Queen Mary students to gain valuable research experience through placements at the Alan Turing Institute

The students who will be joining the scheme are Andrea Bruera, Berker Banar, Elisa Rauseo, Iacopo Ghinassi, Jiawen Huang, Magdalena Huebner and Peiling Yi.

Now entering its seventh year, the Turing Enrichment scheme is designed for PhD students to support and enhance their current research by accessing the facilities and opportunities available at the renowned Alan Turing Institute. Enrichment students can collaborate and network with their peers, as well as leading experts, learn and apply new methodologies, develop research independence, examine the ethical issues in their projects and join a bustling community of students and researchers based at the British Library. Enrichment students were eligible for a stipend top-up of up to £6,700 in London.

Previous recipients from Queen Mary have spoken of how the overall experience as well as the training events and courses offered benefited their research, and that the environment allowed students to thrive on collaboration and look at their research with new perspectives and from different disciplines. Katriona Goldman, Bioinformatician at Queen Mary, said: “This experience pushed my research in directions that would have seemed daunting when I first started my PhD. Access to The Turing Way community gave me the confidence and ability to publish my own open-source software packages and pipelines, ensuring they were fully accessible, transparent, and reproducible.”

Queen Mary’s Dr Emmanouil Benetos, a Senior Lecturer in EECS, a Turing Fellow and member of the Enrichment Scheme applicant review panel, said: “The biggest benefit from Enrichment placements is the opportunity to collaborate with students and researchers from the wider data science and AI community in the UK reaching beyond the student's home institution. Access to the Turing's high-performance computing resources is another benefit, particularly for students who work on computation-intensive research topics.”

Professor Greg Slabaugh, Turing University Lead at Queen Mary and Director of the Digital Environment Research Institute, said: “The Enrichment scheme offers an excellent opportunity for our PhD researchers to put their research into a wider context whilst developing new skills to enhance their research output. Students also grow their personal network through collaboration and the Turing's ability to convene AI research at the national scale.”

Jane Formston from The Alan Turing Institute said: “We are really looking forward to welcoming the next group of students onto our Enrichment scheme this year. We’ve selected candidates from a wide range of disciplines associated with AI who will embrace the opportunity to enrich their own research through the Turing network.

“Students on the scheme will have the opportunity to collaborate with researchers and students across different disciplines, including networking opportunities such as Interest Groups and Data Study Groups and mentoring programmes and we’re really excited to see these students develop their skills and contribute to the Turing’s research portfolio.”

Joining this year’s cohort is Queen Mary’s Iacopo Ghinassi, a second year PhD student researching segmentation and annotation of TV and radio programmes. Commenting on his opportunity, Iacopo said: “I have already been able to connect with some people from the Humanities and Data Science Special Interest Group at the Turing and this has resulted in direct collaborations that will likely increase as I move to work in the Turing’s inspirational HQ.”

Also joining this year’s scheme is Elisa Rauseo, a cardiologist and PhD student in Artificial Intelligence and Cardiovascular Medicine at the William Harvey Research Institute at Queen Mary. Elisa said: “My engagement with the Turing community will broaden my perspective and inspire me to new research opportunities. My clinical background, in turn, can widen the available skill set present at The Turing and bring a different perspective.”
• Calls for 2023 open on Monday 14th November 2022 and prospective students are invited to for an Open Event on Friday 25th November. Further details will be available on the Turing website in due course.