The Societal Future of AI: Healthcare, Robotics, and Innovation

Until recently, the average person might have thought Artificial Intelligence (AI) had something to do with sci-fi robots.

The last few years it’s hit the mainstream, most people have heard of ChatGPT and read speculations about how such innovations might impact the future of work. But AI has applications in all corners of society, including many positive impacts across the health and care space.

Health technology is evolving with AI advancements, and in this session, we’ll explore key research in this space alongside responsible approaches to AI development and deployment.

Join us for an open dialogue that welcomes everyone from experts to the curious - you don’t have to be a technical expert to join this session! AI and its applications are here to stay. This event aims to help you understand how it impacts our daily lives so you can critically engage as uses of AI evolve.

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Panel:

• Dr Alistair McConnell (Robotics and Healthcare)
• Dr Marta Vallejo (Healthcare Machine Learning Expert)
• Dr Alessandro Suglia (Natural Language Processing and GenAI Expert)
• Camilla Irvine-Fortescue (Public Engagement Specialist and PhD researcher
  
• Richard Palmer (Responsible AI Advocate & Early-Stage Founder)

Speaker bios

Dr Marta Vallejo is an Assistant Professor at Heriot-Watt University, specialising in machine learning for healthcare. Her career spans both academia and industry. She was awarded a Tenure-track Research Fellowship in 2019 under Heriot-Watt’s prestigious Bicentennial Research Leader programme, leading data management efforts in the EPSRC-funded Proteus Project for lung cancer research. Her expertise in AI-driven diagnostics extends to Parkinson’s, Huntington’s, and motor neuron disease.

Dr Vallejo leads the ML-Health group, fostering interdisciplinary collaborations in AI for healthcare. She is Programme Director for the Graduate Apprenticeship in Data Science and has supervised over 30 MSc and undergraduate students, alongside multiple PhD researchers. Her contributions to the research community include serving as an EPSRC Grant Reviewer and Panel Member, a member of the College of Experts for the Parkinson’s Disease Foundation, and an Editorial Board Member of Nature Communications Biology. She is actively engaged in public outreach, serving as a STEM and Women in Data Science (WiDS) Ambassador and organising events such as WiDS Edinburgh 2024.

Her affiliations include the Edinburgh Centre for Robotics, the Academic Board in Healthcare for the National Robotarium, and the AI capability board of the Global Research Institute in Health and Care. She is also a member of the International Parkinson and Movement Disorder Society and the European Huntington's Disease Network, reflecting her commitment to advancing AI applications in neurorehabilitation and digital healthcare.

Camilla Irvine-Fortesque is the Responsible Impact Specialist at Heriot-Watt University, working in the Public Engagement Team to support researchers to embed public engagement activities within their research. She supports researchers across a variety of fields - ranging from AI and Robotics to Quantum Technology. She is driven by equitable and inclusive engagement practice and has worked with a variety of external partners to deliver projects. Her work includes an engagement programme of deliberative dialogue and community engagement across West Lothian. She runs the monthly HW Engage Network, which features engagement guests each month and supports researchers in expanding their public engagement practice. She has a creative background, previously working in the arts sector and has been building collaborations with researchers and artists over the past two years to further creative and informal science learning. She is also conducting a part-time PhD exploring 'Amplifying Youth Voices: Integrating Young Perspectives across Public Engagement Practice', which examines frameworks for embedding youth voices within research processes.

Richard Palmer is an early-stage founder in the Responsible AI space, Student Enterprise Officer at Edinburgh Innovations, and an AI master’s graduate from the University of Edinburgh. His startup helps companies manage AI risks and build responsible, high-impact systems that maximise value while aligning with both organisational and societal values. With a keen interest in culture, Richard believes that at its core, AI is about humanity.

Dr Alessandro Suglia is an Assistant Professor at Heriot-Watt University (HWU) and co-lead of the "Generative AI for Robotics" theme at the National Robotarium. I am also a member of the ELLIS network and the academic liaison between HWU and the Alan Turing Institute.
Alessandro’s research focuses on designing artificial agents that learn language by leveraging sensory information derived from interacting with the world and with other agents. During his PhD, he was one of the main developers of Alana, the Heriot-Watt conversational AI which ranked 3rd in the Amazon Alexa Prize challenge in 2018. In his role as Assistant Professor at HWU, he led the HWU team “EMMA”, the only non-American university team which was one of the finalists of the Amazon Simbot Challenge—the first Amazon competition to push the boundaries of Embodied Conversational AI. Alongside several academic collaborations, he also completed research collaborations with Amazon Alexa AI, Meta AI, and the European Space Agency focused on developing innovative Multimodal Generative AI models for embodied and situated human-robot interaction tasks.