Ekaterina Komendantskaya

Heriot-Watt University

Ekaterina is a Professor of Computer Science at HWU and her work lies on the intersection of: AI and Machine Learning, Verification, Types and Programming Languages. She has been a PC member of a dozen of conferences on logic, programming languages and AI, and most recently the Chair of PPDP’19 and PADL’20. In 2019 she established the Lab for AI and Verification at HWU.

David Aspinall

University of Edinburgh

David is the Personal Chair in Software Safety and Security and leads the Academic Centre of Excellence at UoE as well as being a Fellow at the Alan Turing Institute. His focus is on topics in security, verification and programming languages, including work on program logics and analyses for code correctness, controlling resources, concurrency and information. He has worked on statistical and qualitative security of authentication mechanisms, policy languages for mobile device management and user interfaces for proof assistants

Verena Rieser

Heriot-Watt University

Verena is a Professor of Computer Science at HWU and leads the Natural Language Processing group, with a focus on intelligent conversational systems, such as chatbots and virtual personal assistants. The group's aim is to establish machine learning techniques to automatically build such systems from data. Over the last 2 years, Rieser’s team was the only UK university to enter the finals of the prestigious Amazon Alexa Challenge, which aims to build open-domain chat-bots.

Robert Atkey

University of Strathclyde

Robert is a Chancellor’s Fellow at UoS. His work includes type system based analyses for: effectful programs, syntax-manipulation, information flow, resource bounded programs, productive streaming programs, and programs with physical symmetries, such as in classical mechanics. He has served on the programme committees of the top programming language theory conferences POPL, ICFP, ESOP, and ECOOP.

Burkhard Schafer

University of Edinburgh

Burkhard is a Professor of Computational Legal Theory at UoE and is a Director and co-founder of the SCRIPT Centre for IT and IP law, the UK’s oldest interdisciplinary research centre in the intersection between law and technology. He is also Co-Director of the Joseph Bell Centre for Forensic Statistics and Legal Reasoning, which since its inception in 1999 brought together mathematicians, computer scientists and lawyers. He has advised the governments of the UK, Scotland, Germany, the US and EU.

Oliver Lemon

Heriot-Watt University

Prof. Oliver Lemon is a Professor of AI and Academic Co-Lead at the UK's National Robotarium. He works in generative AI, machine learning, Natural Language Processing (NLP), and Human-Robot Interaction (HRI), and is the Director of the Interaction Lab in the Dept of Computer Science at Heriot-Watt University, Edinburgh. He previously worked at Edinburgh and Stanford Universities. He was the faculty advisor for the Alana team in the Amazon Alexa Challenge -- they were finalists in 2017, 2018, and 2023! He is also co-founder and Chief AI Officer of Alana AI, working on multimodal conversational AI.

Matthew Daggitt

Heriot-Watt University

Matthew's research interests lie in applying mathematical rigour to various areas of Computer Science. He received his PhD at the University of Cambridge in 2019, using algebraic methods to prove strong theoretical guarantees about the worst case behaviour of network routing protocols and other asynchronous iterative algorithms. He also has a strong interest in formal verification and since 2017 has been in charge of the development of the standard library for the Agda proof assistant and programming language.

Lu Yu

Heriot-Watt University

Lu received her PhD degree from the Computer Vision Centre, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (UAB), Barcelona in November 2019. Before, she obtained her M.Sc. degree in Northwestern Polytechnic University (NWPU), China in 2015. Her main research interests include deep learning based applications, such as color representation, metric learning, network distillation and lifelong learning. Lu will be working with the Natural Language Processing Lab at HWU.

Luca Arnaboldi

University of Edinburgh

Luca has recently submitted his PhD thesis at Newcastle University. His research focused on improving explainability and adaptability of intrusion detection by using formal models, with specific focus on constrained IoT deployments. His main research interests lie at the intersection of formal verification, security and AI; however, he is always willing to dabble in new areas such as financial machine learning and protocol verification.

Tanvi Dinkar

Heriot-Watt University

Dr. Tanvi Dinkar is a Research Associate at Heriot Watt University, working on Ethics in Conversational AI. Recently completed a PhD in Computer Science at Télécom Paris. Before that, was a dialogue engineer at Nuance (now Microsoft), coding dialogue systems for the automotive industry. Have an MSc in Linguistics and MSc in Speech and Language Processing, both from the University of Edinburgh. (Once upon a time) completed an undergraduate degree in Journalism and Literature. Interested in Ethics and Robustness, and Dialogue

Wen Kokke

University of Edinburgh

Wen is a programming languages researcher at the University of Edinburgh, where she works on session types. She is also a researcher at Heriot-Watt University, where she works on lightweight verification for neural networks. In her spare time, she enjoys cooking and runs a small art space.

Scott McLachlan

University of Edinburgh

Scott recently received his PhD in Computer Science from Queen Mary University of London. Scott has been a postdoc on their PamBayesian project with the Risk and Information Management research group, undertaking research into AI in primarily healthcare settings. In addition, Scott also holds degrees in Law and Business. His research interests sit at the crossroads of AI solution development and their adoption within the health and law domains, with a specific focus on the use of knowledge engineering and expert elicitation methods combined with approaches for information visualisation to develop better resources for use by both AI developers, and professionals and the public.

Sandor Bartha

University of Edinburgh

Dr. Sandor Bartha is a data scientist with both research and industry experience. He graduated from the PhD programme of the University of Edinburgh in 2024, after completing a data science MScR also at UoE. Currently, he is completing a postdoctoral position in the field of AI security. He has a solid background in statistics, numerical methods, and computer algebra, along with 12 years of experience as a software engineer and excellent coding skills in a variety of programming languages (Haskell, C++, Prolog, Python, C#, Java, SQL). He also has experience with a plethora of databases and data integration. His research interest and experience include type theory, formal and logical methods, as well as formal semantics. Other interests include literature, folk music and dancing (Hungarian, Irish, Breton), playing the Irish flute, hiking, and amateur theatre.

Ronny Bogani

University of Edinburgh

Ronny is dedicated to creating a regulatory and legal framework for the interaction of children and Artificial Intelligence. The primary focus of his work is employing the United Nations Convention for Rights of the Child as a universal common ground and starting point amongst states. Leveraging his nearly two decades of experience as a trial attorney in the United States, he is also involved in setting ethical standards for corporations, institutions and future professionals in the Artificial Intelligence field. He remains licensed to practice law in the United States and holds a Masters of Law from University of Edinburgh, a Juris Doctor from Florida State University and a MRes in Accountable, Responsible & Transparent Artificial Intelligence from the computer science department at University of Bath.

Marco Casadio

Heriot-Watt University

Marco has recently completed his MSc in AI at Heriot-Watt University. His research interests involve verification and machine learning. More precisely, they involve enforcing logical constraints to neural networks through loss functions. In his PhD Marco will apply this verification method to Natural Language Processing problems. However, he also enjoys working on other machine learning fields such as Computer Vision and Reinforcement Learning.

Daniel Kienitz

Heriot-Watt University

Although not officially funded by the AISEC grant, Daniel brings his expertise in machine learning and computational geometry to the AISEC project.

Ben Coke

Heriot-Watt University

Research topic: Verification of Neural Networks in Engineering Applications (ICASE Studentship sponsored by SLB Cambridge)

Colin Kessler

Heriot-Watt University

Research topic: Safe Design of Airborne Autonomous Systems with Neural Network Components

Natalia Slusarz

Heriot-Watt University

Research topic: Verification of Neural Networks