About us

AI group is engaged with a wide range of cutting-edge research activities in AI and machine learning and their application to image processing and computer vision, digital health and autonomous systems, remote sensing and Earth Observation and other areas.

The main focus of research revolves around trustworthy AI, interpretability of machine learning, human activity recognition, biometrics and multi-agent systems. Our research encompasses various aspects of trustworthy AI and machine learning including interpretability and explainability, trust, privacy, ethics and social responsibility.

Continuous learning including class as well as domain incremental approaches, prototype-based models which provide higher level of interpretability-by-design as well as addressing streaming data by models with dynamically evolving structure are also being studied. Applications to cybersecurity including threat- and generator- agnostic methods for adversarial attacks and deep fakes detection are also being developed.

AI group is well integrated with the Data Science Institute and Lancaster Intelligent, Robotic and Autonomous systems Centre as well as with international organisations such as ELLIS and others. It collaborates closely with the other research groups, e.g. Cyber Security, Digital Health as well as other Departments and Faculties, e.g. School of Engineering, LEC, Faculty of Health and Medicine and others.

AI group members are Editors-in-Chief or Associate Editors of high impact scientific journals, regularly chair and organise international conferences, are invited and present keynote talks.

The research activities of the AI group are funded by a portfolio of competitive research projects from UK research councils, ERC, European Commission, European Space Agency, DSTL, GCHQ, and other Governmental sources, industry (e.g. Ford, BAE Systems, Thales, Huawei, etc.), charities and others.

The destination of former post-graduate researchers and students include Professorships at leading UK and USA Universities and companies, e.g. Google, IBM, Facebook/Meta, Ford, ARM, Apple, UCLA, etc.

Publications

AI group members feature high in Stanford University’s “Top 2% Scientists” list and regularly publish at top venues such as:

• Leading high impact scientific journals including IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence, Artificial Intelligence Review, Information Fusion, Neural Networks, Pattern Recognition, IEEE Transactions on Neural Networks and Learning Systems, IEEE Transactions on Cybernetics, IEEE Transactions on IoT, WIREs Data Mining and Knowledge Discovery, International Journal of Intelligent Systems
• Top tier conferences such as CVPR, NeurIPS, ICLR, AAAI, ICCV, IJCAI, ECCV, IEEE-IJCNN

Many publications by group members are highly cited (according to SciVal and Clarivate) or were awarded best paper prizes.

PhD Opportunities

AI group welcomes applications for PhD studentships. More details on the opportunities can be found at the School’s PhD webpage as well as on ELLIS website. Periodically positions are being advertised in relation to funded research opportunities that may arise with projects or targeted programmes such as:

• Industrial CASE allocation to industrial partners
• Industrial Doctoral Landscape Awards (IDLA)