About this event

Chaired by alumna Meri Williams and bringing together expertise from across the spectrum of digital research, this event will offer fascinating insight into areas as diverse as human augmentation, digital behaviour, the threat of AI, and visual computing and machine learning.

Our speakers will include Professor Damien Coyle, Director of the Bath Institute for the Augmented Human; Professor Neill Campbell, Director of the Centre for the Analysis of Motion, Entertainment Research and Applications (CAMERA); Professor Laura Smith, Professor of Psychology and Co-Director of the Bath Institute for Digital Security and Behaviour; and Dr Harish Tayyar Madabushi, Lecturer in Artificial Intelligence.

Meri Williams (BSc (Hons) Computer Information Systems, 2005), is an experienced technology leader who has led teams at firms including Procter & Gamble and Monzo. They are now Chief Technology Officer at Pleo, a Technology Advisor for Kindred VC and a board trustee at Stonewall and One Goes Up, an organisation that advocates STEM careers for young women.

You can read more about our speakers and their research below.

Agenda

Join us for welcome drinks from 6.15pm, before we move into the Auditorium to hear from the panel at 7pm.

All our speakers will present some of the key aspects of their work before a panel discussion, chaired by Meri, and an opportunity for the audience to ask questions.

Following this, drinks and canapes will be served in the Vault.

Speaker biographies:

Professor Damien Coyle

Director of the Bath Institute for the Augmented Human
Professor Damien Coyle is a Professor of Neurotechnology and a UKRI Turing AI Fellow. His research focuses on developing AI to translate electrophysiological signals into control signals for brain-computer interfaces and trialling neurotechnology on a large scale with end-users, mainly in clinical and assistive technology applications. Damien is an IEEE Brain Technical Community Steering Committee member and an advisory board member for the UK Neurotechnology Innovation Network. He is the Founder and CEO of NeuroCONCISE Ltd, an award-winning neurotechnology company.

Professor Neill Campbell

Director of the Centre for the Analysis of Motion, Entertainment Research and Applications (CAMERA)
Professor Neill Campbell is a Royal Society Industry Fellow and Professor of Visual Computing and Machine Learning in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Bath. He is the Director of the Centre for the Analysis of Motion, Entertainment Research and Applications (CAMERA), which researches and applies visual computing and machine learning technology in the fields of entertainment, health and sports science. Neill is also the Chair of the British Machine Vision Association and Co-Director of the Centre for Mathematics and Algorithms for Data, an interdisciplinary group that studies the theoretical underpinnings of Machine Learning and Data Science, as well as being the Director of research for MyWorld, a creative hub across the Bath and Bristol region, funded by UKRI and an alliance of more than 30 industry and academic partners. Before moving to Bath, he worked as a post-doc at UCL and Cambridge, where he also completed his PhD in Computer Vision. His research involves learning models of shape, appearance and dynamics from images and video. In particular, creating systems that do not require technical computing expertise (e.g. for artists). He also works on machine learning problems where data are scarce or expensive to obtain (e.g. annotations from expert clinicians) and when uncertainty in the resulting output is important (e.g. medical and safety applications).

Professor Laura Smith

Professor of Psychology and Co-Director of the Bath Institute for Digital Security and Behaviour
Laura Smith is Professor of Psychology at the University of Bath and co-Director of the Institute for Digital Security and Behaviour. She is also Deputy Director of the ESRC Network Plus for Analytical Behavioural Science in Security and Defence, and leads the human centred design theme of the ESPRC AI hub for Collective Intelligence. She received her PhD in Social Psychology from the University of Exeter in 2008, and held academic positions at the University of Queensland, Australia, from 2008-2011, before joining the Department of Psychology at the University of Bath in 2011. She was Chief Editor of the British Journal of Social Psychology from 2020-2022. Her research highlights how human psychology and behaviour interact with the affordances of digital technologies – and how this can produce opportunities, but also create vulnerabilities, threats, and risks. She has been funded by three major UK-based research councils, and in 2016 she won a mid-career Fellowship from the British Academy to study the psychology of online radicalization.

Dr Harish Tayyar Madabushi

Lecturer in Artificial Intelligence
Dr Tayyar Madabushi's is a lecturer in Artificial Intelligence at the University of Bath. His research focuses on understanding the fundamental mechanisms that underpin the performance and functioning of Large Language Models such as ChatGPT. His work was included in the discussion paper on the Capabilities and Risks of Frontier AI, which was used as one of the foundational research works for discussions at the UK AI Safety Summit held at Bletchley Park. His research on the constructional information encoded in language models has been influential in bringing together the fields of construction grammar and pre-trained language models. In addition, his work on language models includes collaborative industrial research aimed at rectifying biases in speech-to-text systems widely utilised across the UK. Before starting his PhD in automated question answering at the University of Birmingham, Dr Tayyar Madabushi founded and headed a social media data analytics company based out of Singapore.

Meri Williams

BSc (Hons) Computer Information Systems, 2005
Meri is an experienced technology leader and Chief Technology Officer, known for building and scaling technology organisations in a range of sectors including banking, e-commerce, government, telco and manufacturing. They particularly enjoy helping others to level up as technical leaders and managers. Meri founded ChromeRose in 2013, where they combine their abilities to assist companies through training, keynote speaking and consulting. A published author and international speaker, they are the chair of the LeadDev conference which runs in London, Berlin, New York and San Francisco. In November 2022, they joined Pleo as Chief Technology Officer. They also hold board trustee roles at Stonewall (the UK's leading LGBT+ rights charity) and One Goes Up (a micro-charity focused on helping young women in South Africa start STEM careers).