Dr Mae Carroll
Fellowship focus: Investigating a system to help understand and classify ‘inflectional morphology’ (the way words are formed in certain grammatical categories).
Inflectional morphology (such as how we would expect the past tense to be indicated with the addition of ‘ed’ at the end of a verb) is hugely complex, and mapping out how it varies requires advanced techniques to measure both within and across languages. Dr Carroll and Dr Beniamine aim to develop the world’s first detailed typology for this variation, which will include a large-scale classification of languages and samples from the lexicons of a range of languages representing the world’s inflectional diversity.
Professor Guilherme Rosa
Fellowship focus: Furthering and promoting the use of AI, big data and informatics to improve animal health and livestock production.
This Fellowship will bring together Professor Rosa’s vast experience in developing tools for the analysis of livestock data with Surrey’s capability in veterinary and human health informatics. As well as establishing strong interdisciplinary links, the objective will be to conduct useful joint research in vet informatics. Professor Rosa will share insights into his research via a series of research seminars, and deliver two workshops for researchers in animal and vet sciences, statisticians and data scientists. Another aim will be to advance the level of machine learning techniques among Surrey’s vet students.
Dr Pranav Khandelwal
Fellowship focus: Developing animal-inspired gliding robots to monitor the ecosystem.
Robots that can launch, glide and perch like animals could allow us to monitor and protect ecosystems in inaccessible areas such as forest canopies, but developing these robots is challenging because we know surprisingly little about the gliding behaviours of animals in the wild. Dr Khandelwal will bring eight years of experience studying flying lizards in the Indian rainforest to inform the design of a new bioinspired gliding robot in collaboration with Dr Siddall (an expert in robotic systems) and an interdisciplinary team of biologists, conservationists and engineers. A key aim will be creating a framework for deploying robotic systems in real-world conservation tasks.
Professsor Patrick Mikalef
Fellowship focus: Exploring the strategic and business value of Generative AI technologies and how they affect people’s trust in organisations.
Summary: Gen AI (Generative AI) technologies such as ChatGPT have attracted significant attention but, as yet, organisations are struggling to leverage them. In this Fellowship, Professor Mikalef will combine his experience in Information Systems with Dr Ioannou’s expertise in privacy and trust to develop a framework that demonstrates the impact of Gen AI on trust among internal and external stakeholders and – in turn – on an organisation’s overall performance. Outcomes will include a lecture, research seminar and a collaborative research project focused on a comparative case study of two organisations deploying Gen AI.
Professor Anastasiya Lipnevich
Fellowship focus: Translating research on the impact of feedback in education into practice, and establishing an international Feedback Lab.
Much research has been undertaken – by Professor Lipnevich, Professor Winstone and other academics worldwide – into the way students engage with feedback and the effects of praise on student performance. This Fellowship is aimed at developing a strategy to translate this research into educational practice. It will include the development of a book for educators, visits to local schools to gain teachers’ input, a masterclass and research seminar led by Professor Lipnevich, and the launch of ‘The Feedback Lab’ – an international community of early career researchers working in this field.
Associate Professor Bingfeng Zhang
Fellowship focus: Solving a fundamental problem in computer vision by developing a method for segmenting objects found in images in real-world scenarios.
At present, computer vision systems are able to segment predefined objects (for example they can be trained to recognise ‘dogs’ and ‘cats’) but often fail when confronted by new classes of object (such as ‘pandas’). Associate Professor Zhang will spend two months at Surrey with the aim of building a new multimodal framework that combines images, text and sound, and enables systems to adapt quickly to new or poorly-trained classes of object. The Fellowship will include the establishment of a research network with China University of Petroleum and a jointly-organised seminar on computer vision and AI.
Associate Professor Tirtha Banerjee
Fellowship focus: Combining multidisciplinary knowledge on wind flows over forested hills with advanced data analysis to improve weather and climate environmental modelling.
Understanding wind flow and turbulence over hills and forests enables us to model scenarios such as heat damage to crops, wildland fire behaviour and pollutant dispersal – but current models often lack the complexity needed. Using numerical simulations and Surrey’s EnFlo meteorological wind tunnel, Associate Professor Banerjee and Dr Iacobello will conduct numerical experiments, collect data to validate new hypotheses, and test their theories on the land-atmosphere exchange when complex terrain and vegetation canopies are present. The Fellowship outcomes will include a seminar series and a short course of lectures for PhD and postdoctoral researchers.