News
March 2026
- Professor Aniko Ekart delivered the AI for researchers part of the joint Entrepreneurship and Artificial Intelligence training programme of the prestigious PhD+ programme and the Net2Zero Centre for Doctoral Training.
- Dr Giorgio Morales presents his work on "Discovering Non-Linear Equations Under Epistemic Uncertainty Using Transformer-Based Multi-Set Skeleton Prediction" at the EuroMech Colloquium for physics-enhanced machine learning.
- We have two contributions to the leading conference in Multi-Agent Systems, AAMAS 2026, by our members Dr Maria Chli, Dr Farzaneh Farhadi, and PhD student Niloofar Aminikalibar. Pre-prints of the papers are available here and here.
- Dr Farzaneh Farhadi has been awarded £31k by Innovate UK for the project AI-GUARDS in collaboration with Aston colleagues Dr Fatemeh Raji and Prof Vladlena Benson. The project will strengthen governance in AI-driven cloud systems.
- We're happy to announce that Dr Giorgio Morales is joining ACAIRA as an AI Fellow. He will work on project GUIDE - Guided Uncertainty-aware Interactive Discovery of Equations.
February 2026
- Dr Martin Rudorfer has been awarded a Royal Society Research Grant. The work on "Autonomous Failure Recovery for Bimanual Robotic Manipulation Tasks" will start in March 2026.
- Our research centre is growing as we welcome a number of new associate members: Dr Ferhat Sadak, Dr Zhengjia Xu, and Dr Debaleena Roy.
January 2026
- We are proud to announce that our PhD students Vincent Zakka and Kieran Saunders have successfully passed their vivas. Vincent worked on privacy-preserving human action recognition and is now a Lecturer in AI and Data Science at the University of Hull. Kieran's work focused on monocular depth estimation and is now with us as a PostDoc. Congratulations to both!
- Led by Dr Alina Patelli, the work on Sustainable Urban Mobility: Co-Designing a Responsible AI Recommender System has been published. The paper proposes a novel, systematic, participatory approach to co-designing and co-assessing responsible AI and applies it to support transport authorities, industry, policymakers, and the public with their urban mobility decisions.
- Our Innovate-UK-funded Knowledge Transfer Partnership (KTP) with Thames Laboratories has been successfully completed. The project set out to develop an automated, intelligent job scheduling system to reduce travel and the company's carbon footprint while increasing the quality of its services. KTP Associate Abimbola Falodu worked on the project together with ACAIRA members Alina Patelli and Aniko Ekart in partnership with Thames Lab's Charlotte Burton. Learn more about the outcomes here.
December 2025
- Dr Roberto Alamino delivered a talk in the ACAIRA research seminar series on "Statistical Asymmetry - An Entropic Measure of Symmetry".
- Dr Alina Patelli and Professor Anikó Ekárt are the editors of the newly published Women in AI and Sustainability book. The volume brings together top-tier contributions to the tightly connected AI and sustainability research fields, put forward by female scientists. The chapter authors also share their inspiring professional and personal stories to galvanise women considering a career in STEM. Dr Chloe Barnes and Dr Maria Chli also contributed as chapter authors.
October 2025
- Dr Howard Haughton from King's College London gave a talk on "Bias in AI Systems" as part of our ACAIRA research seminar series.
September 2025
- Alina Patelli participated in the Leading Cyber Ladies Midlands Autumn Event: Responsible AI Part II The Quantum Conundrum, as a returning keynote speaker.
- One interesting problem in physics is how to measure the complexity of systems. In his newly accepted journal paper, Roberto Alamino introduces statistical measures of asymmetry, postulating that systems that have some level of asymmetry are more complex and exhibit more interesting behaviour. A preliminary manuscript can be found here.
- Dr Roberto Alamino was invited to be part of the Closing Panel Discussion of the Digital Nursing Conference in London. The discussion was chaired by Sue Tranka, Chief Nursing Officer and Nurse Director, NHS Wales and titled "Ethics and Workforce Impact in Digital Nursing: AI, Automation and Professional Identity".
- Our former PhD student, Yingyi Kuang, devliered a talk on Imitation Learning-based Robot Manipulation in our ACAIRA seminar series. The next seminar is scheduled for the 22nd of October, where Dr Howard Haughton (King's College London) will talk about detecting and estimating bias in AI systems.
- Dr Farzaneh Farhadi was an invited speaker at the DEEP-REBAYES Workshop, hosted by the Technical University of Crete in Chania. She also presented the paper “Strategic Infrastructure Design via Multi-Agent Congestion Games with Joint Placement and Pricing”, co-authored with Niloofar Aminikalibar and Dr Maria Chli, at the EUMAS 2025 conference in Bucharest.
July 2025
- The work by Shereen Fouad, her PhD student Ezzaldin Alkooheji, and their collaborators on a data-driven, interactive visualisation platform for paediatric intensive care got accepted for oral presentation at BioMedEng25. This is the UK's largest gathering of Biomedical Engineers, Medical Engineers, and Bioengineers and will take place in September.
- We have two articles published in the research-informed news network The Conversation: Dr Martin Rudorfer explored the idea of an "80-year old machine that shaped the internet", and Dr Roberto Alamino co-authored an article explaining "how technology is helping cities sort their waste problem".
- Our EPSRC-funded CPD course "AI Literacy in Healthcare" helped NHS professionals to enhance their understanding of AI in clinical settings. Dr Shereen Fouad and Prof Aniko Ekart led the course and saw strong engagement and positive feedback, resulting in improved confidence and participants planning to apply their learning to innovation in the NHS.
June 2025
- Phil Weber presented his work on "Speaker Identification in Courtroom Contexts" at the UK and Ireland Speech Workshop 2025. It compares the performance of automatic forensic voice comparison with that of human listeners.
- Niloofar Aminikalibar presented her MSc project as a poster at the 3rd UK AI Conference in London. The work is on "Optimising ARIMA for Time Series Forecasting: The CLEAVE Method for Adaptive Parameter Selection".
- Education flows into research - our previous students are turning their dissertations into academic research outputs: Muhammad Uzzam's work on "Word Complexity Prediction Through ML-based Contextual Analysis" has been accepted for publication in the Proceedings of Machine Learning Research, and Abdallah Abdelhameed just presented his work on "Image-based Detection of Waste on Water Surfaces" at the Advances in Data Science and Artificial Intelligence Conference 2025 in Manchester.
- ACAIRA just became member of the CAIRNE research confederation, a European network that facilitates research and development of human-centered, trustworthy, and responsible AI.
- We proudly announce that we will deliver two CPD courses for "AI literacy in Healthcare" and "AI in Medical Imaging". The courses are designed by Shereen Fouad and Anikó Ekárt in collaboration with the Sandwell and West Birmingham Hospitals NHS Trust. The project is funded by the EPSRC Impact Builder Award.
- ACAIRA is now affiliated with the Z-inspection® initiative. The initiative proposes a holistic process for evaluating the trustworthiness of AI-based technologies at different stages of the AI lifecycle. In particular, it focuses on identifying and discussing ethical issues and tensions through the development of socio-technical scenarios.
May 2025
- ACAIRA's first purely social event was held - our members and their families enjoyed a cozy day out in the Lickey Hills. It was fun!
- Shereen Fouad will present work on "Generative Pretrained Transformers for Medical Communication Training and Automated Performance Assessment" at the UK AI Conference 2025 in London.
- Martin Rudorfer presented his work on "Reachability and Inverse Reachabilty of Robot Manipulator Arms" at the prestigious International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA) in Atlanta, US.
- Professor Anikó Ekárt and Dr Chloe Barnes (Aston Centre for Artificial Intelligence, Robotics, and Applications (ACAIRA)) were invited members of the seventh Trust in Intelligent Machines workshop, held near Frankfurt, Germany.
- Professor Lucy Bastin (Computer Science and Digital Technologies) was an invited presenter at a successful UniLiON brokerage event for Cluster 6 of the Horizon Work Programme (food, bioeconomy, natural resources, agriculture, and environment).
- Dr Alina Patelli, John Rego Hamilton and Professor Aniko Ekart (Applied AI & Robotics) have had their paper ‘Urban Transport Decision Making: Improving Traffic Prediction with Symbolic Regression, Transfer Learning and Deep Learning’ accepted for presentation at the prestigious Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference.
- Professor Aniko Ekart (Aston Centre for Artificial Intelligence Research and Application) was a panellist at the fifth IMA (Institute of Mathematics and its Applications) and OR (Operational Research) Society Conference on Mathematics of Operational Research.
- Shereen Fouad (Aston Centre for Artificial Intelligence Research and Application) was invited as a guest speaker at the Workshop on Foundation AI Models in Biomedical Imaging at the IEEE International Conference on Biomedical Imaging (ISBI) 2025 in Houston, TX, USA.
April 2025
- Dr Alina Patelli and Dr Dalila Ribaudo (Aston Business School) will co-lead a UK-EU consortium consolidation project funded by The British Academy. This will support the development of a Horizon Europe application to fund an intelligent urban mobility project that leverages AI to inform policy.
- Following the success of the UK AI conference 2024 in Birmingham, we are happy to announce that PhD student Vincent Zakka is member of the organising committee for UK AI 2025 in London.
- Professor Lucy Bastin gave an invited seminar at iDiv, the German Centre for Integrative Biodiversity in Leipzig, on the topic of "Connectivity data cubes: tracking functional habitat connections in space and time".
- Professor Anikó Ekárt has been appointed as associate editor for the Genetic Programming and Evolvable Machines journal, dedicated to the automatic evolution of software and hardware area of artificial intelligence.
- Dr Roberto Alamino, Dr Hassan Khan, and PhD student Niloofar Aminikalibar contributed to a training on "Bridging Machine Learning and Microplastic Research" for early-stage researchers. Roberto was one of the organisers, coordinated the activities, and participated and chaired discussion panels.
March 2025
- Dr Phil Weber is teaming up with Professor Abdul Sadka (Digital Futures Institute) and Phoebus Software Ltd to develop a conversational query tool, a private LLM trained to provide financial information to advisers and clients, with zero hallucinations and appropriate security between hosted businesses and clients. They are currently recruiting an associate.
- Dr Shereen Fouad has been appointed as Guest Editor for a Special Issue on "Deep Learning in Biomedical Image Analysis" in Applied Sciences, an international, peer-reviewed, open-access journal published by MDPI. For more information, see here.
February 2025
November 2024
- A number of early career researchers and PhD students from ACAIRA contributed to the 2nd UK AI conference, with talks by Michael Pritchard and Niloofar Aminikalibar and poster contributions from John Rego, Victoria Lush, Muhammad Uzzam and Ezekiel Appiah. Read more here.
- Dr Shereen Fouad won funding from the EPSRC Impact Builder Award to bridge the knowledge gap in AI technology among healthcare practitioners. Learn more on our research page.
September 2024
- ACAIRA proudly hosted its first AI for Healthcare-themed summer school. It was a real success! See more here.
Affiliations
CAIRNE
ACAIRA is a member of CAIRNE - the Confederation of Laboratories for Artificial Intelligence in Europe. CAIRNE is a network of institutions that foster research and development of human-centered, trustworthy, and responsible AI. Its mission is to ensure that AI research and innovation in Europe align with ethical principles, sustainability, and societal well-being.
By being a member, we confirm our commitment to these goals and gain access to the large AI community. We will be part of topic-specific special interest groups and task forces, and expand our network of partners in academia and industry.
Z-inspection®
The Aston Centre for Artificial Intelligence Research and Application (ACAIRA) is affiliated with the Z-inspection® initiative.
Z-Inspection® is a holistic process for evaluating the trustworthiness of AI-based technologies at different stages of the AI lifecycle. In particular, it focuses on identifying and discussing ethical issues and tensions through the development of socio-technical scenarios. The process has been published in IEEE Transactions on Technology and Society.
Z-Inspection® is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons License (Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike CC BY-NC-SA) and is listed in the new OECD Catalogue of AI Tools & Metrics.
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