As cutting-edge research in robotics and artificial intelligence (AI) reaches the stage where widespread deployment is feasible, issues around safety, dependability and trustworthiness become ever more critical. These emerging applications need robotics to be certifiable, reliable and capable of interacting safely with the environment and users. There is a need for research and novel solutions to extend the applicability, scalability and usability of verification and certification methods for deploying robotic and autonomous systems. While AI methods are finding increasing adoption within robotics, much of this technology was not originally designed with safety and other important human-centred requirements in mind. Making AI truly applicable to, and deployable in, robotic solutions will require advanced sets of skills and new ways of thinking.

The UKRI AI Centre for Doctoral Training in Dependable and Deployable AI for Robotics (CDT-D2AIR, pronounced “dare”) is a joint 4-year PhD training programme offered by Heriot-Watt University and the University of Edinburgh. CDT-D2AIR will train students in the latest methods in AI, verification, design, and robotics, along with practical skills to ensure that robotic systems can be safely developed and deployed. The training programme combines state-of-the-art robotics, machine learning, optimisation and software engineering with verification and testing. This training programme will be conducted within the context of emerging legal standards and regulations, sustainability, ethics, Responsible Research and Innovation (RRI), and Equality, Diversity, and Inclusion (EDI), all through engaging learning activities, to create a new generation of graduates working on dependable and deployable AI for robotics.

More details can be found in: https://www.edinburgh-robotics.org/node/2197

Apologies, we have not been keeping seminar advertisements up to date over the past year. A full list of the seminars which have occurred can be found on the LAIV Seminars page.

Recordings of at least some of the seminars are available on the AISEC Youtube channel.

Apologies, we have not been keeping seminar advertisements up to date over the past year. A full list of the seminars which have occurred can be found on the LAIV Seminars page.

Recordings of at least some of the seminars are available on the AISEC Youtube channel.

This week’s seminar is:

Radu Mardare, University of Strathclyde
Title: A formal context for metric semantics
Friday, 8th of October, 13:00 BST.
https://zoom.us/j/98211928090?pwd=SmZhQlFVNC94aVBZTTZyZjQ1cVNQdz09

Abstract: In the last decades the research in most of the fields in computer science, from programming paradigms to cyber-physical systems and from robotics to learning, has been challenged to integrate various concepts of continuous mathematics into semantics. This is because the interaction of computational systems with the real world brought real-valued parameters in computation (rates, probabilities, differential equations, time, resources, etc). And in this context, the classic semantics centred on concepts of congruence (bisimulation, behavioural equivalence) became inadequate. We are not interested anymore in understanding systems or their behaviours up to identity, but we need instead to work with approximations of systems and of their behaviours, which scale properly in the structure of a computational system and allow us to understand approximated computation. To answer this challenge, we have introduced quantitative equational reasoning, an algebraic theory that generalizes universal algebras by extending the classic concept of equation of type s=t to equations of type s=e t for some positive e, interpreted as an upper bound of the distance between the terms s and t. In this way, instead of axiomatizing congruences, we axiomatize algebraic structures on metric spaces. This gives us the concepts we need to develop a metric semantics for systems where the similarity between non-equivalent systems can be properly measured and approximated. This talk is a tutorial on quantitative equational reasoning and will summarize a series of results that we have published in the last five years, joint work with Prakash Panangaden and Gordon Plotkin. https://personal.cis.strath.ac.uk/r.mardare/

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This is the description of the first news.

This is the description of the first news.

This is the description of the first news.