Welcome
Discover the Centre
Our new Centre for AI Fundamentals is a cross-disciplinary home for foundational artificial intelligence at The University of Manchester. It is a key component of a number of significant investments we have made into AI education, innovation and industrial collaboration.
We boldly focus on fundamental AI research, which includes probabilistic modelling, deep learning, reinforcement learning, causal modelling, human-in-the-loop machine learning, explainable AI, ethics, privacy and security.
The fundamentals are in motion - in particular, deployment and collaboration with people are centrally important fundamental AI problems, not only post-hoc issues. We develop AI that works well with humans and in deployment.
This Centre brings together renowned academic expertise in AI with the latest research taking place across our growing institutes, including the Institute for Data Science and AI (IDSAI), The Christabel Pankhurst Institute for health technology research and innovation, and our partnerships with the Alan Turing Institute and the European Laboratory for Learning and Intelligent Systems (ELLIS).
Who's involved
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Mauricio Alvarez Lopez
Mauricio received his a PhD in Computer Science from The University of Manchester, UK, in 2011. He then joined the Department of Electrical Engineering at Universidad Tecnológica de Pereira, Colombia, where he was appointed as an Associate Professor until Dec 2016.
From January 2017 to April 2022, he was Lecturer in Machine Learning at The University of Sheffield before joining The University of Manchester as a Senior Lecturer.
Read Mauricio's research profile
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Samuel Kaski
Samuel is Professor of Artificial Intelligence at The University of Manchester and at Aalto University, Helsinki where he leads the Finnish Center for Artificial Intelligence Research FCAI and ELLIS Unit Helsinki.
In July 2021, Samuel was appointed among the first Turing Artificial Intelligence (AI) World-Leading Research Fellows. The fellowships, named after AI pioneer Alan Turing, are part of the UK’s commitment to further strengthen its position as a global leader in the field.
Read Samuel's research profile
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Anirbit Mukherjee
Before joining The University of Manchester in November 2021, Anirbit worked as a postdoctoral researcher at Wharton, the Department of Statistics at the University of Pennsylvania.
Most recently, his research interests include solving differential equations using neural nets, particularly in the direction of building theoretical foundations for Deep Operator Networks.
Read Anirbit's research profile
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Wei Pan
Wei Pan is a senior lecturer in Computer Science. After completing degrees in Harbin Institute of Technology and University of Science and Technology of China, Wei Pan gained industry experience in China and then in London whilst completing a PhD in Bioengineering at Imperial College London.
Wei Pan moved to Manchester from TU Delft, where he was Assistant Professor in the Department of Cognitive Robotics, Faculty of Mechanical, Maritime and Materials Engineering and was also co-director of Delft SELF AI Lab.
Read Wei Pan's research profile
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Mingfei Sun
Mingfei is a lecturer in Computer Science. He obtained his bachelors degree from the University of Science and Technology of China (USTC) and his PhD from the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (HKUST).
Mingfei has a broad interest in AI with a particular focus on machine learning techniques such as deep reinforcement learning and learning from demonstrations. His research covers large-scale deep reinforcement learning, policy gradient methods, and optimisation theory. He is applying these methods to problems in video games, robotics and multi-agent systems.
Read Mingfei's research profile
