Full Programme

Tuesday, 24 November 2026 - Day 1
Start	End	Session		Location
09:00	10:00	Registration		JMCC Foyer
10:00	10:30	Welcome Remarks & UKRI Address	Prof. Themis Prodromakis, Prof. Subramanian Ramamoorthy, & Samantha Francis	Pentland & Overflow in South Hall
10:30	11:15	Prof Sir Bashir Al-Hashimi	Keynote: The Future of Scientific Research: Intentionally Designed Human–AI Collaboration — A Personal Perspective	Pentland & Overflow in South Hall
11:15	11:35	Coffee & Networking		Concourse & Centro \| Kirkland
11:35	13:00	AI & Entrepreneurship	Caroline Chibelushi - UKRI Innovate UK \| Business Connect	Pentland & Overflow in South Hall
			Ben Clark - Future Worlds
			Emre Kazim - Holistic AI
			Lizzie Withington - Edinburgh Innovations
			Emma Loedel - RAEng Enterprise Hub
13:00	14:30	Lunch & Poster Session 1		Ground Floor JMCC \| Posters in Prestonfield
14:30	15:30	Life & Health - AI for Biomedical Analysis and Clinical Prediction
		Dr. Anatoliy Gorbenko, Leeds Beckett University	Prediction of the infecting organism in peritoneal dialysis patients with acute peritonitis using interpretable Tsetlin Machines	Pentland West (Chaired by Dr. Indu Bodala)
		Dr. Konstantin Georgiev, The University of Edinburgh	Machine learning-based predictions of healthcare contacts following emergency hospitalisation using electronic health records
		Linda Bryant, King's College London	Structural imaging predictors of ketamine response in treatment-resistant depression: a machine learning approach
		Dr. Rufus Daw, University of Manchester	CellTypeAI: cell annotation for scRNA-seq using local generative-AI
		Dr. Saeed Farzi, University of Southampton	HeartBERT: A self-supervised ECG embedding model for efficient and effective medical signal analysis
		Natural & Physical Sciences
		Dr. Alperen Dalkiran, The University of Edinburgh	Signatures of Electron−Hole Hopping in Myoglobin Peroxidase Activity Revealed by Deep Mutational Learning	Pentland East (Chaired by Dr. Paul Harvey)
		Dr. Ben Rowlinson, The University of Edinburgh	Band Gap Prediction of Two-Dimensional Materials Using a Gradient-Boosted Feature Selection Approach
		Francesco Tudisco, The University of Edinburgh	Neural-HSS: Hierarchical Semi-Separable Neural PDE Solver
		Dr. Shashank Mishra, The University of Edinburgh	PhyTENG: A physics-informed machine learning framework for modelling contact-separation triboelectric nanogenerators
		Dr. Michael Gutmann, The University of Edinburgh	Risk-averse optimization of genetic circuits under uncertainty
		Synergistic Human-AI Collaboration - Responsible AI, Ethics and Governance
		Dr. Beatrice Bonami, The University of Edinburgh	AI ethics through a decolonial lens: what does AI ethics look like if we take seriously the push to decolonise it?	South Hall (Chaired by Dr. Shelly Vishwakarma)
		Asst. Prof. Dilara Kekulluoglu, Sabanci University	Understanding User Trust and Expectations in Answerable Sociotechnical Systems
		Dr. Joshua Krook, University of Southampton	When autonomy breaks: the hidden existential risk of AI
		Dr. Paula Westenberger, Brunel University of London	Artificial intelligence for cultural heritage research: the challenges in UK copyright law and policy
		Prof. Steve Benford, University of Nottingham	In the Moment of Glitch: Engaging with Misalignments in Ethical Practice
15:30	15:45	Refreshments and Comfort Break		Concourse & Centro \| Kirkland
15:45	16:30	Life & Health - Human-Centred and Agentic AI in Society
		Dr. Basuraj Bhowmik, University of Strathclyde	Autonomous agentic AI with policy adaptation for physics-informed spectral learning in Structural Health Monitoring	Pentland West (Chaired by Dr. Indu Bodala)
		Dr. Hazrat Ali, University of Stirling	What does Agentic AI brings to Elderly Care?
		Prof. Jennifer Pearson, Swansea University	The ORBIT India Dataset: Understanding the Challenges of Collecting a Disability-First AI Dataset in Low-Resource Environments
		Dr. Adriana Wilde, Royal Institute of Technology Stockholm	Social Educational Robotics and Learning Analytics: A Scoping Review of an Emerging Field
		Yve Smiith, Northumbria University	Exploring children's visions for an AI-enabled education
		Algorithms, Agents & Theory - Causality, Counterfactuals and Explainable AI
		Dr. Damian Machlanski, The University of Edinburgh	Causal Ordering for Structure Learning from Time Series	Pentland East (Chaired by Dr. Paul Harvey)
		Dr. Kurt Butler, The University of Edinburgh	Higher-Order Feature Attribution: Bridging Statistics, Explainable AI, and Topological Signal Processing
		Dr. Sander Beckers, University College London	Large Language Models as Nondeterministic Causal Models
		Dr. Tom Yaacov, King's College London	Explaining Failures of Cyber-Physical Systems with Actual Causality
		Dr. Zhihua Liu, The University of Edinburgh	Causal-Adapter: Taming Text-to-Image Diffusion for Faithful Counterfactual Generation
		Synergistic Human-AI Collaboration - Human-Centred Design, Creativity and AI in Society
		Dr. Gavin Bailey, Swansea University	Street Scenes: Public Appliances for GenAI Video in Informal Settlements	South Hall (Chaired by Dr. Shelly Vishwakarma)
		Prof. Helen Kennedy, University of Nottingham	Worlding otherwise: Virtual production as a participatory method for imagining safer digital futures
		Prof. Richard Ingram, University of Dundee	A kind of magic? Artificial Intelligence-assisted recording: developing principles for an AI-informed social work curriculum
		Prof. Simon Robinson, Swansea University	Less Redraw, More Explore: Suggestion and Completion for Sketch-to-Image
		Dr. William Hunt, University of Southampton	Effects of Swarm Size Variability on Operator Workload
16:30	16:45	Day 1 Closing Remarks	Prof. Themis Prodromakis and Prof. Subramanian Ramamoorthy	Pentland & Overflow in South Hall

Evening
19:00	Late	Gala Dinner	Ceilidh	National Museum of Scotland
19:00	Late	Gala Dinner	National Public Engagement Challenge Grand Final & Award Ceremony	National Museum of Scotland

Wednesday, 25 November 2026 - Day 2
Start	End	Session		Location
09:00	09:30	Registration & Refreshments		JMCC Foyer
09:30	10:15	UK AI Research Labs	Chair: Lisa Coles, Deputy Director of Artificial Intelligence and Data	Pentland & Overflow in South Hall
			Prof. David Barber (GenAI Hub Director) - Science of Fundamental AI Research (SOFAIR) Lab
			Prof. Jakob Foerster - British Open-ended Learning and Discovery (BOLD) Lab
10:15	11:15	Coffee & Networking \| & Poster Session 2		Concourse & Centro \| Kirkland \| Posters in Prestonfield
11:15	12:00	Algorithms, Agents & Theory - Probabilistic Inference, Geometry and Dataset Structure
		Dr. Michael Gutmann, The University of Edinburgh	Fast and Robust Simulation-Based Inference With Optimization Monte Carlo	Pentland West (Chaired by Prof. Vihar Georgiev)
		Sahel Torkamani, The University of Edinburgh	Magnitude Distance: A Geometric Measure of Dataset Similarity
		Xiaoyu Jiang, University of Manchester	Transformed Latent Variable Multi-Output Gaussian Processes
		Dr. Yuanbang Liang, Cardiff University	Geometric Decoupling: Diagnosing the Structural Instability of Latent
		Algorithms, Agents & Theory - Reasoning, Collaboration and Robustness in Foundation Models
		Prof. Des Higham, The University of Edinburgh	Vulnerability Analysis of Transformer-based Optical Character Recognition to Adversarial Attacks	Pentland East (Chaired by Dr. Yali Du)
		Nian Ran, University of Manchester	MCCE: A Framework for Multi-LLM Collaborative Search in Discrete Spaces with Similarity-Filtered Preference Learning
		Sania Waheed, University of Southampton	VLM-Guided Visual Place Recognition for Planet-Scale Geo-Localization
		Dr. Xingwei Tan, University of Sheffield	Fundamental Reasoning Paradigms Induce Out-of-Domain Generalization in Language Models
		Sustainability & AI
		Dr. Arshdeep Singh, King's College London	Compressing Quaternion Convolutional Neural Networks for Audio Classification	South Hall (Chaired by Asst. Prof. Oisin Mac Aodha)
		Dr. Mahdis Tourian, University of Exeter	Automated classification of natural habitats using ground-level imagery
		Dr. Mohammad Amir Anwar, The University of Edinburgh	Towards a new paradigm of 'datafied development'
		Dr. Yue Jin, University of Northampton	Achieving collective welfare in multi-agent reinforcement learning via suggestion sharing
12:00	12:15	Comfort Break
12:15	13:15	Engineering & Manufacturing
		Dr. Chang Liu, The University of Edinburgh	EEsizer: LLM-Based AI Agent for Sizing of Analog and Mixed Signal Circuit	Pentland West (Chaired by Prof. Vihar Georgiev)
		Emily Miller, University of Southampton	Through the Lens of Doubt: Robust and Efficient Uncertainty Estimation for Visual Place Recognition
		Emmanuel Olowe, The University of Edinburgh	Policy-Governed LLM Routing with Intent Matching for Instrument Laboratories
		Dr. Qian Zhang, Durham University	AI in Smart Buildings and Construction 4.0: Implementation areas and influencing factors in construction organizations
		Shengkai Hu, University of Southampton	Pack defender: proactive defense against packet attacks in NoCs using an XGBoost-RNN model
		Algorithms, Agents & Theory - Optimisation, Learning Dynamics and Neural Architectures
		Damian Smith, University of Southampton	Functional Alignment Can Mislead: Examining Model Stitching	Pentland East (Chaired by Dr. Yali Du)
		Denis Zorba, The University of Edinburgh	Convergence of an actor critic gradient flow for entropy regularised MDPs in general spaces
		Asso. Prof. Francesco Tudisco, The University of Edinburgh	Stuart-Landau Oscillatory Graph Neural Network
		Dr. Kate Wenqi Zhu, University of Oxford	Beyond Second-Order: Cubic-Quartic Regularization Methods for Nonconvex Optimization in Machine Learning
		Dr. Yue Jin, University of Northampton	Partial Action Replacement: Tackling Distribution Shift in Offline MARL
		Synergistic Human-AI Collaboration - Trustworthy, Explainable and Multimodal AI Systems
		Dr. Adam Jenkins, King's College London	'It literally feeds on data': Co-designing Privacy Conscious and Trustworthy LLM Dialogues with End Users	South Hall (Chaired by Asst. Prof. Oisin Mac Aodha)
		Mahmud Elahi Akhter, Queen Mary University of London	The Alignment Bottleneck in Decomposition-Based Claim Verification
		Prof. Robert Procter, University of Warwick	A rapid evidence review of evaluation techniques for large language models in legal use cases: trends, gaps, and recommendations for future research
		Sabrina Henry, Heriot-Watt University	Self-Guided Integrated Gradient Method for Attribution
		Dr. Tan Viet Tuyen Nguyen, University of Southampton	SHAF: Small Language Model Integrated with Motion Modality for Multimodal Interaction
13:25	14:15	Lunch & Poster Session 3		Ground Floor JMCC \| Posters in Prestonfield
14:15	15:15	Community Panel	Chair: Dawn Greenberg, Head of AI and Digital – Arts and Humanities Research Council	Pentland & Overflow in South Hall
			Dr Christopher Burr, Senior Researcher in Trustworthy Systems at the University of York
			Dr Natasha McCarthy, Associate Director for Policy at the Royal Academy of Engineering
			Octavia Field Reid, Associate Director of Public Participation & Research Practice at the Ada Lovelace Institute
			Prof David Leslie, Professor of Ethics, Technology and Society at Queen Mary University of London
			Dr Nayha Sethi, Senior Lecturer at the Usher Institute, University of Edinburgh
15:15	16:00	Vivek Natarajan	Keynote	Pentland & Overflow in South Hall
16:00	16:30	Closing Remarks	Prof. Themis Prodromakis, Prof. Subramanian Ramamoorthy, & Dr. Matt Roach	Pentland & Overflow in South Hall