Opening Keynote: Professor Steve Furber
9:00 am 29 August 2023 @The Catalyst Newcastle
Keynote title: A Novel Mechanism for Edge ML
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
2:00 pm 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.
Industrial Keynote: Dr Christian Blakely
9:00 am 30 August 2023 @The Catalyst Newcastle
Keynote title: Recent Applications of Tsetlin Machines: From Time Series to Learning Bayesian Network Structures
Dr Christian Blakely has more than fifteen years of experience in computational science, software engineering, machine learning, and project management. He has been working as a tech lead and engineer in machine learning for large defense, pharma, industrial, and fintech projects throughout Switzerland and the US Beginning his career as a computational engineer at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, he is now the Head of AI & Real-time Analytics for PwC Switzerland where he has built with his team full-stack solutions for detecting market manipulation and insider trading on the Swiss Stock Exchange and for optimizing drug candidate portfolios for large pharma companies. Dr Blakely frequently designs and employs Tsetlin machine architectures for his work and has a primary focus on real-time learning with closed-form expressions for interpretability.
Industrial Keynote: Dr Khaldoon Al-Naimi
2:00 pm 30 August 2023 @The Catalyst Newcastle
Keynote title: Future of Earables
This keynote will be focused on advanced audio application empowered by signal processing and AI with emphasis on hearing (using the example of Earables from Nokia Bell Labs). Users have multiple audio enabled devices around them (such as earbuds, smartphones, smart-watches, smart speakers). They are all optimised to work well by themselves but would need to be orchestrated such that user has the best experience, from a hearing perspective, in a secure and natural manner that does not burden the user. Dr Khaldoon Al-Naimi is a Senior Research Scientist at Nokia Bell Labs Cambridge. He finished his bachelor’s degree in 1996 in Electronics, Communication and Signal Processing from Baghdad University, obtained an Msc in Digital Communication Systems from Loughborough University in 1997, and completed PhD in Advance Signal Processing and Coding Techniques from the University of Surrey in 2002. He has over 20 years of industrial experience in signal processing, algorithm development, digital system design, DSP and embedded systems. His research interest is in advance audio/speech signal processing primarily for wearable devices, limited power resource embedded systems and multi-sensors systems. His