BCML Lab @Heriot-Watt

2024

2024

  1. 21 Feburary 2024: Congrats to Alex Wang, who has successfully secured the EASTBIO BBSRC DTP scholarship. He will be based at Aberdeen University and co-supervised by Prof Mirela Delibegovic (FRSE, lead supervisor), Dr Wei Pang (second), Dr Nimesh Mody (third supervisor). His topic is about using AI and Machine Learning to identify biomarkers of subtypes of Type 1 diabetes.

  2. January 2024: Dr Wei Pang is appointed as the PhD external examiner for Nanyang Technological University, Singapore.

2023

  1. 1 December 2023: Congrats to Luc Frachon, who passed his viva today with minor corrections.

  2. 27 October 2023: Congrats to Adinath Ghadage, who has passed his PhD viva today with minor corrections.

  3. 22 October 2023: We are have been awarded a 4-year CASE PhD opportunity funded by the EASTBIO BBSRC Doctoral Training Partnership and EpitogenX Ltd, project advertisement here

  4. 6 Ocotober 2023: Congrats to Alice Scarpa, who passed her viva today.

  5. 6 October 2023: Congratulations to Yingfang Yuan, who has passed his PhD viva with minor corrections.

  6. 20 July 2023: Our joint work with Tsinghua University (China) is published in Complex & Intelligent Systems DOI

  7. 22 May 2023: Welcome Yonghan Zhang, who started his PhD project today. His PhD study is jointly funded by EPSRC DTP (Doctoral Training Partnership) award and STMicroelectronics. He will be working on immune-inspired machine learning approaches to optimise the workflow of consumer electronics products.

  8. May 2023: A paper by Konstantinos Gavriilidis accepted:
    Gavriilidis, K., Munafo, A., Pang, W. and Hastie, H., 2023, May. A Surrogate Model Framework for Explainable Autonomous Behaviour. In 2023 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA) Workshop on Explainable Robotics.

  9. May 2023: Congratulations to Atiku Abubakar who has passed his PhD viva.

  10. April 2023: Our joint work with Bristol is published in PLOS Computational Biology: DOI

  11. March 2023: Congratulations to Debinal Rajan who has passed her PhD viva.

  12. March 2023: Yingfang Yuan has been granted the prestigious EPSRC IAA (Impact Acceleration Account) funding for the project “Graph Neural Networks for Recommendation System with Fairness and Safety”, with a total value of approximately £8,690.72. The project will be from April 2023 for three months. Yingfang will be hiring research programers!

  13. March 2023: BCML received two prestitoius James Watt scholarships (worth approx. £140K each), both covering oversea tuition fees and stipends. Two students will join BCML in Septemter 2023. More details to come in September!

  14. Jan 2023: Welcome four new BCML members:

    • Yeqi Hu is a PhD student from Ocean University of China. He is funded by China Scholarship Council and he will be a visiting student at BCML for a year.
    • Hong Wang is a Lecturer from Wuhan University of Technology, and she is also funded by China Scholarship Council. She will be visiting scholar at BCML for a year.
    • Kefan Chen: he is co-supervised by Prof Lynne Bailie (lead) and Dr Wei Pang, and he is funded by the prestigious James Watt Scholarship associated with the EPSRC funded PRIME project.
    • Qin Jiang: she is co-supervised by Dr Wei Pang (lead), Dr Miichael Lones, and Dr Chengjia Wang. She is funded by the previous James Watt Scholarship after a very competitive process.

2022

  1. James (Yingfang) Yuan was interviewed by EPSRC funded AI4SD network+, and the report is published here

  2. Nov 2022: One paper is accepted by AAAI-2023.

  3. Oct 2022: James Yuan was elected as a member of the REPHRAIN College of Peer Reviewers

  4. August 2022: Wei Pang serves as a senior PC member of AAAI 2022.

  5. August 2022: We have been principally awarded an EPSRC DTP PhD studentship with industrial contribution worth of £148.3K (EPSRC: £74.7K, ST: £57K cash contribution, Heriot-Watt: £16.6K).

  6. August 2022: double congratulations to Muhammad Usman who successfully defended his PhD viva in July and secured a Research Fellow post at University of St Andrews.

  7. June 2022: Wei Pang is shortlisted for the Societal Engagement Award by Heriot-Watt University as a member of the CircularChem team.

  8. June 2022: Wei Pang gave a seminar talk at Middlesex University titled “Bio-inspired Neural Architecture Search”

  9. Feburary 2022: Our PRIME project is officially funded by EPSRC: URL. Heriot-Watt is awarded £1.46M (approx £1.8M 100% FEC).

  10. January 2022: Wei Pang is awarded a NERC discipline hopping fund to work with Dr Zulin Zhang at James Hutton Institute. The project is about using machine learning to understand spatio-temporal patterns of toxic chemicals in Scotland. James Yuan will be working as a research programmer for this project.

2021

  1. December 2021: James Yuan gave a seminar talk titled “Hyperparameter Optimisation for Graph Neural Networks” at AI3SD Autumn Seminar VIII: Molecules, Graphs & Networks

  2. August 2021: Congratulations to Dr. Rachana Patel, who won the runner-up awards for Data Lab MSc project competition (over 150 Data Lab MSc students from 12 Scottish universities). Project Video. Also congratulation to her for winning the Alison Cawswy Memorial Prize for being the most deserving student of the MSc cohort of 2020/21.

  3. June 2021: Two MSc students (Agne Zainyte and Dr. Rachana Patel) published two papers at SICSA XAI 2021. Another two papers by the RAInS team were also accepted.

  4. June 2021: The DCEE project is funded by EPSRC (led by Imperial): check this link

  5. May 2021: Congratulations to Dr Anthony Chapman, who passed his viva at Aberdeen University.

  6. January 2021: Wei Pang is invited to be a scientific advisor for AiBIOLOGICS ltd., an AI start-up company which is currently developing AI techniques to faciliate COVID vaccine development.

2020

  1. December 2020：Congratulations to Dr Musa Karatu, who passed his viva at Aberdeen University.

  2. July 2020: Congratulations to Dr Abubakr Awad, who passed his viva at Aberdeen University. Dr Awad secured the prestigious Elphinstone Scholarship at Aberdeen for his PhD study, and he was also partially involved in the Royal Society funded project. He is now working as a KTP associate at University of Nottingham.

  3. May 2020: Happy to become a member of the Edinburgh Centre for Robtics: https://www.edinburgh-robotics.org/academics/wei-pang.

  4. April 2020: Congratulations to Dr Wenjun Wang, who has obtained the SICISA PECE award worth £5200. Postdoctoral and Early Career Researcher Exchanges (PECE)

2019 (Aberdeen Systems Modelling and Machine Learning Lab)

  1. December 2019: Dr Wei Pang serves as a PC member again this year for IJCAI: https://ijcai20.org/.

  2. November 2019: Dr Wei Pang are principally funded by Cancer Research UK (up to £100K) for a new project titled “Haem-AI: Early cancer diagnosis in Haematological Malignancies by AI”. I will be working with pathologists, physicists, and AI researchers from Oxford, Imperial, Warwick, and Swansea to explore the use of AI for early detection of mycosis fungoides and myeloproliferative neoplasms (two types of severe cancers).

  3. October 2019: News for DeepSwarm: https://www.abdn.ac.uk/ncs/news/13396/.

  4. September 2019: Our paper “DeepSwarm: Optimising Convolutional Neural Networks using Swarm Intelligence” has won the best paper award at UKCI 2019 (19th Annual UK Workshop on Computational Intelligence) among all 45 accepted papers. Paper, arxiv, Code Award Certificate.

    Our work has been mentioned in automl.org, aitopics.org (from AAAI), deepai.org, papers with code (https://paperswithcode.com/), eyes-on.ai, CSDN (a major Chinese software developer network). “Awesome System for Machine Learning” (http://www.lib4dev.in/info/HuaizhengZhang/Awesome-System-for-Machine-Learning/164433070) We received 231 stars on github.

  5. August 2019: from 1st January 2020, Dr Wei Pang will move to Edinburgh and take up the post of Associate Professor at School of Mathematical and Computer Sciences, Heriot-Watt University.

  6. May 2019: The CRUK funded joint project with Oxford and Middlesex ( Using AI for Early Detection of Oesophageal Cancer) has started. See the following project information from CRUK Oxford Centre. See the following information from CRUK for two of my funded projects (Project 3 and Project 5).

  7. May 2019: Wei Pang was invited by UKRI to attend the UKRI AI regional workshop, in which we help to form UKRI's future AI funding strategies by providing our input and opinions on AI.

  8. January 2019: Wei Pang serves as a PC member for IJCAI 2019 in Macau, China.

  9. January 2019: Wei Pang was invited to attend a CRUK/EPSRC/STFC joint workshop on AI for cancer early detection. He was notionally awarded two projects during the workshop with researchers from Oxford, Middlesex, UCL, National Physics Laboratory, Institute for Cancer Research, Leeds, and the Royal Marsden NHS Foundation Trust.

2018

  • October 2018: Wei Pang secured a BBSRC fundedeastbio DTP (BB/M010996/1) PhD studentship (~£95.2K) as co-supervisor (50%). This is one of the five eastbio PhD studentships within the theme of AI/ML. Project title: Improving forecasting and management of fish stocks and forest pests using artificial intelligence and machine learning.

  • August 2018: Wei Pang serves as one of the technical co-chairs of ICDIS 2019 (The 2nd International Conference on Data Intelligence and Security).

  • June 2018: A fully funded PhD studentship was awarded by Data Lab (I am the co-supervisor, Lead Supervisor: Dr Yaji Sripada, the other supervisor: Dr Frank Guerin).

  • March 2018: Dr Wei Pang is awarded a new EPSRC project Realising Accountable Intelligent Systems (RAInS) (PI: Prof Pete Edwards, value in total £1.36M) with researchers from Cambridge and Oxford.

  • February 2018: I will be the co-chair of The 31st International Workshop on Qualitative Reasoning, which will be held at IJCAI-ECAI 2018.

  • January 2018: Our ESPRC project "Manufacturing Immortality" featured on BBC Radio 4 morning news (starting from 1:43:56): http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b09kq1gr

2017

  • July 2017: I am promoted to Senior Lecturer with effect from 1 August 2017.

  • July 2017: We have been awarded £19.9K from Scottish Funding Council on the community cinema statistics project. Industrial partners include INDY Cinema Group Ltd, Driftwood Cinema Limited, North East Arts Touring, and Open Cinema Foundation. Academic partner: University of Glasgow. £9.95K goes to Aberdeen.

  • July 2017: I obtained First-class Science and Technology Award of Jilin Province, China with my Chinese collaborators (Prof Lan Huang, Prof Yanchun Liang, Prof Yan Wang etc) for our research on Swarm Intelligence Optimisation Algorithms. It has been my great pleasure to work with these preeminent researchers over the last 15 years!

  • May 2017: Wei Pang was selected to participate in the EPSRC New Industry Systems Sandpit, and we have been notionally awarded by EPSRC a £2.71M project titled "Manufacturing immortality". and he was awarded as Aberdeen's sole investigator ~420K (~£360K from EPSRC). Other project members include Bristol, Manchester, Northumbria, Cranfield, Lancaster, and Sheffield Hallam. Project partners include CENSIS, Data Lab, Dstl, Siemens, AFC Energy, Ellen MacArthur Foundation, ITM Power, Zentraxa.

  • March 2017: We are funded by Royal Society for an international exchanges scheme from March 2017 to March 2019. PI: Dr Wei Pang, CoIs: Prof George M. Coghill, Prof. David Lusseau, participanting student: Abubakr Awad

  • January 2017: Wei Pang is invited by EPSRC to attend the ICT Theme Early Career Workshop.

2016

2015

BCML Lab @Heriot-Watt

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