Seminar series

Welcome to the Trustworthy Systems Lab Seminar Series!

Here you can find all the upcoming and previous seminars in the series. The focus of the seminars is on promoting discussion and debate around the topic of Trustworthiness. 

The format of the talks are 20-30 mins of presentation and 30 mins for discussion and questions. We usually hold these weekly on a Wednesday lunchtime at midday (12:00). This is an open group so please share widely and get in contact if you wish to observe, join the debate or give a presentation.

Please contact us to be added to the mailing list where you will be sent an invitation to the talks each week along with an update of the next talks.

Details of upcoming talks and speakers can be found below.

 

18th June 2025, Making Robots Explainable, Safe and Trustworthy

Autonomous robot systems operating in real-world environments are required to understand their surroundings, assess their capabilities, and explain what they have seen, what they have done, what they planning to do, and why. These explanations need to be tailored to different stakeholders including end-users, developers, and regulators. In this talk, I will discuss how to design, develop, and evaluate fundamental AI technologies in simulation and real-world applications to make robots explainable, safe, and trustworthy and how this can help to overcome critical barriers which impede the current deployment of autonomous systems in economically and socially important areas.

 Prof. Lars Kunze

Lars Kunze is a Professor in Safety for Robotics and Autonomous Systems at the Bristol Robotics Laboratory (BRL) at UWE Bristol. Before joining BRL, he was a Departmental Lecturer (Assistant Professor) in Robotics in the Oxford Robotics Institute (ORI) and the Department of Engineering Science at the University of Oxford (where he is now a Visiting Fellow). He is also the Technical Lead at the Responsible Technology Institute (RTI), an international centre of excellence at Oxford University.
Professor Kunze's areas of expertise lie in the fields of robotics and artificial intelligence (AI). He has a background in Cognitive Science (BSc, 2006) and Computer Science (MSc, 2008) which he studied at the University of Osnabrück, and partly at the University of Edinburgh. He received his PhD (Dr. rer. nat.) from the Technical University of Munich, in 2014.
Within the ORI, he leads the Cognitive Robotics Group (CRG) which performs research into scene understanding, causal cognition, and explainability for autonomous systems; motivated by applications in complex, real-world environments. From 2019 to 2022 he led the AAIP SAX project which demonstrated explainability for autonomous vehicles in challenging real-world driving scenarios. From 2022 to 2024, he led the UKRI Trustworthy Autonomous Systems RAILS project which investigated approaches for the responsible deployment of AI technologies in autonomous systems including AVs, drones, and service robots. More recent highlights include the development and deployment of a novel sensor backpack to understand how road infrastructure and road user behaviour can affect the safety of cyclists (RobotCycle).