I started my academic placement at the Intelligent System Laboratory, University of Bristol on April the 2nd 2024.
Luckily for me, I’ve previously met my new supervisor at Bristol, Dr. Zahraa Abdallah, at ECML ‘23: I think this aspect has simplified a lot the whole process of getting familiar with the new city, new working environment, etc.
At first we struggled to find a topic for my placement but after some research, I found an interesting one to work on, with another PhD student Nikos Papadeas: both our PhDs are about xAI methods applied to the Time Series domain. We found an intersection between our research interests, specifically we’re working on how to mitigate the exponential computational cost and the theoretical feature independence requirement of the SHAP algorithm by segmenting the Time Series to be explained. In the last few months, we’ve been working together on developing code and recently we could run the first experiments. The most probable outcome of this will be a collaboration between me and Nikos, UCD and the University of Bristol and hopefully also a nice and interesting publication!
Apart from the academic side, I had the opportunity to travel a lot through England. From Bristol, it’s easy to reach other interesting locations such as Bath, a small but beautiful tourist city 15 minutes by train from Bristol, Cardiff, the capital of Wales, with its great green spaces and very peculiar city center and London which I think … doesn’t need any introduction!
On top of that, I also attended a conference in Sheffield (photo above) on Multimodal AI: one of the most common modalities was Time Series, which is why I’ve gained some ideas to be applied in the future.
In a nutshell, after these months I spent in Bristol I got a new topic to currently work on, ideas for the next ones and I’ve also explored a bit of a new country! I’d like to thank ML-Labs for the great support in this placement.
Davide Serramazza ML-Labs Student Cohort 4