Turing Seminar Series

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

  • Wednesday, 22nd October 2025 13:00 - 14:00
    • 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
    • Abstract:

      • Causal directed acyclic graphs (DAGs) are among the most widely used causal diagrams. Developed in the 1980s and 1990s, with intellectual roots extending back to the 1920s, DAGs have become a core part of the modern data scientist’s toolkit for planning and interpreting causal analyses of observational data. Advocates argue that DAGs improve the quality of causal research by increasing transparency and clarifying common analytical pitfalls. Critics, however, question whether these benefits have truly materialized, pointing to a persistent gap between theoretical promise and real-world practice.

        At the 2024 World Congress of Epidemiology, Dr Peter Tennant (University of Leeds) and Prof Margarita Moreno Betancur (University of Melbourne) took part in a debate on whether DAGs have fulfilled their promise in epidemiology. In this talk, Dr Tennant will revisit the key arguments from that debate and share further reflections on how DAGs can be used more effectively in epidemiology and health research.

  • 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
    • Abstract:
      • Sperm whales live in highly structured societies where communication and cooperation intertwine in complex ways. 
        In this talk, I will explore how these two social dimensions —vocal culture and collective behaviour— interact within sperm whale societies.  By combining large-scale acoustic datasets from the Pacific and Atlantic with computational models of coda structure, we uncover evidence that sperm whales not only share clan-specific repertoires but also learn aspects of vocal style from neighbouring clans. This suggests that cultural boundaries are porous, maintained by identity but shaped by interaction, and calls for an expanded notion of vocal identity that includes both repertoire and stylistic nuance. I will then turn to the social context in which such learning occurs: the cooperative dynamics of sperm whale groups. Using high-resolution drone footage, we reconstructed the collective behaviour surrounding the first documented sperm whale birth in over forty years. The event revealed a tightly coordinated network of assistance across kinship lines, where all members participated in protecting and lifting the negatively buoyant new-born. Together, these results suggest that sperm whale societies sustain a form of collective intelligence rooted in shared learning and cooperative care—one where communication and cooperation co-evolve as coupled substrates of culture. 
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Previous Seminars: 

  • Wednesday 24th September 2025 16:00 – 17:00
    • 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: