Invited Speakers

Keynote Speaker

Title: Mind the Gap: Building AI Systems for Real-World Challenges

Professor Greg Slabaugh

Abstract: AI systems are already having a transformative impact across domains, yet their deployment in the real world remains limited by imperfect data, shifting environments, and constrained resources. This keynote will outline key real-world challenges, from data scarcity and distributional drift to model control, efficiency, and interpretability, and present a unifying framework spanning data, models, deployment, monitoring, and adaptation. Through examples from my research team and collaborators, including foundation models, generative AI, test-time adaptation, model distillation, and explainable AI, the talk will examine the gaps that emerge when AI meets messy, dynamic reality. It will conclude with future perspectives on AI systems that perceive, adapt, and act robustly in complex, changing environments.

Short Bio: Greg Slabaugh is Professor of Computer Vision and AI and Director of the Digital Environment Research Institute (DERI) at Queen Mary University of London. His primary research interests include computer vision, deep learning, computational photography, and medical image computing. Before joining Queen Mary in 2020, he was Chief Scientist in Computer Vision (EU) at Huawei Technologies R&D, leading work on the camera ISP pipeline, including denoising, demosaicing, automatic white balance, super-resolution, and colour enhancement. Earlier, he held industrial roles at Medicsight, where his team’s ColonCAD product for CT detection of pre-cancerous lesions achieved FDA clearance and CE marking, and at Siemens on medical image computing and 3D shape modelling. He earned a PhD in Electrical Engineering from the Georgia Institute of Technology. Previously an academic at City, University of London, he led research grants funded by the European Commission, EPSRC, and Innovate UK. He was awarded a university-wide Research Student Supervision Award in 2017, and a Teaching in the Schools award for the School of Mathematics, Computer Science, and Engineering in 2016.

Title: Not your models, Not your Al

Jiahao Sun

Abstract: AI systems are already having a transformative impact across domains, yet their deployment in the real world remains limited by imperfect data, shifting environments, and constrained resources. This keynote will outline key real-world challenges, from data scarcity and distributional drift to model control, efficiency, and interpretability, and present a unifying framework spanning data, models, deployment, monitoring, and adaptation. Through examples from my research team and collaborators, including foundation models, generative AI, test-time adaptation, model distillation, and explainable AI, the talk will examine the gaps that emerge when AI meets messy, dynamic reality. It will conclude with future perspectives on AI systems that perceive, adapt, and act robustly in complex, changing environments.

Short Bio: Jiahao Sun is the founder and CEO of FLock.io. He graduated from the University of Oxford, and worked as an honorary research fellow at Imperial College London. FLock.io is a decentralized AI platform that empowers communities to collaboratively build, train, and deploy AI models in a privacy-preserving, secure, and incentivized manner, democratizing AI development and unlocking its potential across industries.