Informatics colleagues celebrated for their long service

[17/01/2025] Colleagues from the School of Informatics were recognised for their long-standing contributions at the University’s annual long service celebration. The event, held at the Playfair Library, brought together 180 staff members and their guests to mark their dedication and service to the University.

Professor Michael Rovatsos was recognised for 20 years of service, Professor Jacques Fleuriot for 25 years, Professors Alexandra Lascarides and Perdita Stevens for 30 years each, and Professor Bob Fisher for 40 years. Professor Fisher was unable to attend the event due to a prior engagement in India, where he was elected President of the International Association for Pattern Recognition.

Colleagues celebrated for their long service

Professor Michael Rovatsos: 20 Years of Service

Michael Rovatsos is Deputy Vice Principal of Research and Professor of Artificial Intelligence, he also serves as Director of the Bayes Centre. He obtained his PhD in Informatics from the Technical University of Munich in 2004 and immediately joined the University of Edinburgh in a full-time academic position. 

Professor Rovatsos has authored over 90 publications in AI and has been involved in externally funded projects worth over £17 million. His research focuses on Artificial Intelligence, particularly multiagent systems and ethical algorithm design. He has contributed to various topics, including multiagent communication, planning, learning, argumentation, trust and reputation, and normative systems. His recent work includes designing smart orchestration platforms for human collaboration, developing diversity-aware coordination algorithms, and creating methods to translate fairness criteria from human users into ethical resource allocation mechanisms. 

Image
Photo of Prof. Michael Rovatsos

Professor Jacques Fleuriot: 25 Years of Service

Professor Jacques Fleuriot received a First Class Honours MEng Computing degree in Artificial Intelligence from Imperial College, London in 1995, and a PhD in Automated Reasoning from the University of Cambridge in 1999. His PhD focused on the mechanization of proofs from Newton's Principia using the proof assistant Isabelle, for which he received the British Computer Society Distinguished Dissertation Award in 2000. He was supported by scholarships from the Government of Mauritius, Imperial College, the University of Cambridge, and the Overseas Research Students Awards Scheme. 

In 1999, after completing his PhD, Professor Fleuriot was appointed Lecturer in Automated Reasoning at the School of Informatics, University of Edinburgh. He has been the principal investigator on grants in areas such as collaborative theorem proving and AI-based modelling and predictions for healthcare. He has also served as a principal investigator and co-investigator on grants related to mathematical reasoning and the application of AI to healthcare, medicine, and manufacturing. 

Currently, Professor Fleuriot supervises several PhD students and has been the principal or co-supervisor for over 15 successful PhD students. He teaches courses in automated reasoning and artificial intelligence to undergraduate and master's students. 

Image
Photo of Jacques Fleuriot

Professor Alexandra Lascarides: 30 Years of Service

Professor Alex Lascarides' research is in theoretical and computational linguistics and AI.  Her research aims to model the semantics and pragmatics of communicative actions in conversation, mainly focussing on text and speech but also analysing non-verbal actions such as hand gestures.She has developed logical and computational models of how humans communicate with each other, and machine learning frameworks that enable software agents and robots to engage in, and learn from, verbal and non-verbal interactions with humans.  She has also developed models of conversation where the participants' goals diverge (e.g., courtroom cross examination, negotiations over restricted resources and political debate), as well as cases where they align (e.g., tourist information, scheduling). A common underlying theme to all this work is to exploit models of discourse coherence to constrain the inferential processes that underly generating and interpreting language and gesture.

Prof. Lascarides also has an ongoing interest in developing machine learning methods for learning optimal strategies, particularly for complex games such as Settlers of Catan, or for decision problems where the agent starts out unaware of possible states and/or actions that are critical to task success.

Image
Photo of Alex Lascarides

Professor Perdita Stevens: 30 Years of Service

Professor Stevens began her career as a mathematician, specializing in algebra at King's College, Cambridge, and the University of Warwick. She then worked as a software engineer before joining the Department of Computer Science at the University of Edinburgh in 1994. Her research includes model-checking of concurrent systems, reengineering legacy systems, and using models in software development. 

From 2000 to 2006, she held an EPSRC Advanced Research Fellowship. She was promoted to Reader in 2003 and Professor of Mathematics of Software Engineering in 2014. Professor Stevens has pioneered bidirectional model transformations (bx) to maintain consistency between models in software development. From 2013 to 2016, she led a research project with Oxford on the Least Change property of bx. 

She serves on the editorial boards of "Theoretical Computer Science" and "Software and Systems Modelling" and has been a member of over 50 Programme Committees, chaired five PCs, and served on the steering committees of ETAPS and Bx. She was an invited speaker at BCTCS'17. 

Image
Photo of Perdita Stevens

Professor Bob Fisher: 40 Years of Service

Professor Robert B. Fisher is a prominent academic in computer vision at the University of Edinburgh's School of Informatics. He holds a B.S. in Mathematics from Caltech (1974), an M.S. in Computer Science from Stanford (1978), and a PhD from the University of Edinburgh (1987).

He co-founded the Institute of Perception, Action and Behaviour and has focused on high-level and 3D computer vision, including geometric model reconstruction and video sequence understanding. He has published 5 books and around 350 peer-reviewed articles, secured approximately £5 million in research funding, and contributed to projects on skin cancer, bat acoustic robotics, and fish video data analysis.

He has been the Dean of Research in the College of Science and Engineering and is currently the President of the International Association for Pattern Recognition.

He is a Fellow of both the International Association for Pattern Recognition and the British Machine Vision Association.

Image
Bob Fisher

Related links