Governance
The Centre for Machine Intelligence is governed by the CMI Leadership Team: the Director, the AI Research Engineering Lead and four Research Theme Leads and the Academic Advisory Board.
CMI Leadership Team
Interim Director
Professor Guy Brown
Professor of Computer Science
g.j.brown@sheffield.ac.uk
Head of AI Research Engineering
Professor Haiping Lu
Professor of Machine Learning & Turing Academic Lead
h.lu@sheffield.ac.uk
Academic Advisory Board Members
Members of the Academic Advisory Board (AAB) have been selected to give a broad range of expertise across the University, covering major disciplines and IT services.
Members typically serve renewable terms of 2 years.
Professor of Digital Society, Department of Sociological Studies; Director of the ESRC Digital Good Network
Professor Helen Kennedy is director of the ESRC Digital Good Network, a £4m investment which explores what a good digital society looks like and how we get there. She has researched and published extensively on digital in/equalities, and collaborated with a range of digital society policy and practice bodies.
Professor of Medical Robotics, Department of Automatic Control and Systems Engineering
Sanja has over 20 years of research experience in surgical and physical assistance robots, safe human-robot interaction and soft robotic structures. She has led numerous EPSRC, EC, NIHR and Innovate UK projects as PI. She is in the Executive Board of Sheffield Robotics and established the medical robotics group at Bristol Robotics Laboratory, before moving to University of Sheffield in 2020.
Head of Department, Department of Automatic Control and Systems Engineering
George joined the Department of Automatic Control and Systems Engineering as a Lecturer in 2010, and was promoted to Professor of Computational Intelligence in 2019. He has a research grant portfolio of over £3M, as well as over 100 research publications in theoretical as well as applied contributions in the areas of computational intelligence, data-driven modelling, optimisation, control, and decision support systems.
Professor of Emergency Medicine, School of Medicine and Population Health. Director of Data Connect
Sue qualified in medicine from London University in 1990, training initially in surgery and then specialising in Emergency Medicine. She joined the University as a Senior Clinical Lecturer in 2001, was promoted to Reader in 2007 and Professor in 2010. Sue works across the University and the Sheffield Teaching Hospitals Trust emergency department.
Senior Lecturer in Theoretical Chemistry, Department of Chemistry
Grant obtained an MChem degree in 2002 and a PhD in theoretical chemistry in 2006 from University of York. He spent 2005-2008 as a postdoctoral researcher in the group of Dr. Jamie Platts at Cardiff University, and 2008-2010 at Washington State University in the group of Prof. Kirk Peterson. After a temporary lectureship and short period as a Leadership Fellow at the University of Glasgow, he joined the University of Sheffield as a lecturer in 2014.
Senior Theme Lead for Data, Connectivity and AI, Advanced Manufacturing Research Centre (AMRC)
Jon’s research has focused on the automated identification of urban and natural audio signals, testing a novel time-domain feature extraction method, alongside researching ensemble neural network classifiers. He has been part of the Process Monitoring and Control (PM&C) team at the AMRC since 2013, and a Technical Fellow since 2017.
Head of Research and Innovation IT
Saul is expert in digital transformation with more than 20 years experience in the public sector and commercial organisations, and a founding member of Sheffield Digital. He is currently Head of Delivery for Research and Innovation IT at the University of Sheffield.
Faculty Director of Research and Innovation, Arts and Humanities
Nikki has expertise in the science and psychology of music, popular music and new musical multimedia. She has published over 70 journal articles and book chapters, and in 2022 she was awarded an honorary doctorate from the University of Oslo for her contribution to music studies. Before becoming Faculty Director of Research and Innovation, Nikki was Director of the Humanities Research Institute, leading collaborative and interdisciplinary research in the Arts and Humanities.
Academic Advisory Board: responsibilities and role
The Academic Advisory Board (AAB) will play a crucial role in guiding and supporting the mission of the Centre for Machine Intelligence (CMI) to advance interdisciplinary AI-related research, innovation and education at the University of Sheffield.
Members of the AAB will help the Director and the leadership team to shape the strategic direction of the centre and ensure its continued success in the rapidly evolving landscape of AI research.
The AAB will guide and support the work of the CMI through various activities, including:
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Strategic Guidance. Providing valuable insights, strategic advice, and recommendations to the CMI leadership team.
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Networking. Using professional networks to facilitate collaborations, partnerships, and sponsorship opportunities with relevant academic and industry stakeholders.
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Research oversight. Offering input on research projects, methodologies, and initiatives, ensuring they align with the CMI’s objectives and contribute to the broader Sheffield AI community.
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Review and evaluation. Participating in the evaluation of ongoing research activities, helping to assess their impact, significance, and alignment with the CMI’s goals.
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Advocacy. Promoting the CMI’s work, achievements, and impact to a wider audience, internally and externally.
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Governance. Contributing to discussions on the governance structure of the research centre, including key performance indicators, policies, and decision-making processes.