AI across borders: PhD students at Alan Turing Enrichment program
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Research thrives on collaboration, exchange of ideas, and exposure to different perspectives. Hear from two of our PhD students - Anastasiia, previous enrichment scheme awardee, and Sushant, who will join ATI through the program in January 2025.
NORA, the Norwegian Artificial Intelligence Research Consortium, is a collaboration between Norwegian universities and institutes within AI, including Simula, and is part of the Alan Turing Institute (ATI) enrichment program. The consortium funds and coordinates a six-month research exchange for a selected few PhD students in AI from Norway.
In an interview with Simula, PhD student Anastasiia Grishina shared her experiences, and PhD student Sushant Gautam discussed the opportunity to be selected for this research visit that is otherwise for UK PhD candidates only.
Presentations, reflections, and unspoken rules
Early on in her PhD work, Anastasiia sought to broaden her experiences and she was invited to ATI from October 2023 to March 2024. Anastasiia was part of a group of 60 enrichment students who had been through a rigorous selection process.
Her highlights included the opportunity for large-scale knowledge sharing and networking, with more practice in presenting and demonstrating.
“There are a lot of opportunities to learn more about any subfield within AI. It was very exciting and fast-paced, being at one of the top institutes in AI research”.
One of her highlights was presenting at the PitchFest at AIUK, the UK’s national showcase of data science and AI. She was one of the finalists, presenting a 90-second pitch.
“I learned a lot about summarising my research effectively. We had three weeks of preparation with professional coaches.”
Her PhD project focuses on large language models for software engineering, more specifically, developing a frameworks for automatic bug detection and fixing. Through attending numerous events and networking, she also experienced more direct benefits to her thesis.
“Being exposed to so many different perspectives and subfields, I had more reflections around the ethics part of my thesis, which is a huge focus at ATI”, notes Anastasiia.
She emphasises the importance of getting familiar with various fields and approaches to AI research, saying, “When we’re physically in the same environment with other researchers, we can see unspoken practices as well. Different teams have different standards and it’s important to broaden our perspectives and get exposed to these different approaches.”
“You’re surrounded by brilliant people and have the opportunity to exchange knowledge, brainstorm, and learn soft skills.”
During her stay, Anastasiia also had the opportunity to write a blog post about the use of generative AI to write code: a guide for researchers.
New perspectives, multimodal AI, and opportunities
Sushant is preparing for his upcoming six-month stay at the Alan Turing Institute, starting in January 2025. He decided to apply based on the opportunities that the ATI offers and his aspiration to gain new perspectives and experiences.
“I was introduced to the idea when Anastasiia gave a presentation at the annual Simula retreat last year and mentioned that she was going to participate.”
He then joined the NORA Student Council, which reminded him about the opportunity, and he applied. Sushant was selected by NORA and ATI from among candidates from academic institutions within Norway to participate in the third round of the program.
“Having the opportunity to visit such an influential research institution focused on data science and AI, while being exposed to diverse methods, groups, and applications is something I look forward to”.
He is doing his PhD research on multimodal AI, aimed at developing AI models that are able to comprehend various modalities such as image, text, video and audio. He is currently working on multimodal football game understanding and is looking to extend his research to healthcare. He recently published a multimodal question answering dataset intended to train multimodal healthcare AI.
“I’m excited to see how other researchers are using multimodal AI in different domains.”
He believes that being part of this program will benefit his thesis and broaden his perspective, as well as provide him with a great networking opportunity for future projects and collaborations.
Sushant emphasizes the rapid developments in AI and the value of collaborations in such a dynamic field.
“It’s helpful to connect with diverse groups and gain new perspectives. I believe that’s a big part of how research excels," he concludes.
You can read more about both Anastasiia’s and Sushant’s research interests and their stay through their profiles on Alan Turing Institute's webpages:
Relevant links:
Read NORA’s announcement on Sushant’s research stay at ATI.
How many large language models do you need to write code without errors? - Anastasiia Grishina's presentation at AI UK PitchFest.
Using generative AI to write code: a guide for researchers (turing.ac.uk). A blog post by Anastasiia Grishina.