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.

We are delighted to report that Dr Greg Watson and Dr Lin Gui have been promoted to, respectively, Senior Teaching Fellow and Senior Research Fellow, effective from 1 August 2021. Quoting from their recommendations,

What particularly stands out ... is the virtuous circle of (1) Dr Watson’s continual striving for advancing his teaching expertise, evidenced by the extensive courses he has both attended and contributed to, (2) the strong two-way links between Dr Watson’s development and his teaching practice (and that of his peers), evidenced by the various different changes and improvements that he introduced in the classroom based on his scholarly educational investigations, and (3) the consistent very positive feedback from different groups of students as well as colleagues.

and

Dr Lin Gui is one of the most successful postdoctoral researchers in the recent history of the Department, and is continuing his research career with us after a prestigious two-year Marie Curie fellowship. He has been building a solid and high-flying international reputation, underpinned by an impressive trajectory of high-quality publications. Dr Gui’s initiative and emerging independence are in particular reflected in his contributions to substantial successful funding proposals.

it remains to say many congratulations!

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.