Turing Seminar Series

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

  • Wednesday, 18th March 2026. 13:00 - 14:00 followed by refreshments (1400 - 1500)
    • Title: Open data infrastructure in the age of generative AI
    • Speaker: Elena Simperl
    • Location: Chemistry Building LT4
    • Abstract:

      • Open data infrastructure refers to the systems, frameworks, and processes put in place to collect, store, manage, and share data generated or held by governments and other public institutions. It is meant to ensure that public data is accessible, high-quality, secure, and usable by a wide range of stakeholders, including the general public. For more than a decade, we have witnessed millions of datasets made available via such infrastructure, advancing research, policymaking, and innovation. However, open data infrastructure is still far from realising its potential; non-technical users, in particular, face significant barriers in navigating complex datasets and extracting meaningful information to support their decisions. There are also ongoing challenges around sustainability and stewardship.

        In this talk I will walk through some of my recent research into how generative AI could address some of these barriers. I will start with user studies in "data prompting", which explore how professionals in various data-related roles engage with chatbots to find, make sense, and use open data. Diving deeper to the accuracy issues suggested by these studies, I will then describe two projects focusing on open government data. In the first one, my team used machine unlearning and information leakage methods to understand if existing open datasets are used by widely accessible generative AI tools. In the second one, we developed a benchmark to assess the factuality of foundational models in answering citizen queries.

        Informed by the findings, we developed PortalGPT, a proof of concept leveraging knowledge graphs, large language models, and retrieval-augmented generation to make open data more accessible and actionable for people with varying levels of data literacy.

    • Bio:

      • Elena Simperl is a Professor of Computer at King’s College London and the Director of Research for the Open Data Institute (ODI). She is a Fellow of the British Computer Society and the Royal Society of Arts, and a Hans Fischer Senior Fellow. Elena’s work is at the intersection between AI and social computing. She features in the top 100 most influential scholars in knowledge engineering of the last decade and in the Women in AI 2000 ranking. She is the president of the Semantic Web Sciences Association. 

Previous Seminars: 

  • Wednesday, 4th March 2026. 13:00 - 14:00
    • Title: Machine Learning Assisted Multi-Scale Mechanical Simulation of Large Composite Structures
    • Speaker: Aewis Hii
  • Wednesday, 18th February 2026
    • Title: Convergent Methods for Koopman Operators on Reproducing Kernel Hilbert Spaces
    • Speaker: Nicolas Boullé
  • Wednesday, 19th November 2025
    • 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
  • Wednesday, 22nd October 2025
  • 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: