- Nathaniel Byrne
Newsletter January 31st 2020
Calls & Opportunities
Call for project partners for Data Science for Social Good Summer Fellowship
DSSGx, the Turing's UK Data Science for Social Good Summer Fellowship, is looking for project partners who want to tackle critical social challenges and believe that data can improve their operations and interventions with tangible social impact.
As a project partner, you get:
a strong data science team that cares about your challenges
a prototype solution (report, predictive model and software) that helps solve your problem using data science tools
exposure and training – for the project at hand but also how to tackle these projects technically as well as through validation.
Each data science team consists of 3-4 students (undergraduate/graduate) and post-graduates within 2 years of graduation. Their academic strength is complemented by professional technical mentors and project managers. The latter ensure that the time is used efficiently, the deliverables for each week are achieved and that the organisation’s goals are met.
In 2019 we had 800 applicants from around the world.
Projects must be submitted via the application portal. You will need to register.
Deadline: 3 February 2020 before noon.
Turing Call for JADE Applications January 2020
The Alan Turing Institute is offering access to The Joint Academic Data Science Endeavour (JADE) high performance computing (HPC) facility for research projects in the fields of artificial intelligence (AI) and data science.
JADE is a Tier2 HPC resource designed specifically for applications in machine learning and data science. The system features 22 Nvidia DGX-1 deep learning systems, each with 8 of the latest Nvidia V100 GPUs connected via NVlink. For details on the JADE Tier 2 service and how to access it, please see the JADE website.
The aim of this call is to extend the access to the flagship Nvidia Tesla V100 GPUs which, currently in high demand and short supply, might not be available otherwise. We would like to encourage adventurous high-risk, high-reward projects that will benefit from this opportunity.
Application deadline: 10 February 2020
BBC Expert Network seeking Turing written contributions
The BBC is actively looking for written contributions from the Turing for their Expert Network.
Articles need to be related to a Turing project/piece of research and can be linked to the news agenda and/or have a human angle. Article pieces need to be between 600-800 words (you can browse website for examples) and need to be accessible to members of the public.
View a piece they commissioned by Turing Fellow Brad Love: Do supermarkets know more about us than we do? And another from Turing@Birmingham Lead and Turing Fellow Ganna Pogrebna: The emotions that make a film a hit…or a miss
If you are interested or have any questions, please contact Beth Wood, Turing’s Press and Communications Manager at bwood@turing.ac.uk
Events & Conferences
Conferences
Tuesday 24 March 2020 - Wednesday 25 March 2020
Turing Presents: AI UK
Tickets are now available for the Alan Turing Institute's first major conference. For the first time a dynamic, two-day showcase will see the Turing bring together all three of these goals in an unrivalled showcase featuring the very best of UK academic work in AI and machine learning.
Turing Fellows are eligible for a 10% discount, please contact Nathaniel Byrne, for details.
Thursday 5 March 2020
European AI Policy Conference
Bringing together some of the leading voices in AI from across the continent to discuss why European success in AI is important, how the EU compares to other world leaders today, and what steps European policymakers should take to be more competitive in AI.
Sunday 7 June 2020 - Wednesday 10 June 2020
PSI Conference: Speaker required
The PSI (www.psiweb.org) are looking to run a session around the topic of ethics and are looking for a third speaker from The Alan Turing Institute who would be interested in presenting at their upcoming conference in Barcelona. One idea is to have a presentation on ethics with respect to automated decision making in healthcare, but a different topic around ethics and data science/AI in the area of healthcare would be of interest.
Tuesday 7 July 2020 - Friday 10 July 2020
12th International ACM Web Science Conference, University of Southampton
Call for Contributions
The 12th International ACM Conference on Web Science in 2020 (WebSci’20) is a unique interdisciplinary conference facilitating creative and critical dialogue with the aim of understanding the Web and its impacts and reflecting on the most pressing questions facing the Web. This year the organiser particularly encourage contributions on the interrelationships between the Web, AI and other new digital technologies, exploring current theoretical, methodological, and epistemological challenges as well as the practices of individuals, collectives, institutions, and platforms.
Please see the website for more information and detail on submitting.
Abstract submission deadline: 14 February 2020
Paper submission deadline: 21 February 2020
Workshops
Thursday 13 February 2019
NEW: Dynamic situational awareness from autonomous platforms (1,000 Drones)
Suitable attendees will be anyone from a robotics, AI, autonomous strategy/systems or air/space platforms background, this one-day workshop will determine the key research challenges to using a system of air and land autonomous platforms in a Defence and Security context. The intention is to launch a research programme into the challenges raised by the workshop and will underpin a real world trial using 640 Autonomous airborne systems, 300 Autonomous ground borne systems and 10 base stations or “Aviaries” for the air platforms.
Further details are available here. For more information and to register for this event, please contact Alaric Williams or Kate Wicks.
Upcoming Events
Friday 07 Feb 2020
Citizen participation and machine learning for a better democracy
Speakers will present on the Consul project, on how machine learning is being used to enhance citizen’s experiences of direct democracy, new cases of direct democracy in Scotland and the Netherlands, and more advanced applications of machine learning in this critically important domain.
Wednesday 12 Feb 2020
Complexity and token economy
The event will bring together experts from academia and the industry to talk about how Complexity can help make sense of what is happening in the cryptocurrency ecosystem, and how open data from cryptocurrencies can help test and advance theories of Complexity.
Monday 24 Feb 2020
UK multi-agent systems symposium
The AI Programme at the Turing will host an interactive UK Symposium on Multi-Agent Systems (UK-MAS). The goal of the symposium is to bring together UK-based research labs at universities and industry who have a significant focus on MAS research, to explore the MAS research landscape in the UK. There will be space for talks by people from academia and industry as well as discussion sessions and networking opportunities.
Wednesday 26 Feb 2020
Turing Lecture: AI and the future of work
In this lecture, Dr Anne-Marie Imafidon will explore some of the current limitations of the implementations of AI, the implications of a severe lack of diversity throughout the development and creation processes and specifically what this means in the workplace. Also – Anne-Marie will touch on the loss of jobs and strategies for ensuring future employment. Then, drawing on her work with the Institute for the Future of Work, she’ll close with the role that industry has to play in creating a fairer, more equitable future and in role-modelling behaviours to shape society.
New: Tuesday 03 Mar 2020
Causal machine learning masterclass
This masterclass will introduce machine learning-based methods for the evaluation of (causal) treatment effects, highlighting that bias can be introduced if using standard machine learning methods that are tuned for prediction performance, as opposed to estimation of treatment effects. We will then introduce the framework of “Targeted Learning” and other causal machine learning approaches, as a principled solution with optimal statistical properties for the estimation of causal treatment effects. This is an invitation to apply to attend the workshop, please see the web page for details
Wednesday 04 March 2020,
Targeted learning
Part of the Turing AI for Science and Government initiative, this talk exposes the current practice of learning from data by applying traditional statistical methods that are too simplistic, arbitrarily chosen, and subject to manipulation, and presents a solution — a principled and reproducible approach, termed targeted learning, for generating actionable and truthful information from complex, real-world data. This approach unifies causal inference, machine learning and deep statistical theory to answer causal questions with statistical confidence.
Future Events
Wednesday 11 Mar 2020
Machine learning interpretability, explainability and trustability
Monday 16 Mar 2020
Data science for development
Tuesday 17 Mar 2020
Edge computing for earth observation
Wednesday 18 Mar 2020 - Thursday 19 Mar 2020
UK-Italy robotics and AI research collaboration workshop
Tuesday 24 Mar 2020
Turing Lecture: Provably beneficial AI
Monday 20 Apr 2020 - Friday 24 Apr 2020
New: Data Study Group - April 2020
Wednesday 22 Apr 2020
Turing Lecture: Earth Day with Emily Shuckburgh
Many events are recorded, find the archive on YouTube.
Turing Save Haven Secure Compute Environment
Turing’s Safe Haven secure compute environment is currently available through the Alan Turing Institute. Check out the background information here and a more in depth paper can be found via this arxiv link: https://arxiv.org/abs/1908.08737