Welcome to Peggy Seriès

Peggy Seriès joins Informatics this month as a lecturer, working in our Institute for Adaptive and Neural Computation.

Peggy started her higher education with a degree in Engineering from the Institut Supérieur d'Électronique de Paris (ISEP) and an MSc degree in Knowledge Based Systems from the University of Sussex in 1996. In 2002, she received a PhD in Computational Neuroscience from the Université Pierre et Marie Curie (Paris). Her PhD was supervised by Dr Y. Fregnac and Dr J. Lorenceau.

She has held postdoctoral positions at the University of Rochester (NY, USA) with Prof. A. Pouget, and at the Gatsby Unit (UCL, London) with Dr P. Latham. Until May next year Peggy will be spending most of her time on a fellowship at NYU, working with Prof. Eero Simoncelli, but she will be making a number of visits back to Edinburgh during this time.

Peggy's primary research aim is to understand how sensory information is encoded and transmitted in the collective activity of large populations of neurons in the brain. She is also interested in understanding how neural activity gives rise to perception and behavioral performance, and how it can be decoded by experimentalists. To investigate these questions, she employs mathematical models and simulations and focusses on the processing of visual information in the cortex.

Alan Bundy wins Award for Research Excellence

Congratulations !

The IJCAI Award for Research Excellence is given to a scientist who has carried out a program of research of consistently high quality yielding several substantial results. Past recipients of this honour are a most illustrious group of scientists from the field of Artificial Intelligence.

They are: John McCarthy (1985), Allen Newell (1989), Marvin Minsky (1991), Raymond Reiter (1993), Herbert Simon (1995), Aravind Joshi (1997), Judea Pearl (1999), Donald Michie (2001), Nils Nilsson (2003), and Geoffrey E. Hinton (2005).

As the winner of the 2007 Award for Research Excellence, Alan Bundy, Professor of Automated Reasoning in the School of Informatics becomes the third Edinburgh AI pioneer to receive this honour. With this award, he also becomes the first person to win both the Award for Research Excellence and the Donald E. Walker Distinguished Service Award, which he received in 2003.

Professor Bundy is recognized for both his seminal work in the area of automated reasoning, and his wider contributions to Artificial Intelligence. In particular, he has pioneered the use of meta-level reasoning, proof planning, and has developed novel methods for automated reasoning in areas such as diagrammatic reasoning and concept formation.

Alan joined the University of Edinburgh in 1971, as a Research Fellow with a BSc in Mathematics and a PhD in Logic, both from Leicester. He became a Lecturer in 1974, a Reader in 1984, and was elected to a Personal Chair of Automated Reasoning in 1990.

IJCAI is the International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence, the main international gathering of researchers and practitioners in Artificial Intelligence.