The PGR Citizenship Prize for PhD students in the School of Mathematical Sciences has been awarded to STOR-i PhD student Rui Zhang and Prob_AI Hub PhD student Andreas Makris, in recognition of the leading role they have jointly played in the creation of the Lancaster AI reading group.

The Lancaster AI (LAI) reading group is a weekly reading group tailored towards people who wish to learn more about the recent developments of AI. The group is tutorial-styled and the audience usually comprises PhD students, postdoc researchers, and full-time academics. Topics this year have included diffusion models, reinforcement learning, and geometric deep learning.

Co-organiser Rui Zhang said: “The reading group would not be possible without the contributions from the wider Computational Statistics and Machine Learning community at Lancaster. In particular, I am grateful for the support of Prof. Christopher Nemeth, Prof. Paul Fearnhead, and Prof. David Leslie, as well as the Prob_AI Research Hub and the STOR-i Centre for Doctoral Training, Lancaster University.”

For the upcoming academic year, the LAI reading group will be organised by Andreas Makris and STOR-i student Cassandra Durr and will cover topics such as optimisation for machine learning and Bayesian deep learning.