We are investigating the theoretical underpinnings of safe, verifiable, and trustworthy autonomous systems and their use in addressing real-world challenges from smart cities to disaster response. Our research addresses models of safety, responsibility and optimisation for AI systems, reinforcement learning, game theory and negotiation, mechanism design, reasoning under uncertainty and ethical and responsible AI.
Exciting research challenges around human-in-the-loop interaction include exploring how to build better human-in-the-loop AI systems which use AI to support and augment human performance, both enhancing interaction experiences for humans and utilizing human expertise to enhance AI performance. Our research includes human-system/robot interaction, natural language processing, machine listening, human-agent collaboration and citizen centric AI.
How systems evolve, learn and adapt enable us to better understand complex networks of individual actors. Our research in this area spans evolutionary computation and evolutionary biology, complex economic systems and social networks, and complex multi-robot systems.
Distinguished Visiting Academics hosted by AIC Group
We have a number of distinguished visiting professors in the group, comtributing to our vibrant research environment and contributing to education and research training with the group and wider school.
Sridhar Sudarsan is the Chief Technology Officer (CTO) at SparkCognition. As CTO, Sridhar is responsible for driving SparkCognition’s technology and product strategy and leveraging next-generation artificial intelligence systems to secure and optimize assets across industries including intelligent infrastructure, smart cities, healthcare, mobility among others. With over two decades of intrapreneurship and technology leadership experience, Sridhar has been at the helm of several complex products and projects, collaborating with global customers on cutting-edge technologies. Previously, Sridhar was the CTO for IBM Watson Platform and Partnerships, where he led the technology strategy and architecture of the IBM Watson platform, ecosystem and strategic partnerships.
Alvin Wilby was Vice President responsible for the Research, Technology and Innovation activities at Thales UK, and he led the development of the strategic research framework agreement between Thales and the University of Southampton. He has also been leading defence cross-sector work on the safety of autonomous systems, which is helping to inform the MoD research agenda.
Steven Meers is RAEng Visiting Professor of Applied Artificial Intelligence in the School of Electronics and Computer Science. He is Fellow and Head of the AI Laboratory at the UK Defence & Technology Laboratory.
Doing a PhD within AIC
As a group we believe in supporting our PhD students and creating an inspiring, nurturing and collaborative environment in which to do your research. This environment includes our annual student-led AIC conference event, away day team building activities, technical reading groups and a seminar series with world-class experts presenting their latest research.
We provide opportunities to gain teaching experience and grow your personal research networks, such as the MINDS Centre for Doctural Training (MINDS CDT) and TAS Hub Doctural Training Network (TAS DTN). A recent PhD student at AIC was assistant papers chair (CHI 2018) and another created a spin off company (sentientsports 2020)!
The group has reading groups around the latest research topics (Reinforcement Learning, NLP, etc.), a seminar series and first Friday lunch events. We have regular team building activities such as away days to Marwell Zoo and the unbelievable truth challenge, which help our students make friends and establish research connections within the group. PhD students have the chance to take on research leadership roles within the group, including the student & research staff committee, AIC conference organising group and PhD representatives at group academic management meetings.
Joining AIC as a Post-Doctoral Research Assistant (PDRA) or Academic
Our world-class research team regularly win new grants and advertise for PDRA positions. As a PDRA you will have career development opportunities to increase your professional network, gain teaching experience and develop your research independence (e.g. support in applying for funding from Turing Post-Doctoral Enrichment Awards or internal grants).
Collaborating with researchers at AIC
Our research team regularly engages with external partners via collaborative research projects, consultancy and PhD sponsorship. If you are interested ask for a chat with one of our team about the options we have for collaboration.