We are delighted to announce that Dr Long Tran-Thanh has been awarded funding and support from Google’s AI for Social Good program.

The program focusses on using AI to address some of the world’s biggest societal challenges. Dr. Tran-Thanh’s project, titled Incentive Engineering and Truthful Mechanisms for Grassland Quality and Local Market Price Estimation in Africa, will address the problem of holistic grazing and pasture management in East Africa. The main objectives of the project are: (i) to identify the most efficient ways to evaluate the overall quality of different grazing areas; (ii) to develop a user friendly recommendation system that chooses the next best grazing areas for pastoralists, that takes into account the holistic aspect of pasture management; and (iii) to incentivise pastoralists to truthfully report their activities in order to further improve the system’s predictive ability. The project is a collaboration between the University of Warwick and AfriScout.

Dr. Tanaya Guha (PI) has been awarded a research grant by Ford Motor Company through their Global University Research Program to develop the project "Multimodal Learning for In-Car Driver's Activity Monitoring". This 2-year project aims at developing an AI system that can monitor driver's and passengers' safety through audiovisual scene analysis integrated with short-term driving patterns. For example, by creating alerts when a driver is distracted. The project will be developed in collaboration with Ford's AI research at Michigan.

Prof. Yulan He and Prof. Rob Procter have been awarded funding from the EPSRC under the UKRI’s COVID-19 call. During the COVID-19 pandemic, national and international organisations are using social media and online platforms to communicate information about the virus to the public. However, propagation of misinformation has also become prevalent. This can strongly influence human behaviour and negatively impact public health interventions, so it is vital to detect misinformation in a timely manner. This project aims to develop machine learning algorithms for automatic collection of external evidence relating to COVID-19 and assessment of veracity of claims.

The project is in collaboration with Prof. Maria Liakata and Dr. Arkaitz Zubiaga from the Queen Mary University of London.