Keynote Speaker - 2026

09 July 2025, 09:30–10:30 BST (British Summer Time)

Professor Emma Hart FRSE

Associate Dean for Research and Innovation

School of Computing, Engineering & the Built Environment

Edinburgh Napier University, Edinburgh, UK

Machines designing Machines: Generative Approaches to the Autonomous Design of Robots

Abstract

Robot design is traditionally the domain of humans–engineers, physicists, and increasingly AI experts. Advances in generative AI techniques such as Evolutionary Computation and Large Language models are now accelerating the ability to automate the design of both static objects (such as bridge) and of robots, including their body shape and brain (control system). If the latter is coupled with advances in materials, 3d printing, autonomous manufacturing and assembly techniques, it becomes possible to full automate the design and fabrication of robots, i.e. enables machines to design machines.

I will give a short history the use of AI to design robots, and show case the current state of the art, based on some the recent work from my group. Finally, I will touch on some ethical issues associated with the notion of autonomous robot design, and discuss the potential of artificial evolution and generative AI techniques to be used as a tool to gain new insights into biological evolving systems.

Biosketch of the speaker:

Professor Emma Hart has worked in the field of Evolutionary Computing for over 20 years on a range of applications ranging from combinatorial optimisation to robotics, where the latter includes robot design and swarm robotics. Her current work is mainly centred in Evolutionary Robotics, bringing together ideas on using artificial evolution as tool for optimisation with research that focuses on how robots can be made to continually learn, improving performance as they gather information from their own or other robots’ experiences. The work has attracted significant media attention including recently in the New Scientist, and the Guardian. She gave a TED talk on this subject at TEDWomen in December 2021 in Palm Springs, USA which has attracted over 1 million views since being released online in April 2022. She was the Editor-in-Chief of the journal Evolutionary Computation (MIT Press) and an elected member of the ACM SIG on Evolutionary Computing until 2023. In 2022, she was honoured to be elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh for her contributions to the field of Computational Intelligence.

09 July 2025, 10:45–11:45 BST (British Summer Time)

Professor Eerke Boiten

Head School of Computer Science and Informatics

De Montfort University, Leicester, UK

Cyber security asymmetry in the age of AI

Abstract

A classical asymmetry in cyber security, making defence intrinsically harder than attack, is that the attacker needs to find only one way through, whereas the defender needs to close off all possible avenues. We evaluate the exploitation of large AI models in cyber security, both in attack and defence, in the context of this asymmetry.

Biosketch of the speaker:

Eerke Boiten spent the first twenty years of his research career, first in the Netherlands and then in the UK, on mathematics and logic based methods to guarantee and verify the correctness of software. He published over 50 peer reviewed papers on formal methods, including program transformation, viewpoint specification, and refinement in process algebra and state-based systems (e.g. Z). On the latter topic, he authored the monographs “Refinement in Z and Object-Z” (Springer 2004, 2015) and "Refinement: Semantics, Languages and Applications" (Springer 2018) with John Derrick, and organised many conferences and workshops including nine editions of the BCS-FACS Refinement Workshop.

His research has since moved mainly towards cyber security and privacy. He set up and led Kent’s interdisciplinary Research Centre in Cyber Security from 2012 to 2017. In 2017, he moved to De Montfort University to lead the Cyber Technology Institute, which then held NCSC/EPSRC Academic Centre of Excellence in Cyber Security Research status from 2019 to 2023 and NCSC Academic Centre of Excellence in Cyber Security Education (Gold) status since 2021. He became Head of the School of Computer Science and Informatics in 2019. His current research projects are in privacy impact assessment, anonymisation, cyber intelligence sharing, and privacy and broader implications of artificial intelligence. He often engages with the press on these topics and broader issues of impacts of computing in society.

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