About

ELIAI (pronounced eel i) is a Turing Artificial Intelligence World-Leading Researcher Fellowship awarded to Professor Mirella Lapata, sponsored by UKRI

Informatics Forum Stairs

 

UKRI Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council
Sponsored by UKRI Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council

The research team at the Edinburgh Lab for Integrated Artificial Intelligence, funded by UKRI and industrial partners, is seeking to enhance neural network models with reasoning capabilities, a skill required to enhance many AI applications.

We are developing a theoretical framework which characterizes what it means for neural network models to reason, we are designing various reasoning modules, and we are showcasing their practical importance in applications which:

  • understand requests and act on them 
  • process and aggregate large amounts of data (e.g., from multiple modalities) 
  • make generalizations (e.g., robots cannot be pre-trained on all possible scenarios they might encounter) 
  • deal with changing situations and causality 
  • manifest creativity (e.g., in writing a story or a poem) 
  • co-ordinate various agents (e.g., in game playing) 
  • explain their predictions and decisions.

We anticipate that our lab will have a transformative effect on AI theory and practice, bridging the gap between the neural and symbolic views of AI and integrating their complementary strengths. ELIAI is located in the School of Informatics, aiming to attract highly motivated postdocs and graduate students and give them the opportunity to conduct research on breakthrough integrative AI topics. See our Projects page for a list of current projects and postdocs.   

 

Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion (EDI)

It is important to us that we ensure that equality, diversity, and inclusion (EDI) are considered at all stages throughout the Turing AI World-Leading Researcher Fellowship-related performance and activities, and that we adhere to both UKRI EDI policies and principles as well as to the EDI standards set by the University of Edinburgh. The School of Informatics has an ethics procedure in place to ensure that all research conducted in the School abides by the required ethical standards. To this end, the School follows a set of guiding principles which are in line with those of the College and University and based on the Universities UK (UUK) Concordat to Support Research Integrity (2019).