Turing Seminar Series

This series boasts academics connected to the Turing Institute, speaking about their cutting edge research in data science and AI.

  • Wednesday, 19th November 2025 1pm-2pm
    • Title: Tracing Affective and Cognitive Patterns Across Scales: From Minds to Networks to Human-AI Systems
    • Speaker: Andreia Sofia Teixeira, Associate Professor at the Network Science Institute, Northeastern University London
    •  Location: Ada Lovelace Building SM1
    • Abstract:

      • Affective and cognitive patterns—how emotions, trust, conflict, and mental representations organize—exist across multiple scales of human experience. Understanding these structures is critical as AI systems increasingly function as social partners rather than mere tools. Using network science approaches, I trace these patterns from individual cognition through social systems to population-level dynamics. At the cognitive level, language networks reveal how emotional and semantic structures organize in individual minds. At the interpersonal level, signed network analysis shows how positive and negative relationships create polarization and structural balance. At the population level, longitudinal analysis of 900 individuals over four years demonstrates that despite continuous individual turnover, social networks maintain statistical equilibrium through balancing human cognitive limits and social pressures. Preliminary findings further reveal how change in the social environment affects adolescent mental health and brain organization. As AI companions become widespread, they represent a potential affective and cognitive perturbation: they offer unlimited availability, have the tendency to be validating, and eliminate interpersonal friction essential to developing social-cognitive skills. I will discuss current research on understanding spillover effects: how patterns learned or developed through human-AI interactions may cascade through social networks, potentially disrupting equilibria that stabilize collective behaviour.

  • Wednesday, 26th November 2025 13:00 - 14:00
    • Title: Common Crawl: open web data for everybody
    • Speakers: Laurie Burchell and Thom Vaughan from Common Crawl
    • Location: Biomedical Building, Room C44
    • Abstract:
      • The Common Crawl Foundation exists to make high-quality crawl data available to everyone. Our primary offering is a free, open repository of over 10 petabytes of web crawl data dating back to 2008, but we also develop tooling for accessing web data, carry out research into improving the crawl, and advocate for open data more broadly. In this talk, we introduce the Common Crawl Foundation and the data products we offer to our users. We describe how our web data is structured and how users can access it for their own research, making use of the indices and tools we have developed. We then discuss our crawl data as a representative sample of the web and how this impacts the data we make available. Finally, we discuss some of our current research into improving the data contained in our crawl by increasing its diversity in terms of language, community and culture.

Previous Seminars: 

  • Wednesday, 5th November 2025 13:00 - 14:00
    • Title: Tracing the Cultural Fabric of Sperm Whale Societies
    • Speaker: Giovanni Petri, Professor of Network Science at Northeastern University London 
    • Location: Biomedical Building, C42
    •  
  • Wednesday, 22nd October 2025
    • Title: Have DAGs fulfilled their promise in epidemiology and health research?
    • Speaker: Peter Tennant, Associate Professor of Health Data Science at the University of Leeds
    • Location: Queens Building, 1.18LT
  • Wednesday 24th September 2025
    • Title: Do we know what AI will know?
    • Speaker: Krzysztof Janowicz: Professor and Chair of the Department of Geography and Regional Research at the University of Vienna
    • Location: Peel Lecture Theatre, University of Bristol
  • Wednesday 6 November:
  • Wednesday 20 November:
    • Title: Trustworthy Digital Twins: designing, developing, and deploying open and reproducible pipelines
    • Speaker: Chris Burr, Head of the Innovation and Impact Hub, Turing Research and Innovation Cluster for Digital Twins, Alan Turing Institute
    • Chris Burr slides 21.11.24 (PDF, 6,304kB)
  • Wednesday 4 December:
    • Title: What can your shopping basket say about your health?
    • Speaker: Anya Skatova, Senior Research Fellow, Bristol Medical School (PHS)
  • Wednesday 15 January:
  • Wednesday 12 February:
    • Title: Temporal models for Word Sense Disambiguation in historical texts
    • Speaker: Barbara McGillivray, Lecturer in Digital Humanities and Cultural Computation, Kings College London
    • Barbara Mcgillivray slides (PDF, 6,859kB)
  • Wednesday 26 February:
  • Wednesday 12 March:
    • Title: "Cognition-first evolution"
    • Speaker: Richard Watson, Professor, (evolutionary biology and computer science), University of Southampton
  • Wednesday 26 March:
    • Title: "Big data as propeller for dynamic and time-sensitive service industries: a tourism sector perspective."
    • Speaker: Nikolaos Stylos, Associate Professor in Marketing and Digital Innovation, Business School, University of Bristol
    • Niko Stylos seminar slides (PDF, 1,287kB)
  • Wednesday 9 April: