A Lancaster University professor has given a talk on artificial intelligence (AI) to staff at one of the world’s leading technology companies.

Professor Plamen Angelov, of the School of Computing and Communications, gave a virtual live-streamed talk on May 17 to Facebook engineers on ‘explainable by design deep learning’ (xDNN) computer artificial intelligence systems. These are systems where it is possible to understand how the computers arrive at the decisions they make – overcoming a key issue in AI design, called the ‘black box’ problem, where AI systems make decisions but humans don’t know how or why the decisions were made.

In a separate event, Professor Angelov also co-organised a ‘human-centred machine learning’ workshop which was attended by more than 300 researchers.