Engagement & Highlights

Please find highlights and updates from The Alan Turing Institute, the UCL Turing University Liaison Team, and from the wider AI & data science community.

UCL TUT Change in Leadership. From September, 2024 Professor Elsa Arcaute will take over as Academic Lead.

Elsa is currently a Turing Fellow and a Professor of Complexity Science at the Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis (CASA). She is a physicist with a masters in Mathematics (part III of the Mathematical Tripos) and a PhD in Theoretical Physics from the University of Cambridge, UK. Her doctoral research was on Clifford algebras applied to Penrose's twistors, and to multi-particle wave-functions. She moved to the field of Complex Systems while visiting Prof. Henrik Jensen at the Complexity and Networks group at Imperial College London. Later she joined the group as a postdoc where, working with Prof. Kim Christensen as part of a multidisciplinary project funded by the EPSRC, her research focused on self-regulation in social systems. The work was done alongside Dr Ana Sendova-Franks, a biologist who manipulated ant colonies, Dr Torbjorn Dahl, an engineer who programmed robots, and Dr Angela Espinosa, a social scientist who developed an intervention for the viability of an Irish eco-village.

The TUT team remain as a group, comprising Prof Elsa Arcaute, Prof Miguel Rodrigues, Dr Irina Bass and Jess Livermore.

UCL Turing Fellows announced. In March 2024, the Turing announced its new cohort of Turing Fellows.Tne Turing Fellows represent a community of exceptional researchers at the forefront of data science, AI and/or related disciplines. The Turing University Team can now share the names of ourTuring Fellows from UCL.

The TUT attended AI UK - the UK’s national showcase of data science and AI in March. AI UK is a showcase of how data science and AI can be applied to society's biggest challenges, with a focus on The Alan Turing Institute's grand challenges, defence and security, environment and sustainability, and transformation of healthcare.

The Chancellor has announced £100 million investment in the Alan Turing Institute. The investment will build on the work of the Turing, helping it to bring the AI community together to address national and international challenges in areas such as: health, environment and sustainability, defence and security.

Turing awarded £1.7M to convene new community of data professionals. The Alan Turing Institute has been awarded £1.7M by UKRI to establish a national network of professionals who work in data, such as data stewards, data librarians, data wranglers and data engineers.

The Turing has appointed four new Directors to address society’s biggest challenges through data science and AI. The announcement, made on Wednesday 14 February, is a key milestone in implementing the Turing’s new strategy which shapes how the Institute will use data science and AI for social good. Read more about the announcement here

If you have any relevant stories that you would like to suggest for consideration, please contact the Turing University Liaison Team.