able to get to know each other and exchange valuable knowledge and ideas in a professional, relaxed environment.
Many thanks to our attendees and we look forward to seeing you again soon!
Looking ahead
The collaborative spirit and knowledge-sharing on show at the Year 2 Kick Off gave a taste of things to come at our much-anticipated conference at Queen Mary University of London on 9-11 June. The conference promises to be a key component in our aims to unite and revolutionise the mathematical field to unlock new and improved AI systems. It will bring together leading minds from across the UK’s mathematical, algorithmic and computational communities, and will feature a range of high-profile speakers from across academia and industry.
