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The British Academy Early Career Researcher Network brings together ECRs across the humanities and social sciences disciplines, regardless of their funding source or background.
Event Organiser: British Academy ECRN Training and Development ThinkIn Group.
This event aims to explore the integration of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in research, highlighting its benefits, risks, and the future potential within the UK AI ecosystem, emphasising the value that the humanities and social sciences bring into the STEM dominated AI space. It will provide Early Career Researchers (ECRs) with insights into AI developments, opportunities for networking, and practical workshops to on applying AI in research and brainstorming AI themed research proposals and related grant opportunities.
Join us to SHAPE the future of AI in research, where we bring together ECRs, industry experts, and government representatives to explore, discuss, and innovate.
Event themes and focus areas
- Theoretical Insights: Latest perspectives and forward-looking visions on AI in research.
- Practical Application: Hands-on sessions on future projects and networking opportunities for ECRs to SHAPE the future of AI.
- Benefits and Risks: Comprehensive understanding of the advantages and challenges of using AI.
Event Speakers
Professor Gina Neff (Chair)
Her books include Venture Labor (MIT Press 2012), Self-Tracking (MIT Press 2016) and Human-Centered Data Science (MIT Press 2022).
Professor Gina Neff is the Executive Director of the Minderoo Centre for Technology & Democracy at the University of Cambridge. She is the Deputy Chief Executive Officer for UKRI Responsible AI UK (RAI) and Associate Director of the ESRC Digital Good Network.
She serves on the board of directors for the (US) Social Science Research Council and sits on the board of trustees for the Institute for the Future of Work. She was awarded the 2019 University of Oxford Social Science Division Teaching Excellence Award for Excellence in Doctoral Supervision for her work leading the DPhil at the Oxford Internet Institute.
Her academic research has won both engineering and social sciences awards. Professor Neff led the team that won the 2021 Webby for the best educational website on the Internet, for the A to Z of AI, which has reached over 1 million people in 17 different languages.
Professor Edward Grefenstette
Edward Grefenstette is a computer scientist, serving as Director of Reseach at Google DeepMind, and as an Honorary Professor at UCL.
He previously was Head of Machine Learning at Cohere, before which he was at Research Scientist and RL Area Lead at Facebook AI Research, preceded by my time as a Staff Research Scientist at DeepMind, following a (short) period as the CTO of Dark Blue Labs, which I also co-founded.
Prior to his move to industry, he was working at the University of Oxford's Department of Computer Science, and was a Fulford Junior Research Fellow at Somerville College, while also lecturing at Hertford College to students taking Oxford's new computer science and philosophy course.
In his keynote, Ed will outline and lightly speculate on the mechanisms and properties which enable diverse applications, such as open-ended conversation, code understanding and synthesis, some degree of tool-use, and some zero-shot instruction-following capabilities, and posit that the training regimen which enables these capabilities points to a shift where we go from focussing on scale, to focussing on reasoning about what data to train on. Ed will briefly discuss recent advances in open-ended learning in Reinforcement Learning, and how some of the concepts at play in that work may inspire or directly apply to the development of novel ways of reasoning about data in supervised learning, in particular in areas pertaining to LLMs.
Professor Peter Bloom
Peter Bloom is a Professor of Management at the University of Essex. His research critically explores the radical possibilities of technology for redefining and transforming contemporary work and society. It focuses on better understanding the human aspects of organizational existence and the potentially for constructing more empowering cultural paradigms for organising the economy and politics.
He received his PhD from the University of Essex in 2009 in Government (Ideology and Discourse Analysis). Prior to coming to the EBS, he was a Senior Lecturer and Head of the Department of People and Organisations at the Open University as well as the Co-Founder of the research group REEF (Research into Employment, Empowerment, and Futures).
Herbie Bradley
Herbie Bradley is a Research Scientist in the UK AI Safety Institute, working on research to support AI governance and evaluations for advanced AI systems. Herbie is also a PhD student at the University of Cambridge, and prior to joining the UK’s Frontier AI Taskforce spent the past few years studying the behaviour of large language models and their implications for AI governance in collaboration with several AI start-ups and non-profit research groups, including EleutherAI.
Dr Harish Tayyar Madabushi
Dr Tayyar Madabushi became a Lecturer in Artificial Intelligence at the University of Bath in 2022, after completing his PhD in AI, focusing on automated question answering, at the University of Birmingham in 2019.
Dr Tayyar Madabushi's long term research goals are focused on investigating methods of incorporating high-level cognitive capabilities into models. In the short and medium term, his research is focused on the infusion of world knowledge, common sense and reasoning into pre-trained language models to improve performance on complex tasks such as multi-hop question answering, conversational agents, and social media analysis.
Dr Alex Mankoo
Alex is a senior policy adviser and sociologist of science & technology with ten years of experience in research and policy, particularly working at the intersection of policy, academia, funders, and civil society. He currently leads the British Academy's Policy programme on 'Digital Society' and is particularly interested in the way in which digital technologies are being shaped by social forces while also shaping the societies we live in.
Provisional Programme
09:30 – 10:00 Arrival and Registration
10:00-10:10 Introduction (Dr Lenore Thompson, University of Derby, ECRN Training and Development Opportunities ThinkIn Group)
10:15 – 11:00 Keynote, Prof. Edward Grefenstette, Google Deep Mind & UCL
11:00-11:15 Break
11:15-11:30 Prof. Peter Bloom, University of Essex
11:30 – 11:45 Herbie Bradley UK AI Safety Institute & University of Cambridge
11:45 – 12:30 Panel and Q+A with audience
12:30-13:30 Lunch
13:30-13:45 Dr Harish Tayyar Madabushi on project development: How to use AI in research.
13:45-14:45 Brainstorming tables based on emerging themes/research topics that came out of the morning session.
14:45-15:00 Break
15:00-15:10 Dr Alex Mankoo, Senior Policy Adviser at the British Academy on current and upcoming AI related funding opportunities
15:15 – 15:55 Group discussion and questions, presenting research project ideas for feedback from speakers
15:55 – 16:00 Closing summary for the day.
Thank you for your interest. We understand that plans may change. If you sign up and can no longer attend let us know by emailing ecr_network@thebritishacademy.ac.uk and your ticket can be offered to someone else
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