Highlights from the May 2020 meeting: 

The most recent meeting of this Innovation Community featured a talk from Dr Warren Mansell titled “Comparative robotics as a paradigm for testing an interdisciplinary theory of behaviour: Perceptual Control Theory”. This was followed by time for questions and networking and discussions  Robotics, AI and Big Data.

March community meeting: 

This Innovation Community meeting was led by Kiera Gould, Business Engagement and Dr Hujun Yin, School of Engineering. The meeting started with a number of presentations, which followed by time for networking and discussions on industry engagement with Robotics, AI and Big Data. 

You can view the presentations on the Podcast. The timings for each presentation are listed below: 

• 0:00 – 07:49 – Introductions (Emma Finch and Kiera Gould)
• 07:49 – 39:35 – ‘What deep learning (and AI) is and can do’ (Hujun Yin)
• 39:35 – 1:15:24 – Christopher Yau (slides unfortunately not available)
• 1:14:24 – 1:47:27 – ‘Text analytics: Unlocking the evidence from large-scale free-text data’ (Goran Nenadic)
• 1:47:27 –  2:14:27 – ‘Operations Research and AI’ (Julia Handl)
• 2:14:27 – 2:38:48 – ‘Overview of National Centre of Text Mining’ (John Mcnaught)

February Community Meeting

At the February meeting of this Innovation Community, we discussed:

• The Membership of the community
• Current competitions and funding opportunities
• Meeting, lectures and RLP workshops that may be of interest 

The majority of time was spent networking with colleagues to discuss collaboration opportunities. 

Slides presented at the meeting are available below.

• Robotics and AI February meeting slides 

Robotics and AI innovation community meeting at The University of Manchester – Wednesday 30 October 

We invited current users and interested researchers to a meeting to discuss the use of Robotics and Artificial Intelligence (AI) in research across the University. The meeting followed on from a Robotics@Manchester workshop in September 2018, organised by Digital Futures with Professors Angelo Cangelosi and Barry Lennox, at which University researchers presented ongoing research projects in this area and identified proposals and opportunities for a proposed University of Manchester (UOM) robotics entity/centre/institute. If you are interested in hearing about future activity with this community, please contact digitalfutures@manchester.ac.uk. 

Over 50 people from across the University expressed an interest in the meeting representing all three faculties, which resulted in a broad spectrum of research being presented and discussed. This resulted in participants making new connections with colleagues whom they were unlikely to encounter in their day-to-day activities. The meeting began with a brief introduction to the Research Lifecycle Programme by Emma Finch, followed by presentations and discussion. There was a break halfway through the presentations for networking and further discussion over lunch where researchers compared similarities and differences between the methodologies and requirements of using Robotics and AI in their research.  

We had a number of talks at the event, some of which can be found on our Podcast if you want to catch up (presentations available to listen to have the times in brackets). 

• Introduction to Research Lifecycle Programme and Innovation Communities (0:00 – 09:49) 
  Emma Finch, Innovation Lead
• Electric actuators for robot joints (09:50 – 19:24) 
  Judith Apsley, School of Engineering  
• Deep Learning and Machine Vision (19:25 – 45:44) 
  Hujun Yin, School of Engineering
• Predicting the human in HRI – and other things (45:45 – 1:02:11) 
  Guido Herrmann, School of Engineering
• Small-molecule robotics 
  David Leigh, School of Natural Science