From November 2024 – April 2025, we (the Turing Liaison Team at Bristol) ran a fruitful Turing Seminar Series. This series boasted academics connected to the Turing Institute, speaking about their cutting-edge research in data science and AI.
From Machine Learning, Large Language Models and Digital Twins, to early prediction of dementia, disambiguation in historical texts and evolutionary biology, the range of speaker specialisms reflected the breadth of research at Bristol in this space, reaching academics and early career researchers across the institution.
Below are a list of the talks and speakers:
Wednesday 6 November:
- Title: Machine Learning and Dynamical Systems meet in Reproducing Kernel Hilbert Spaces
- Speaker: Boumediene Hamzi, Marie Curie Fellow, Imperial College London.
Wednesday 20 November:
- Title: Trustworthy Digital Twins: designing, developing, and deploying open and reproducible pipelines
- Speaker: Chris Burr, Head of the Innovation and Impact Hub, Turing Research and Innovation Cluster for Digital Twins, Alan Turing Institute
Wednesday 4 December:
- Title: What can your shopping basket say about your health?
- Speaker: Anya Skatova, Senior Research Fellow, Bristol Medical School (PHS)
Wednesday 15 January:
- Title: AI-guided tools for early prediction of brain and mental health disorders
- Speaker: Zoe Kourtzi, Professor of Computational Cognitive Neuroscience, University of Cambridge
Wednesday 12 February:
- Title: Temporal models for Word Sense Disambiguation in historical texts
- Speaker: Barbara McGillivray, Lecturer in Digital Humanities and Cultural Computation, Kings College London
Wednesday 26 February:
- Title: “If you can’t tell, does it matter?” What should the law say about humanlike AI?
- Speaker: Colin Gavaghan, Professor of Digital Futures, Bristol Digital Futures Institute, University of Bristol
Wednesday 12 March:
- Title: “Cognition-first evolution”
- Speaker: Richard Watson, Professor, (evolutionary biology and computer science), University of Southampton
Wednesday 26 March:
- Title: “Big data as propeller for dynamic and time-sensitive service industries: a tourism sector perspective.”
- Speaker: Nikolaos Stylos, Associate Professor in Marketing and Digital Innovation, Business School, University of Bristol
Wednesday 9 April:
- Title: Can large language models reason about qualitative spatial information?
- Speaker: Robert Blackwell, Senior Research Associate, Alan Turing Institute
These seminars have connected external researchers with relevant academics and departments at Bristol, and we have already seen these connections turn into longer-term collaborations. After the talk by Chris Burr, Alan Turing Institute, we organised a workshop between the Alan Turing Institute and the Bristol Digital Futures Institute (BDFI). This workshop provided an insight into digital twin projects run by both institutes, as well as facilitating connections. We took visitors on a tour of BDFI to show the incredible facilities, namely the Reality Emulator – the world’s first large-scale digital twin facility. Staff then went into roundtable discussions delving into shared areas of interest and what a longer-term collaboration could look like.
Over the series, we had 184 internal and external attendees, with 80% feeding back that they found the information / content provided during the event helpful. We are planning on running another series in the 2025-2026 academic year, building on our momentum and further increasing our external and internal networks.
If you have any suggestions of who you would like to see speak as part of next year’s series, please contact Isabelle Halton, Turing Liaison Manager – uob-turing@bristol.ac.uk
You can find out more about Turing events and opportunities at Bristol, including the previous Turing Seminar talks and slides on the Turing web pages.