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Archive for August, 2024

CDT Foundational Artificial Intelligence Showcase: London. 22-24 July

By Claire Hudson, on 27 August 2024

This year, CDT students, academics and speakers along with staff and students from the prestigious Erasmus Mundus Joint Master’s Programme in AI gathered at the AI Centre for a journey into research, innovation and collaboration at the annual CDT Showcase.
The event kicked off with a session focusing on “The future of AI: Forming your own opinion on what’s coming, when it’s coming, and what we should

or shouldn’t do about it”. Here we explored AI Bias, AI and Warfare and AI Regulation – topics which sparked some lively debates and fostered a spirit of critical thinking amongst attendees.

After lunch, we heard from Dr Anthony Bourachad with his talk titled ART: AI’s final frontier” in which Dr Bourachad presented AI’s foray into the world of art and the Pandora’s box of questions this opens. His talk delved into the philosophical debates about what it means to create, the legal intricacies of ownership and moral rights, and the use of AI as a tool to analyze historical art.
This led to the next session in which we had the opportunity to view participants’ AI and Art entries during a mini museum experience. On display were over 40 entries from current CDT students and students from the Erasmus Mundus Joint Master’s Programme.  All artwork had to be original and created by the submitting artist and there were many impressive submissions, each telling a story and highlighting a wealth of creativity and innovation from the artists.
More on the winners later…..
To conclude the first day, attendees were treated to a vibrant and engaging social event at Immersive Gamebox  This immersive activity provided a welcome break from the day’s sessions and created many memorable moments whilst fostering relationships between participants. Truly a wonderful way to close the first day of the Showcase and a chance to solidify connections made during the conference sessions.
Day two started with a morning of informative presentations from CDT students in which we heard more about their research. With topics ranging from ” A Human-Centric Assessment of the Usefulness of Attribution Methods in Computer Vision” to “Latent Attention for Linear Time Transformers” to a talk on the “Theory of generative modelling – rethinking generative modelling as optimization in the space of measures”  The range of topics being presented provided a reminder about the diversity and exciting research that is being conducted from students and demonstrates why centres such as the FAI CDT are crucial to foster interdisciplinary research in this ever changing landscape.
One of the highlights of the showcase was the afternoon’s visit to the offices of Conception X.
Conception X is the UK’s leading PhD deeptech venture programme and assists PhD students to launch deeptech startups based on their research. There are two tracks available. “Project X” which is for PhD students interested in developing business skills through training designed for STEM researchers, and “Startup X” which is aimed at  PhD students ready to build startups.
During our visit, we enjoyed a welcome introduction from Dr Riam Kanso, Chief Executive Officer who spoke about how Conception X is leading the way in enabling scientists to create companies from their research. This was followed by presentations from entrepreneurs who have been successful in launching their companies with the support of Conception X and concluded with a host of questions from students all seemingly keen to find out more about the Conception X programme and how they too might launch their entrepreneurial journey.
Day three started with a visit to the Intelligent Robotics Lab at UCL East in which the group enjoyed a fast-paced morning with Professor Igor Gaponov.

 The lab is a world-leading research centre of excellence, dedicated to autonomous robotics, specializing in robots that can make decisions in the real-world and act on those. The lab covers areas from mechatronics and control to robot vision and learning, so our group were delighted to be able to hear more about the fascinating research that is emerging and would like to thank Professor Gaponov for providing such a wonderful opportunity to our group.

The final afternoon was filled with key note talks on a range of AI related topics. First up was  Avanade’s Emerging Technology R&D Engineering lead, Fergus Kidd with his talk titled ” The road to General Artificial Intelligence”. Next up was Professor Niloy Mitra and his talk on “what are Good Representations for 3D-aware Generative Models’ then we concluded with a presentation from Sophia Banno – Assistant Professor in Robotics and Artificial Intelligence at UCL and her talk looking at the future of AI and Robotics in Surgical Interventions!
All of these talks emphasized the importance of sustained innovation and collaboration in this rapidly evolving world and provided an intriguing end to the formal presentations of the CDT Showcase.

The final session was an opportunity to view and discuss a variety of posters that students had produced which represented their research. Poster sessions are always a great opportunity for researchers to share their findings in a visual format and encourage observers to delve deeper into specific areas of interest. It was inspiring to witness this session buzzing with an energy that underscores the collaborative spirit that defines the CDT showcase experience.

To close, our sponsor G-Research presented prizes for the AI and Art competition and best poster award to the following recipients
AI & ART
Judging was based on three key criteria (i) Description: convincing description that is compelling and an ability to explain the concept (ii) Novelty: originality of the idea and (iii) Aesthetics.
1st:
Romy Williamson
the convergence of perception
2nd:
Reuben Adams
Nook
3rd:
Pedro José Ferreira Moreira
UCL Summer School
4th:
Kai Biegun
In With The New
5th:
Roberta Chissich
Fores Escape
POSTER SESSION
1st:
Adrian Gheorghiu & Pedro Moreira
Joint 2nd:
Lorenz Wolf.
Mirgahney Mohamed & Jake Cunningham
4th:
Sierra Bonilla
5th:
Bernardo Perrone De Menezes Bulcao Ribeiro & Roberta Chissich

We would like to take this opportunity to thank G Research for their generous sponsorship of the AI & Art competition and Best Poster award.

Looking ahead, the connections made and ideas exchanged during these three days will continue to develop, shaping the future of AI. The Foundational Artificial Intelligence CDT Annual Conference is a platform for researchers and academics to showcase their research and innovation and this event proved to be a melting pot of ideas, insights, and networking opportunities, shaping the future landscape of AI.

We look forward to hosting the event again next year!

Filed under Conferences, Discussion series, Event, Research, workshop

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The UKRI Centre for Doctoral Training in Foundational AI is proud to announce the participation of Sierra Bonilla in the International Computer Vision Summer School (ICVSS) 2024

By Claire Hudson, on 23 August 2024

The UKRI Centre for Doctoral Training in Foundational AI is proud to announce the participation of Sierra Bonilla in the International Computer Vision Summer School (ICVSS) 2024, held in Sicily from July 7 to July 13, 2024. This event is known for its rigorous selection process, with 30% of applicants accepted from a pool of 626.

This year, the theme focused on “Computer Vision in the Age of Large Language Models,” covering cutting-edge topics at the forefront of research and industry innovation. The summer school featured 30 hours of intensive lectures delivered by world-renowned experts, including:

Vijay Badrinarayanan (Wayve, USA)

Michael J. Black (Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems and Meshcapade GmbH, DEU)

Andreas Geiger (University of Tübingen, DEU)

Georgia Gkioxari (California Institute of Technology, USA)

Abhishek Gupta (University of Washington, USA)

Aaron Hertzmann (Adobe Research, USA)

Derek Hoiem (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, USA)

Diane Larlus (Naver Labs Europe, FRA)

Richard Newcombe (Meta Reality Labs Research, USA)

Pietro Perona (California Institute of Technology, USA)

Bobby Rao (Microsoft, USA)

Stefano Soatto (Amazon and University of California Los Angeles, USA)

Andrea Tagliasacchi (Simon Fraser University, CAN)

Antonio Torralba (Massachusetts Institute of Technology, USA)

Lior Wolf (Tel Aviv University & Mentee Robotics, ISR)

One of the highlights of the event was the interactive poster sessions, where Sierra presented her recently accepted MICCAI ’24 Paper “Gaussian Pancakes”. The social events and the beautiful Sicilian environment and food made networking with peers and experts very memorable.

Special thanks go to the ICVSS 2024 organizers, particularly Giovanni Maria Farinella, Roberto Cipolla, and Sebastiano Battiato, for orchestrating such an incredible event. Additional gratitude is extended to Derek Hoiem for his valuable mentorship session.

The knowledge and insights gained from ICVSS 2024 are expected to greatly benefit Sierra Bonilla’s ongoing research and future projects, further contributing to the advancement of the field within the UKRI CDT in Foundational AI.

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