2nd “Text-as-Data in Economics” Workshop 15th & 16th May

The proposed workshop, titled 2nd Text as Data in Economics Workshop, will explore the intersection of computational linguistics and economics. It aims to investigate how natural language processing (NLP) methods are being applied across various fields of economics and identify opportunities for methodological advancements.

The workshop will facilitate discussions on how NLP researchers can collaborate with economists to adapt and develop methods better suited to economics research and economic policy work.

This event is expected to be of significant interest to not only computational linguists in the School of Computing and Communications, whose expertise in NLP methods aligns with the workshop’s objectives, but also social scientists in general, who work or are interested in working with text data.

Sign up for this workshop here with Eventbrite

This conference will take place at Lancaster Castle. It will be free for Lancaster Staff and Students.

Mathematics, Ai and Data Science for Material Innovations (MADSMIN) 9th - 13th June

The purpose of the workshop is to discuss the latest methods of rigidity theory, geometric data science and artificial intelligence for real objects such as, but not limited to, solid 3D materials (periodic crystals or polymers) and molecular graphs including proteins, and more complex 3D genome structures.

Organised by Vitaliy Kurlin (Computer Science, Liverpool), Anthony Nixon (Mathematical Sciences, Lancaster) and Abbie Trewin (Chemistry, Lancaster) and jointly funded by Lancaster's Data Science Institute and Mathematics for AI and Real-world Systems project.

Confirmed speakers:

• Murad Banaji (Oxford)
• Matthias Himmelman (TU Braunschweig)
• Catherine Mollart (Birmingham)
• Therese Malliavin (Lorraine)
• Henry Moss (Lancaster)
• Lilja Metsalampi (Aalto)
• Michael Peach (Lancaster)
• Bernd Schulze (Lancaster)
• Ellena Sherrett (Lancaster)
• Jack Trainer (Lancaster)
• Andrea Fusiello (Universita' degli Studi di Udine)
• Jiayi Li (Max Planck Institute)
• Louis Theran (St Andrews)
• Daniel Widdowson (Liverpool)
• Olga Anosova (Liverpool)
• Vitaliy Kurlin (Liverpool)
• Abbie Trewin (Lancaster)
• Bill Oxbury (Lancaster)
• Ben Smith (Lancaster)

There will be an opportunity to display a poster (A1) during this workshop. Please let us know via the sign-up process.

Sign up via Eventbrite - Ai and Data Science for Material Innovations

How can AI help people to generate adaptation strategies to manage environmental risks? 16th - 17th June

How can AI support real-world adaptive strategies to manage environmental risks? We will be hosting discussions and a networking dinner to explore this question. Join us at Lancaster Castle on 16–17 June 2025 for a two-day workshop to define a new research agenda at the intersection of AI, decision science, and environment.

Environmental resilience involves decisions taken in the face of deep uncertainty with complex trade-offs. Examples arise in water management, flood and coastal risk management, land use and conservation, amongst other applications. Could AI help to generate, evaluate, and communicate adaptive strategies that are robust in the face of future uncertainty? What are the issues and opportunities that we can foresee as people start to use LLMs and other deep learning models for this purpose? This workshop will bring together colleagues from across disciplines to map out the key challenges, identify research priorities, and shape future collaborations.

This workshop is funded by Mathematics for AI and Real-world Systems project.

Sign up for this Interdisciplinary Workshop.

FACTOR Summer School - Mon 28th Jul to Wed 30th Jul 2025 Theme: Fraud and the (Mis)use of AI

In 2024, a Hong Kong employee of Arup joined a video call with their Global CFO and other executives. During the call, they were ordered to make a series of bank transfers totalling £20 million. The catch? The only real person on the call was the employee. The rest were AI-generated deepfakes.

Countless frauds and scams are being perpetrated all around us right now, and AI has made it easier than ever. From fake voicenotes pleading for bail money to heartbreakingly convincing romantic messages, the landscape of crime is changing, and it's in everyone's interest that we all keep up.

With that in mind, the world-leading FACTOR team is running a three-day summer school that will take you through the cutting-edge worlds of forensic linguistics, forensic speech science, and the ever-growing challenges that we now all face - the (mis) use of AI. We'll talk about how easy it is to clone someone's voice, whether we have telltale linguistic habits, and how good ordinary people are at distinguishing human language from AI. On the last day, you'll have the chance to turn detective with your own high-profile fraud case to crack.