on June 6, 2020
ACM-W UK is delighted to invite you to attend a speaker series on the subject of “Computing for Social Good” every Friday at 3 pm. The webinars are free to attend! We are very happy that we have been able to invite the best female professionals in academia and industry in computing in the UK to talk about their research projects and to share their ideas on how computing technologies are helping both society and individuals. We hope that both our speakers and our listeners will enjoy the webinars. Each talk will be followed by a discussion. Through a programme packed with insightful topics “Computing for Social Good” provides a unique experience to learn, network and inspire!
Host and Organiser: Dr. Poonam Yadav, ACM-W UK Chair and Lecturer (Assistant Professor), University of York, UK
Co-host: Anastasia Nazarova, ACM-W UK Communication and Project coordinator
Please, register to attend: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/acm-w-uk-webinar-series-computing-for-social-good-tickets-108527801576
Date: 12.06.2020
Time: 3 pm.
Speaker: Dr Hatice Gunes
Title of Talk: Artificial Emotional Intelligence for Well-being
Talk summary: Designing artificially intelligent systems and interfaces with socio-emotional skills is a challenging task. Progress in industry and developments in academia provide us a positive outlook, however, the artificial emotional intelligence of the current technology is still limited. In this talk, I will present some of our research explorations in this area, including virtual-reality-based cognitive training with affective adaptation, and tele-presence robotics that is sensitive to socio-emotional phenomena with its potential use for well-being.
Biography: Dr. Gunes is a Reader (Associate Professor) in Affective Intelligence and Robotics (AFAR) and the Director of the AFAR Lab at University of Cambridge’s Department of Computer Science and Technology (https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~hg410/). Her expertise is in the areas of affective computing and social signal processing cross-fertilizing research in multimodal interaction, computer vision, signal processing, machine learning and social robotics. She has published over 100 papers in these areas (H-index=31, citations > 4750). Dr Gunes is the former President of the Association for the Advancement of Affective Computing (2017-2019), the General Co-Chair of ACII 2019, and the Program Co-Chair of ACM/IEEE HRI 2020 and IEEE FG 2017. She was the Chair of the Steering Board of IEEE Transactions on Affective Computing in the period of 2017-2019 and has been an active member of the research community in shaping interdisciplinary dialogue at the international level. In 2019 she co-led the effort for creating a new Theme on Reproducibility for Human-Robot Interaction at the ACM/IEEE HRI 2020 Conference, and in 2014 she co-led the effort for creating a new area at the ACM Multimedia Conference on Emotional and Social Signals which has been running ever since. In 2019 she has been awarded the prestigious EPSRC Fellowship to investigate adaptive robotic emotional intelligence for well-being and has been named a Faculty Fellow of the Alan Turing Institute. Dr Gunes is a Senior Member of the IEEE and a member of the ACM.
Date: 19.06.2020
Time: 3 pm.
Speaker: Prof. Blanca Rodriguez.
Title of Talk: “Augmenting drug development and cardiology with computer science.”
Biography: Blanca Rodriguez is Professor of Computational Medicine and Wellcome Trust Senior Research Fellow at the University of Oxford (https://www.cs.ox.ac.uk/people/blanca.rodriguez/). She leads the Computational Cardiovascular Science team (www.cs.ox.ac.uk/ccs), with a key focus on its members’ career development, and a large network of collaborators in industry, hospitals, academia and with regulatory bodies. Her research is on investigating the response of human hearts to disease and therapies, through computational approaches to augment experimental and clinical methods. She is also Head of the Computational Biology and Health Informatics Theme in the Department of Computer Science at Oxford, and holds leadership and advisory positions in several national and international organisations. Blanca has been awarded generous funding by research councils, charities, industry and the European Commission, including personal fellowships since 2007.
Date: 26.06.2020.
Time: 3 pm.
Speaker: Professor Elena Simperl.
Biography: Elena Simperl is Professor of computer science at King’s College London, a Fellow of the British Computer Society and former Turing fellow (https://www.kcl.ac.uk/people/elena-simperl).
Elena Simperl is professor of computer science at King’s College London, a Fellow of the British Computer Society and former Turing fellow. According to AMiner, she is in the top 100 most influential scholars in knowledge engineering of the last decade, as well as in the Women in AI 2000 ranking. Before joining King’s College early 2020, she held positions at the University of Southampton, as well as in Germany and Austria. She has contributed to more than 20 research projects, often as principal investigator or project lead. Currently, she is the PI of two grants: H2020 ACTION, where she develops human-AI methods to make participatory science thrive, and EPSRC Data Stories, where she works on frameworks and tools to make data more engaging for everyone. She authored more than 200 peer-reviewed publications in knowledge engineering, semantic technologies, open and linked data, social computing, crowdsourcing and data-driven innovation. Over the years she served as programme and general chair to several conferences, including the European and International Semantic Web Conference, the European Data Forum and the AAAI Conference on Human Computation and Crowdsourcing.
Date: 03.07.2020.
Time: 3 pm.
Speaker: Dr. Kutoma J. Wakunuma
Title of Talk: “Critical Questions at the Intersection of Digitalisation, Development and Justice in the Global South”.
Biography: Dr. Kutoma Wakunuma is an Associate Professor at De Montfort University. She has worked and continues to work on a wide range of research projects where she has taken on roles such as Principal Investigator, Lead Evaluator as well as part of project coordination teams. Her work has been diverse, ranging from ICT for Development research; Civil Society Organisations research; conducting stakeholder evaluation, research in emerging technologies and ethics; Responsible Research and Innovation and Gender. Her main interest is in understanding the social and ethical aspects of emerging technologies in both the Global North and the Global South. She is currently the Programme Leader for MSc Computing as well as Deputy Subject Lead for IS.
Date: 10.07.2020.
Time: 3 pm.
Speaker: Amali de Alwis
Biography: Amali de Alwis is currently UK Managing Director of Microsoft for Startups. She is a board member of Ada, the National College for Digital Skills, and the Institute of Coding (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amali_de_Alwis). Amali de Alwis has been recognised the WISE Campaign for her “significant impact in encouraging girls to code”. She won the 2017 Women in IT award for her services to electronic skills. She was selected as Computer Weekly’s Most Influential Women in IT in 2018, after being in the top ten in 2017. Amali de Alwis was awarded an MBE in the 2018 New Year Honours for services to diversity in technology.
Date: 17.07.2020
Time: 3 pm.
Speaker: Prof. Cecilia Mascolo
Biography: Prof. Cecilia Mascolo is a Full Professor of Mobile Systems in the Department of Computer Science and Technology, University of Cambridge and part of the Systems Research Group (https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~cm542/). She is Co-Director of Centre for Mobile, Wearable Systems and Augmented Intelligence and a Fellow of Jesus College. She currently holds an ERC Advanced Grant on Audio-based Mobile Health Diagnostics (2019-2024) and was named among the 2016 – 10 Women in Networking/Communications That You Should Know.
Date: 31.07.2020
Time: 3 pm.
Speaker: Dr. Diana Popescu
Title of Talk: “Performance in the age of cloud computing and edge computing”
Biography: Diana Andreea Popescu is a postdoctoral researcher working on IoT, edge computing and data centre networking in the Systems Research Group at the University of Cambridge, Department of Computer Science and Technology, working with Dr. Richard Mortier (https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~dap53/). She completed her PhD in Computer Science with a dissertation titled “Latency-driven performance in data centres” in the same group working with Prof. Andrew Moore. She studied for her undergraduate degree in Computer Science at the University Politehnica of Bucharest, Romania, and for her master degree in Computer Science at École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, Switzerland. She interned several times at Google in the Network Infrastructure team and at CERN during her studies. Her research interests are data centre networking, network measurement, edge computing and applied machine learning.
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