Join us for a special summer lecture from an external academic.

This talk is from Professor Dave Robertson, Chair of Applied Logic, Vice Principal and Head of College of Science & Engineering at the University of Edinburgh.

Social Contracts: Computing between autonomous entities

Many of the drivers for computation at large scale require us to address the problem of very complex entities (with reasoning abilities that we may not be able to inspect or fully predict) that must socially cohere to solve complex problems. This is the motivation for much of what we do in social robotics, multi-agent computation, open data sharing, crowdsourcing and other technologically driven areas. I’m interested in general methods for providing this sort of “glue” between intelligent systems and in applying the resulting technology to domains. I will talk about recent work in data-intensive healthcare, using automated experimentation as an example. I will then summarise some of the ways in which the engineering perspective changes when the focus is on interaction between systems, rather than the systems themselves.

David Robertson is Chair of Applied Logic, Vice Principal and Head of College of Science & Engineering at the University of Edinburgh. Prior to this he was Head of School of Informatics at Edinburgh. His computing research is on formal methods for coordination and data sharing in distributed, open systems using ubiquitous internet and mobile infrastructures - the goal being to develop theories, languages and tools that out-perform conventional software engineering approaches in these arenas. He was coordinator of the OpenKnowledge project and was a principal investigator on the Advanced Knowledge Technologies research consortium, which were major EU and UK projects in this area. His work on the SociaM EPSRC Programme (social.org) Smart Societies European IP (smart-society-project.eu) and SocialIST coordinating action (social-ist.eu) develops these ideas for social computation. Methods from his group have also been applied to other areas such as astronomy, simulation of consumer behaviour and emergency response but his main application focus is on medicine and healthcare. To this end, he is a member of the Farr Institute for medical data sharing and was co-director of the Centre for Medical Informatics at the University of Edinburgh. He is a Fellow of the British Computing Society and chaired the executive of the UK Computing Research Committee (the expert panel of BCS and IET); was a member of the EPSRC Strategic Advisory Team for ICT and of the MRC Population Health Sciences advisory group; is on the Advisory Board for Innovate UK’s Complex Systems programme and is a member of the management board for the Scottish Innovation Centre in Data Science.

Refreshments will be available from 15:00 with the talk starting at 15:30. This will last around 45 minutes and will be followed by a Q&A session and further refreshments. Please email engage@mmu.ac.uk if you have any questions.

To register, please visit: https://profdaverobertson.eventbrite.co.uk