LIDA: Artificial Intelligence (AI)
The LIDA: AI Community has helped to organise AI Research at Leeds: Building Connections Across Disciplines, together with the LIDA, Horizons and RIS Teams. This workshop attracted 138 registered participants. Researchers from across the University presented work on climate research, AI in healthcare and Robotics, Fintech, Cultural Heritage Projects, and twelve lightning talks demonstrated the breadth of research across campus.
Above images - Delegates attending our AI Research at Leeds event in June 2025.
The community also helped to organise NVIDIA’s campus visit (Patricia Ternes, Zoe Hancox, Claire Knowles, Marc de Kamps) on 17 June. Here, AI research that is reliant on GPUs was presented by a variety of speakers, and NVIDIA staff showed current and future applications of high end GPUs.
LIDA AI also supports SciML, run for and by postgrads, in their efforts to attract funding for external speakers - see their update below!
In order to be better prepared for upcoming AI related calls for proposals, Jodi Gunning of RIS prepares monthly overviews, which are distributed across the newly created [email protected] mailing list.
We will organise a Sandpit event: a workshop that aims to stimulate the submission large-scale proposals to UKRI and other funders. We are also looking to organise a business meets academic event.
The University overall has impressive outputs, for example: Learning to adapt through bio-inspired gait strategies for versatile quadruped locomotion
Overall, dozens of REF quality papers have been produced across the University in the last year alone.
SciML Sub-community
This year, the sciml-leeds community has continued to grow, thanks in part to our regular informal gatherings held on the first Friday of each month. Open to all researchers at the University, these sessions provide a relaxed space to share relevant news on upcoming events, potential resources and opportunities—both internal and external—troubleshoot machine-learning challenges, brainstorm ideas, and foster collaboration across faculties and institutes. We also have a mailing list with over 300 members, including representatives from other universities, industry and beyond. All the key notices are also provided in our monthly newsletter.
Fortnightly, we hold literature club meetings, where volunteers have an opportunity to practise their presentation skills, and critically discuss state-of-the-art papers on scientific machine learning with their peers. The literature club has proven to be a valuable vehicle for identifying potential external speakers to invite.
The sciml-leeds team host frequent external seminars, where we reach out to researchers in the field of scientific machine learning and invite them to present their work to us. This year, we welcomed fourteen speakers from ten institutions in four countries, including the UK Met Office, MIT and the University of Cambridge. These seminars are in hybrid format, making them accessible to remote workers and community outside of the University of Leeds. Topics have ranged in scope from machine-learning theory through to on-the-ground applications in such fields as weather forecasting, development of early-warning systems for floods and volcanic eruptions, and applications in medical imaging and robotics.
We will be collaborating on at least two hackathons in the coming academic year. We will work with AISoc to coordinate an outreach hackathon, with a focus on encouraging young women (in local sixth form colleges) to pursue careers in STEM. The participants will be given a data-science challenge, with a real-world application towards the UN sustainable development goals. After the outreach event, the resources used will be
made available to our community, with details on implementation to be confirmed.
Finally, sciml-leeds' public-facing website has been completely revamped to make it more useful and welcoming for the community. Visitors to the site will now find a handy list of resources, recordings of our seminars (available via the LIDA YouTube channel), a calendar of upcoming events, and a full list of our members.
People
- We welcomed two new committee members: Martin Parker and Denise Hick.
- Our membership continues to grow, with 300 people signed up to our mailing list, representing all 7 University of Leeds Faculties, along with (academic and industry) researchers based internationally.
Partnerships
- AISoc (University of Leeds) https://engage.luu.org.uk/groups/4GQD2/artificialintelligence-society
- AI^2 https://leeds-ai-cdt.github.io/
- LIFD https://fluids.leeds.ac.uk/
- CEMAC https://www.cemac.leeds.ac.uk/
Achievements
- Continued our popular seminar series. Our most popular event this year attracted over 50 attendees, and the top 4 of our recorded seminars have over a thousand views each on the LIDA YouTube channel.
- Brand-new website, visible to researchers globally, promoting the great work we do within LIDA.