Keynotes

Opening Keynote: Professor Steve Furber
9:00am 29 August 2023 @The Catalyst Newcastle

Keynote title: TBC

Steve Furber is the ICL Professor of Computer Engineering in the School of Computer Science at the University of Manchester. He received his B.A. degree in Mathematics in 1974 and his Ph.D. in Aerodynamics in 1980 from the University of Cambridge, England. From 1981 to 1990 he worked in the hardware development group within the R&D department at Acorn Computers Ltd, and was a principal designer of the BBC Microcomputer and the ARM 32-bit RISC microprocessor, both of which earned Acorn Computers a Queen’s Award for Technology. In Manchester he established the Amulet research group in 1990s which has interests in asynchronous logic design and power-efficient computing, and which merged with the Parallel Architectures and Languages group in 2000 to form the Advanced Processor Technologies group. From 2003 to 2008 the APT group was supported by an EPSRC Portfolio Partnership Award. Professor Furber has won multiple national and international awards for hid pioneering contributions to computing and machine learning.

Tutorial Keynote: Professor Ole-Christoffer Granmo
10:00am 29 August 2023 @The Catalyst Newcastle

Keynote title: The Tsetlin Machine

Professor Ole-Christoffer Granmo is Director of the Centre for Artificial Intelligence Research (CAIR). His passion for artificial intelligence was lit at the age of ten when he got his first computer and discovered programming. Fascinated by the idea of superintelligence, he obtained his master’s degree in informatics in 1999 and the PhD degree in 2004, both from the University of Oslo, Norway. Granmo develops theory and algorithms for systems that explore, experiment and learn in complex real-world environments. Drawing inspiration from the paradigms of deep reinforcement learning and probabilistic causal reasoning, he seeks to surpass human capability in flexible pattern recognition, model building and reasoning. Within his field of research, Granmo has written numerous refereed and invited articles for prestigious publications. He is the inventor of Tsetlin Machine.