The ECS Centre for Machine Intelligence (CMI) brings together the Artificial Intelligence (AI) research across Electronics and Computer Science (ECS) and is a platform to connect with the university as well as enterprise and society. Machine intelligence has been at the centre of the research activities in ECS for more than 20 years, and spans multiple groups and areas of research, including machine learning, multi-agent systems and robotics.
More than 30 academics within ECS have AI as their primary research expertise, ranging from fundamental theory to practical applications. Much of our research is across disciplines including healthcare, psychology, engineering and social science. The CMI has an especially an important role to play in interdisciplinary and applied research by uniting researchers across the university, as well as businesses, through a variety of events. For example, one of the recent events was a seminar on AI for COVID-19 with attendees from both AI and healthcare.
The CMI and its events are led by academics, and we welcome new and early career academics to join the board, help shape its vision and propose new events. The CMI also engages with our undergraduates who are very interested in AI providing a route for them to engage with Southampton research at an early stage. Many of our PhD students are home grown and last year three accepted NeurIPS papers were all led by former ECS undergraduate students who are currently doing their PhD here.
CMI also helps academics to engage with industry partners, which is important for producing high quality research proposals. At our latest showcase events, we had more than 40 industrial partners. There were many proposals that were helped by the presence of CMI, either directly or indirectly, including a Shell partnership, the national Trustworthy Autonomous Systems (TAS) Hub which is led by ECS at Southampton, and a Turing AI Fellowship.