Cambridge Service Alliance’s Post

In a world where AI exists to support and challenge us, Human Growth should remains as our focus being an individual or an organisation.

📍 First AGE Florence Event I’m thrilled to have contributed to the inaugural presentation of the Interdepartmental Ageing Research Center (AGE Florence) at the University of Florence. Involving 11 departments, the center promotes interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary research on ageing and longevity through a holistic, integrated, and cooperative approach, overcoming the fragmentation of perspectives on this complex topic. Alongside the research groups from the FORLILPSI department focused on ageing, I presented the scientific poster “Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Education and Language Learning as Pathways to Lifelong Growth, Longevity, and Active Ageing”. This research highlights how non-formal education and foreign language learning empower individuals by fostering inclusion, resilience, and cognitive engagement, particularly among adults and older learners. By addressing the psychophysical, cognitive, and social dimensions of ageing, these approaches showcase the transformative role of education in promoting active ageing and improving the quality of later life. 📌 AGE Florence advances the translational dimension of ageing research by providing policy insights, fostering scientific dissemination, encouraging international collaborations, and supporting innovation through startups and technological transfer. A heartfelt thank you to everyone who contributed to such meaningful dialogues within the research ecosystem! 🌟 👉 Learn more about the center: https://lnkd.in/gFCb23Cc

Thank you to Lumina Learning and Kirros Consulting for the opportunity to attend The Association for Business Psychology conference on Minds and Machines Unite 2024. What a brilliant space to connect with excellent speakers, thought leaders, practitioners, experts and professionals. Anxiety is rife in the age of automation and augmentation. How we perceive AI is often the cause of this anxiety - either as a threat or an opportunity. Dr Luke Treglown pointed out that there is no known relationship between age and this perception currently. Medis Moradi eluded that there is a relationship with personality type and how much we trust technology showing that people with higher neuroticism are more skeptical and wary of AI. Jazz Rasool shared, we must proceed with caution, ensuring to mitigate against unintended consequences. We should encourage proper regulation, standards and procedures to safeguard best practice that is ethical, responsible and fair. Important things to explore further: - The digital divide and furthering of inequality - Homogeneity and its impact on performance and innovation - The democratization of competence through augmentation It was a privilege to connect and learn with you all! Joy Maitland MBE FIoD FCMI FIoL, Atiya Sheikh CBP MGP MIoD, Alannah Filip, Lara Bowdidge (Poole), Katrin Becker, Nick Hayter, Graham Norris, Julianne Djan-Sampson, Medis Moradi

🔬 Reflecting on the First Chapter of 5th Period Science!  What started in September as a handful of Science interactives has grown into a collection of 24 free resources spanning Physics, Chemistry, Biology, and Space Science. My goal was simple: create straightforward simulations and tools that teachers can easily integrate into their science lessons to enhance student understanding. I'm thrilled to see nearly 10,000 site visits and hundreds of downloads through the TES shop, reaching classrooms from the UK and Europe to Qatar, UAE, Australia, and New Zealand. It's been particularly encouraging to see the positive response to the Predator Prey simulation, Sound Waves, and Taxonomic Classification interactives. Your messages of support and constructive feedback have been invaluable in shaping these resources to be more useful and classroom-friendly. Thank you to everyone who has reached out with kind words, suggestions, and stories of how these tools are being used in their classrooms. Your encouragement keeps me motivated to create more simple, effective teaching resources. Looking forward to what 2025 holds for 5th Period Science. For those still in teaching mode, I've just added a Chemistry-themed Christmas wordsearch - perfect for both touchscreen or mouse - https://lnkd.in/gbXsMxpG

I’m thrilled to have earned a 1st class masters degree from the University of Bristol in psychology and neuroscience and I’m excited to dive into the next chapter. Using my mastery in the dark arts for the betterment of society and mankind, whatever that may materialise as. Its been four years of living on the railroads between Reading and Bristol, overly flexible wake-up times, caffeine fuelled all-nighters, looming imposter syndrome, and realising that I’ve got this! I will always cherish these years for their liberty, fun, and growth, knowing that the memories will keep me smiling as I transition into the professional world. I would like to thank my dear family, loving partner, and supportive friends for all they have given me whether directly or in-directly. I wouldn’t have got here without you all. Here’s some lessons I’ve learnt along the way: - Don’t take anything seriously, no-one really knows what’s going on. Keep working hard, but know what your working for. - When faced with a complex problem, don’t treat it as such, simplify and find the essence. - The truth is staring at you in the data, if you can’t find it, either your data is too narrow, incorrect or your not looking in the right place. - Large language models and deep fakes will almost certainly be the death of democracy. - No matter how fun it seems at the time, never ever run through a bonfire. That is all, thank you and here’s to the future! Luc Swarbrick

We are happy to share that our colleague, Girija Natekar- Kalantre, PhD, was featured in "India Bioscience: Academia-Industry Transitions, Volume II." She shared her insights on cutting-edge technological trends in the life sciences, the role of a subject matter expert, and the importance of transferable skills. You can read her views on page 139 in the section titled "Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning in the Biotechnology Industry."https://lnkd.in/gK7Vggkw

I'm thrilled to announce that my guest blog, featuring my research on gender differences in competitive behavior, is now live on Chessable's platform! 🧠♟️ In this piece, I dive into insights on how competition plays out among professionals and whether gender differences in setbacks exist. I also present one small piece of my research results from analyzing the competitive behavior of 3,508 chess experts. This research opens up exciting conversations about the importance of feedback and commonly known evaluation criteria. The summary: Feedback helps professionals make accurate and rational decisions on which competitions to enter. Conditional on objective (and unbiased) feedback men and women behave similarly. My findings from a field setting support behavioral economics insights from laboratory experiments. Check out the full blog here: https://lnkd.in/epmuv8_S A huge thank you to everyone who has supported this work and to Chessable Limited for honoring my research with their Graduate Researcher award.

Dreams do come true! Our recent paper, "Rethinking Visual Counterfactual Explanations Through Region Constraint", has been accepted to the International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR) 2025. 💥💥💥 Prior works on generating visual counterfactual explanations (VCEs) have been highly effective at synthesizing semantically meaningful, classifier-dependent changes. However, they lacked clarity and precision and could even lead to faulty reasoning. We propose region-constrained VCEs (RVCEs), which greatly simplify the explanatory process by applying a hard constraint on the region where changes are allowed to appear. Using Image-to-Image Schrödinger Bridges, our approach not only sets the new state-of-the-art by a large margin but also, for the first time, extends the applicability of VCEs to model- and even human-explanation interactions. 👩💻 But it is the process and not the outcome that matters most. Along the way, a team of extremely determined and ambitious people worked tirelessly to achieve this success. Thank you, Jakub Grzywaczewski, Bartek Sadlej, Matthew Tivnan and Przemyslaw Biecek for your tremendous dedication. This would not have been possible without you. 🙏 See you in Singapore! 🇸🇬 Preprint: https://lnkd.in/ddAdGesA MI2.ai NCN Narodowe Centrum Nauki Narodowe Centrum Badań i Rozwoju Politechnika Warszawska Uniwersytet Warszawski

I am happy to share that our paper, Test Input Validation for Vision-based DL Systems: An Active Learning Approach, has been accepted into the Software Engineering in Practice (SEIP) track at the 47th International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE 2025). This work, by Delaram Ghobari, Mohammad Hossein Amini, Dai Quoc Tran, Seunghee Park, Shiva Nejati, and myself, proposes a novel application of image-comparison metrics alongside active learning to make test input validation for deep learning vision-based systems more accurate and less time-consuming. The paper is also the first empirical study to document the use of test input validation for such systems in an industrial setting. Thank you to SmartInside AI and Mitacs for supporting this research! A preprint will be available soon!

My new paper! MolMiner: https://lnkd.in/dRxJ_Cmq I’m thrilled to finally share what has been my most challenging and rewarding project to date: "MolMiner: A Transformer Architecture for Fragment-Based Autoregressive Generation of Molecular Stories." Generative models for material science largely inherit from the advances in NLP and Vision. While this transfer of approaches across fields is really useful, materials have unique challenges that are often overlooked (e.g chemical validity, fixed size of the material, interpretability, etc). MolMiner was designed specifically to tackle these unique challenges. I include in this post a visualization of the construction of different molecules by MolMiner. I want to thank Tejs Vegge and Jes Frellsen for their support in the development of this project. It has been an ambitious project and it would not have been possible without them.