DSAIL Newsletter - July 2026

Posted on by Julia CARRADUSChristopher Nemeth

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Newsletter – July 2026

As we reach the end of the 2025/26 academic year, we want to take this opportunity to thank all our colleagues across the Institute for their contributions to the continuing success of Data Science and AI at Lancaster. There are no upcoming events to highlight in this issue, but do save the date for the DSAIL Showcase, taking place on Monday 28th September at Lancaster House Hotel – full details below.

Thank you to everyone who contributed to the Data Dialogues sessions this year. We ended with Lena Podoletz talking about The quantified home and investigative narratives. This was a fascinating look at the narratives created by home based technologies in criminal investigations. We want to continue these informal talk sessions in the next academic term, if you want to present or have any suggestions please get in touch.

This will be the last newsletter of the current academic year; we look forward to returning with more news and updates when the new academic year begins in the autumn. We wish you all a wonderful summer!

News and Announcements

DSAIL Showcase Event

We are writing to invite you to attend the AI Showcase Event organised by the Data Science and AI Institute @ Lancaster (DSAIL), which will take place on Monday 28th September at Lancaster House Hotel.

DSAIL brings together Lancaster’s interdisciplinary strengths in data science and artificial intelligence, spanning foundations and infrastructure, globally relevant application domains, and the wider social, legal and ethical questions raised by data science and AI. The Showcase will provide an opportunity to learn more about the Institute’s current research, teaching, partnerships and strategic priorities, and to discuss future opportunities for collaboration.

The programme will include an introduction to DSAIL, interactive sessions, a keynote talk, poster presentations, research-theme discussions, and a panel discussion on “The Role of Universities in the World of AI”. The afternoon research-theme sessions will cover DSAIL’s key areas of activity, including Creativity, Integrity, Environment, Health and Foundations. There will also be time throughout the day for networking with colleagues from across the University and with local businesses. The current agenda runs from 09:30 to 17:00, with lunch and refreshments provided.

We would be delighted if you were able to join us. We see this event as an important opportunity to strengthen connections between Lancaster’s data science and AI community and external organisations interested in research collaboration, innovation, skills, policy, responsible AI, and real-world applications of data-driven methods.

Please let us know whether you would be able to attend by completing the following Eventbrite form.

Call for new members of the Diversity in Data Science & AI Working Group

Data science and AI present real risks and challenges, from algorithmic bias to the erosion of trust in automated systems, many of which are compounded by the persistent underrepresentation of women and other minority, protected and underserved groups in the field.

We're looking for new members to join our working group, which sits within the leadership structure of DSAIL and works to embed EDI across its activities.

The group remit is to (1) hold DSAIL leadership to account on decisions affecting equity and inclusion, (2) maintain and update resources on diversity in data science and AI, (3) run events to raise awareness and build skills around EDI issues, and (4) oversee grant opportunities and prizes in gender diversity and inclusive AI.

We meet once a month and have resources, institutional backing and direct access to leadership to make things happen. If you want to help address these problems through concrete action, we'd welcome your involvement. No prior EDI experience is required. To find out more or express interest, contact Julia Carradus (dsi-enquiries@lancaster.ac.uk).

AI and Trust: Teaching and Assessment Summit On the 9th of June, Isobelle Clarke (Linguistics and English Language) and Lee Francis (Marketing) hosted the first ever AI Summit at Lancaster University, funded by DSAIL. Psychology, Computing and CETAD. It was a truly rare interdisciplinary event, bringing together 40 colleagues from departments and faculties from across the university for a much-needed discussion about navigating Generative AI in teaching, learning and assessment. We were delighted to see staff from Accounting, English, ISS, Mathematics, Marketing, Entrepreneurship, Strategy, Management, OWT and Media Studies. Issy and Lee have written a blog and you can find that here AI Summit blog

Lancaster University is stepping up its investment in world-class digital, data and cyber security innovation, strengthening its position as a key driver of regional and national growth.

New cyber security innovation hub to boost links between Lancaster University, government, industry and investors

At the heart of this ambition is the University’s flagship Data Cyber Quarter (DCQ), a physical space which re-imagines the south side of the Lancaster campus, bringing together industry stakeholders, researchers and emerging talent to shape the future of the UK’s digital and cyber economy. Full story here

Lancaster University launches new £2million nuclear facility control room simulator to deliver key nuclear sector skills

The pioneering simulator, the first of its kind in the UK due to its highly reconfigurable nature and ability to simulate a variety of reactor designs, will support the nation’s clean energy goals and help enhance the country’s future nuclear safety.

Funded through a £2 million grant from the Office for Students, the ‘Lancaster University Nuclear Operations Simulator’ will support teaching across a range of disciplines targeted to address nationally critical skills gaps. Full story here

New Grants:

Hedley Emsley - DSI: SDE Network Driver Projects Development Fund

New members:

Ali Saeidan Lancaster Medical School

In this academic year DSAIL has had 55 new members from across many departments and faculties.

Current DSAIL members are welcome to encourage new Lancaster colleagues and students to become members of the Data Science & AI Institute. Interested candidates should reach out via the email address (dsail@lancaster.ac.uk) or sign up here

Events

Recognised or Misidentified? A Public Discussion on Facial Recognition, Bias and Accountability

Tuesday 7th July 2026, 6:00pm to 8:30pm

The Gregson Centre

Sign up here

Join us for a panel discussion bringing together representatives from policing, academia and civil society to examine the growing use of facial recognition technology (FRT) and its implications for human rights.

The event will focus on concerns around racial and gender bias, the risk of misidentification, and the broader impact of surveillance technologies on privacy, freedom of expression and public trust. This discussion takes place in the context of the UK Government’s recent consultation on a new legal framework for the use of biometrics and facial recognition in law enforcement, which recognises both the potential benefits of these technologies for public safety and the significant concerns they raise regarding privacy, discrimination, oversight and public confidence.

The event aims to explore both the opportunities and the risks associated with FRT, as well as the safeguards needed to ensure its use is fair, accountable and consistent with human rights principles.

Software Lancaster Talks with Jaz Chana - Scaling cinch: Or, How to Teach a Unicorn to Fly - Monday 27th July at 6pm

Join us for our next Software Lancaster Talks on Monday, 27th July 2026 at 6:00 pm at the Fraser House Hub in Lancaster.

For the fourth talk of this year's series, Jaz Chana joins us in Lancaster for his talk "Scaling cinch: Or, How to Teach a Unicorn to Fly” a journey from an early-stage startup into one of the UK's largest online used-car marketplaces.

Building the technology at cinch was only half the challenge. Jaz will share the leadership lessons he learned while helping scale one of the UK's fastest-growing startups, and how those lessons continue to shape his approach to building teams and products today.

Jaz is a seasoned CTO and CPTO with over 20 years’ experience leading technology and product organisations, including helping scale cinch from an early-stage startup into a billion-pound business.

📅 Date & Time: Monday, 27th July 2026, 18:00📍 Location: Fraser House Hub, South Rd, Lancaster LA1 4XQ🍕 Perks: Free pizza and drinks!

https://www.meetup.com/software-lancaster-talks/events/315569257

Post talk networking session from 20:15 onwards at The Royal Hotel & Bar, LA1 1YD

HackaCon - August – September 2026

Can we use AI to convincingly synthesise a natural, spontaneous-sounding human conversation between two specific speakers?

No really. That’s it. So we’re running this conversation hackathon – a competition to find out the state-of-the-art of AI-generated conversation. To play, you need to register, and if you top the leaderboard, there’s a prize in it for you.

You might think, “That’s ridiculous… We already have speech synthesis. We even have conversational AI. This will be easy!” But it very much isn’t. Allow us to convince you.

If you already know how tough this could be and you’re up for it, jump directly to The Challenge.

RDSci Connect - A Meetup for Research Data Scientists at RSECon26

Tuesday 8th September · University of Sheffield

"Whether you identify as a Research Data Scientist, work in a dedicated data science team, or are an RSE whose projects are heavily data-science driven, this session is designed to bring the community together."

More details (including registration, free) here: https://rsecon26.society-rse.org/satellite-events/rdsci-connect/

Turing News and Events

BriCS x Turing - Isambard-AI workshop, The Alan Turing Institute, 21st July 2026, in person, 10:00 - 16:00

The Bristol Centre for Supercomputing (BriCS) and The Alan Turing Institute are running a joint 1-day introductory workshop on Isambard-AI. This event will be hosted at Enigma 2.0, The Alan Turing Institute, British Library, 96 Euston Rd, London, NW1 2DB on Tuesday, 21st July 2026.

The workshop is open to participants from UK research organisations (e.g. universities, NHS bodies, research institutes) and industry (UK registered business of any size with a Companies House registration number).

Please note this is a repeat of the workshop held in March 2026. Please do not sign-up to this workshop if you attended the March workshop and give others a chance to attend.

Find out more and register here.

International Computable 90 Conference, in person, Bletchley Park, 16th – 18th September 2026The International Computable 90 Conference, co-hosted by The National Museum of Computing (TNMOC) and the London Mathematical Society (LMS) at Bletchley Park this September (16 – 18 Sept 2026). This prestigious event, taking place in one of the UK’s most iconic locations, will be highly relevant to your colleagues, postdocs, and graduate students.

The conference marks the 90th anniversary of Alan Turing’s seminal 1936 paper, On Computable Numbers, and features a phenomenal lineup of global experts exploring how his foundational thinking continues to shape computational complexity, AI, and mathematical logic today. Full information about the conference, and how to register, can be found on TNMOC’s website here.

Alongside the main academic tracks, the organisers are also hosting a major public evening lecture on Thursday, 17 September 2026 by Professor Avi Widgerson (IAS Princeton, Abel Prize & ACM Turing Award winner) titled “Reading Alan Turing.” It’s a fantastic opportunity for the broader community to engage with these ideas.

Early bird registration closes at the end of July, so now is a great time for people to lock in their places.

Register for the international conference here.

Funding

AIRR compute opportunity: AI open access

Apply for between 50,000 and 1,400,000 graphics processing unit (GPU) hours on the Isambard-AI supercomputer for artificial intelligence (AI) related research and development projects. Open to UK-based researchers and AI developers from academia, industry, public sector or other organisations.

AHRC BBSRC ESRC EPSRC Innovate UK MRC NERC STFC

ESRC’s social science data service infrastructures

Apply to attend a sandpit to develop projects to transform discovery and access to data provided by ESRC’s social science data service infrastructures. Projects will make a step change in how researchers can discover, access and use social science data and advance the transition to technology-enabled data pipelines that support this.

You must complete an expression of interest to apply for the sandpit.

The sandpit will take place on 12 (in-person), 14, 19 and 23 October (virtual).

It is expected that around five to 10 projects will be funded, sharing up to £21.6 million of total funding at 100% full economic cost (FEC). ESRC will fund 80% FEC.

ESRC call in pre-call mode - Innovating in data-driven research - ONE award to be made

Please contact Julia Carradus if you are interested in taking this forward.

The full pre-call guidance is here - https://www.ukri.org/opportunity/doctoral-focal-award-plus-innovating-in-data-driven-research/

ESRC will be commissioning one doctoral focal award plus to develop a cadre of social scientists across career stages with the skills needed to use data-driven research approaches in innovative ways. It will deliver both doctoral training and targeted training and capacity-building activities.

Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) will contribute a maximum of £5.75 million.

Reminders

Prob AI Funding for Discipline Hopping Awards for researchers to support a move into the area of probabilistic AI research. The maximum project value is £50k (Prob_AI will contribute 80% FEC to this).

The aspiration is that the Discipline Hopping Awards will encourage talented researchers who are already working in the mathematical sciences, to move into working in probabilistic AI research, and help build the research community in this area. You should have a proven track record of research in your home discipline and wish to develop skills and collaborations in the underlying mathematical areas of probabilistic AI.

The deadline for completed applications is Tuesday 1st September 2026. Decisions are expected by the end of October 2026.

For more details see:https://www.probai.ac.uk/funding/

ADR UK is inviting applications from existing Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) Doctoral Training Partnerships (DTPs) to host a cohort of PhD studentships using ADR UK linked administrative data.

This funding opportunity is for PhD Supervisors. The successful studentships will be announced in January 2027, and following recruitment, the PhD students will start in October 2027.

The DTP deadline for applications is 16:00 on 15th September 2026

Current Job/PhD Opportunities

Call for EPSRC Doctoral Landscape Award (DLA) PhD Studentship - Decoding Ruminative Inner Speech with Multimodal Brain-and-Articulatory Machine Learning

Applications are invited for a fully funded PhD studentship in the Department of Psychology, Lancaster University, hosted by the Data Science and AI Institute (DSAIL) and funded by an EPSRC Doctoral Landscape Award. The project develops a wearable, AI-driven brain-computer interface that detects spontaneous inner speech - the silent verbal stream involved in self-talk, rumination, and intrusive thought - and classifies its emotional content from a combination of brain activity (EEG) and tongue movement (ultrasound tongue imaging).

Supervisory team: Dr Bo Yao (Psychology, Lancaster), Professor Hossein Rahmani (Computing and Communications, Lancaster), Dr Sam Kirkham (Linguistics and English Language, Lancaster).

FindAPhd.com

EPSRC Doctoral Landscape Award (DLA) PhD Studentship - Decision-Theoretic Shared-Autonomy Allocation under Communication Uncertainty for Safety-Critical Remote Robotics

Applications are invited for a fully funded PhD studentship in the School of Engineering, Lancaster University, hosted by the Data Science and AI Institute (DSAIL) and funded by an EPSRC Doctoral Landscape Award. The project will develop a decision-theoretic shared-autonomy framework for safety-critical remote robotics, enabling robotic systems to adapt the allocation of authority between human operators and autonomous agents under uncertain communication conditions.

Supervisory team: Dr Ziwei Wang (Engineering / DSAIL, Lancaster University) and Professor Qiang Ni (School of Computing and Communications / DSAIL, Lancaster University).

Click below for full project description and how to apply.

FindAPhd link is here

School of Computing and Communications

School of Mathematical Sciences

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