Making Britain AI Match-Fit - A Cross-Sector Perspective

Peter Flach has been Professor of Artificial Intelligence at the University of Bristol since 2003. An internationally leading scholar in the evaluation and improvement of machine learning models using ROC analysis and calibration, he has also published on mining highly structured data, on knowledge-driven and explainable AI, and on the methodology of data science. His books include Simply Logical: Intelligent Reasoning by Example (John Wiley, 1994; interactive online edition, 2022) and Machine Learning: the Art and Science of Algorithms that Make Sense of Data (Cambridge University Press, 2012), the latter of which has, to date, sold over 20,000 copies and has established itself as a key reference in machine learning with translations into Russian, Mandarin and Japanese.

From 2010 until 2020, Prof Flach was Editor-in-Chief of the Machine Learning journal, one of the two top journals in the field that has been published for over 25 years by Kluwer and now Springer. He was Programme Co-Chair of the 1999 International Conference on Inductive Logic Programming, the 2001 European Conference on Machine Learning, the 2009 ACM Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining, and the 2012 European Conference on Machine Learning and Knowledge Discovery in Databases in Bristol. He is a founding board member, previous President and current Vice-President of the European Association for Data Science. He is a Fellow of the Alan Turing Institute for Data Science and Artificial Intelligence, of the European Lab for Learning and Intelligent Systems, and of the European Association for Artificial Intelligence. From April 2019 he directs a UKRI-funded Centre for Doctoral Training in Interactive Artificial Intelligence, which awards PhD scholarships to cohorts of around 10 students annually. He was instrumental in setting up and managing a peta-scale Research Data Storage Facility at Bristol.

Prof Flach has a strong track record of collaborations both in academia and in industry. In Bristol he collaborates with colleagues in Engineering on the SPHERE project, with colleagues in Population Health Science in the MRC-funded Integrated Epidemiology Unit, and others. International collaborations include Monash University, the Polytechnic University of Valencia, the University of Strasbourg, the University of Tartu, and several universities in Brazil. He leads the work package on Network Collaboration in the TAILOR European network of AI excellence centres. Non-academic collaborators include LV=, Thales, the Centre for Sustainable Energy, and over 20 partners in the Interactive AI CDT. Prof Flach is a member of the Advisory Board of XMOS.

Anil has held several senior roles across Operations, Marketing, Strategic Improvements & Crisis management. He has been in payments and financial services for the last 20 years in Australia & UK.