School of Computing Science

December 2025

November 2025

October 2025

September 2025

August 2025

July 2025

June 2025

May 2025

October 2025: First general assembly for the Horizon Europe Climinvest project

This month Iadh Ounis and Richard McCreadie attended the first general assembly for the Horizon Europe Climinvest project, which aims to develop tools to make investment in green development projects easier and less risky. Our participation in Climinvest is part of the growing Financial Informatics theme within IDA and is a follow-up to the prior flagship Horizon 2020 Infinitech project. Climinvest is currently in the data modelling phase, here is Richard discussing how technical, financial, regulatory and environmental data form the back-bone of new bankability reports for investors:

Later in the project the Information Retrieval group will be working on research and development of state-of-the-art approaches to leverage large language models and conversational search to analyse project risks and build mitigation strategies interactively with stakeholders.

October 2025: EU ELLIE Horizon Project

As part of the ELLIE project (PI: Dr Christos Anagnostopoulos), full name Technology Preserving Culture and Enhancing History: Cultural Heritage Meets Modern Technology, the KDES group is developing a digital twin for Interactive Heritage Showcases at The Tall Ship Glenlee, Glasgow, through AR and VR environments and Internet of Senses.

October 2025: 3D-ADAM dataset for defect detection in 3D-printed parts reaches 200K downloads

The 3D-ADAM (3D Anomaly Detection in Additive Manufacturing) dataset developed in the CVAS group has now been downloaded over 200,000 times. The 3D-ADAM project was led by CVAS PhD student Paul McHard under the supervision of Dr Gerardo Aragon-Camarasa in collaboration with HAL Robotics Ltd, with input from Dr Paul Henderson, Dr Florent Audonnet, and Oliver Summerell. The dataset is discussed in this preprint.

September 2025: Dr Gerardo Aragon-Camarasa becomes a Director and Trustee of the British Machine Vision Association

IDA academic and CVAS group leader Dr Gerardo Aragon-Camarasa has been appointed as director, trustee and deputy treasurer for the British Machine Vision Association (BMVA). The BMVA provides a national forum for individuals and organisations involved in machine vision, image processing, and pattern recognition in the United Kingdom.

September 2025: KDES paper accepted at NeurIPS 2025, the top conference for machine learning

The paper STaRFormer: Semi-Supervised Task-Informed Representation Learning via Dynamic Attention-Based Regional Masking for Sequential Data from the KDES group will be presented in NeurIPS 2025, San Diego, 2-7 Dec 2025. This work is the product of a collaboration between KDES (Sham, Max, and Christos) and the BMW Group. More information here: https://star-former.github.io/

May 2025: Information Retrieval Group Hosts Visiting Research Students

The Information Retrieval Group recently welcomed five visiting research students:

Giuseppe Spillo is a 3rd-year PhD student at the University of Bari, Italy, in the SWAP Research Group. His main research interests are Multimodal and Knowledge-aware Recommender Systems and Green AI. His visiting period at UoG focused on quantisation approaches in multimodal recommendation scenarios.

Marco Braga is a 3rd-year PhD student at the University of Milano-Bicocca, Italy, in the IKR3 Research Group. His main research interests are Efficient Tuning of Large Language Models on specific domains, tasks, or languages. During his visiting period at UoG, he focuses on adapting Information Retrieval models to specific domains.

Chiara Mallamaci is a final-year Master's student in Artificial Intelligence and Data Science at the Polytechnic of Bari. During her visiting period, she has been focusing on sequential recommendation systems, working on quantisation methods to improve recommendation efficiency.

Daniel Namaki is a final-year Master's student in Artificial Intelligence and Data Engineering at the University of Pisa. During his visiting research period, he has focused on enhancing answer quality in Retrieval-Augmented Generation systems through context diversification techniques.

Emmanouil Georgios (Akis) Lionis is a final-year Master's student in Artificial Intelligence at the University of Amsterdam (UvA), currently researching Long Document Retrieval by Learning Sparse Representations for his thesis. The visit was supported by the ELLIS honor program, which connects exceptional UvA research students with professors from other institutions. Akis will start as a PhD student at Glasgow in Fall 2025.

July 2025: Glasgow hosted IEEE ICDCS conference

IEEE ICDCS is the leading and premier international conference (CORE A* ranked) focusing on distributed computing systems. ICDCS is the oldest conference in the field of distributed computing systems in the world. It was launched by the IEEE Computer Society Technical Committee on Distributed Processing (TCDP) in October 1979, and is sponsored by such committee becoming an annual conference since 1983. The ICDCS has a long history of significant achievements and worldwide visibility, and celebrated its 45th year in Glasgow, Scotland. It provides a research and social venue for researchers, academics, and professionals to present and discuss the latest research in the field. The conference covers important topics including Distributed AI, Data-centric AI/ML, Distributed Data Science, Federated Learning Systems, and more. As the world is increasingly moving towards the adoption and integration of AI-driven data systems across various sectors, Glasgow is important to host conferences in the field. ICDCS serves as a platform to highlight the strength and vision of IDA, University of Glasgow and the city of Glasgow fully sponsored by IEEE CS. IDA academics and researchers are part of the organizing committee with Christos and Iadh (General Chairs), Graham (Finance Chair), Fani (Publication Chair) and Shameem (Local Organization Chair).

July 2025: Workshop on Federated and Privacy Preserving AI in Biomedical Applications

As part of IEEE ICDCS in Glasgow, Dr Fani Deligianni and Dr Idris Zakariyya organised a workshop to discuss the latest advancements and challenges in applying federated learning and privacy-preserving AI techniques to biomedical applications. The focus was on ensuring data privacy and security while enabling collaborative research and innovation in healthcare.

April 2025: Best paper awards at European Conference on Information Retrieval (ECIR '25)

Three papers from the Information Retrieval Group received awards at the European Conference on Information Retrieval, held in Lucca earlier this month:

Best Paper Award: "One size doesn’t fit all: Predicting the Number of Examples for In-Context Learning" by Manish Mandra, Debasis Ganguly and Iadh Ounis

Best Student Paper Honourable Mention Award: "mFollowIR: a Multilingual Benchmark for Instruction Following in Information Retrieval" by Orion Weller, Benjamin Chang, Eugene Yang, Mahsa Yarmohammadi, Sam Barham, Sean MacAvaney, Arman Cohan, Luca Soldaini, Benjamin Van Durme and Dawn Lawrie

Best Short Paper Honourable Mention Award: "Efficient Constant-Space Multi-Vector Retrieval" by Sean MacAvaney Antonio Mallia and Nicola Tonellotto.

March 2025: Finalist for Best Research Paper (ECR) at UKRI Trustworthy Autonomous Systems (TAS) Hub AI & Robotics Research Awards

The paper titled "Interaction-Aware Decision-Making for Automated Vehicles Using Social Value Orientation", co-authored by Dr. Edmond Shu-lim Ho of the CVAS group, has been selected as one of the three Best Research Paper (ECR) finalists for the 2025 UKRI Trustworthy Autonomous Systems (TAS) Hub AI & Robotics Research Awards held at the Royal Society on 12th March 2025. The research was led by Dr. Luca Crosato during his PhD, under the supervision of Dr. Edmond Ho, Dr. Chongfeng Wei (James Watt School of Engineering), and Dr. Hubert Shum (Durham University).

February 2025: Kevin Bryson appointed as new Head of IDA Section

Dr Kevin Bryson has taken over as head of the Information, Data & Analysis Section, replacing Prof. Iadh Ounis who has led the section for the past four years. Kevin joined the School in 2021 as a Senior Lecturer in Bioinformatics and AI; his research aims to develop deep learning (AI) methods for bioinformatics data integration, particularly in the area of cancer for precision medicine.

January 2025: Prize for virtual unwrapping of the Vesuvius Scrolls

Paul Henderson of the  group received a $30,000 prize for his work on virtual 'unwrapping' of the Vesuvius Scrolls, a trove of ancient papyrus scrolls that were preserved during the famous eruption of Mount Vesuvius in AD79. An international competition aims to find novel methods to read text from 3D scans of these scrolls, which are too badly burnt to physically unroll. Dr Henderson developed a method blending deep learning and computational geometry techniques to automatically determine where the surface of the papyrus passes in the 3D scan volume, allowing it to be virtually flattened out into a 2D sheet.

January 2025: Newly funded EU/Horizon project TERRA

The EU Horizon-awarded project TERRA: An Intelligent platform for integrating climate services (2025-2028) led by Christos Anagnostopoulos (Technical Manager) in collaboration with Zhiwei Gao (Geotechnical Engineering, James Watt School of Engineering) and Martin Hurst (School of Geographical & Earth Sciences) aims to tackle global water-related challenges such as pollution, flooding, and coastal erosion. TERRA envisions the creation of services and product chains that fuse Copernicus services with Digital Twins and AI technologies to provide solutions for coastline detection, coastline erosion prediction, flood risk assessment and mitigation, water pollution assessment and coastline modelling. TERRA provides the framework to promote its outcomes through the Global Earth Observation System of Systems (GEOSS).

December 2024: Andrew Parry awarded the Bloomberg Data Science Fellowship

PhD student Andrew Parry was received the Bloomberg Data Science Ph.D. Fellowship. This highly-competitive fellowship recognizes Andrew’s research achievements in the area of information retrieval, and it provides him with financial support, mentorship, and a research internship through Bloomberg. You can read more about Andrew’s plans for the fellowship here.

November 2024: Glasgow hosted the British Machine Vision Conference

The annual British Machine Vision Conference (BMVC) was recently held in Glasgow, from the 25th to the 28th of November 2024. BMVC is one of the top international conferences on computer vision, a sub-field of AI that aims to build machines that understand image and video data. The event was organised by Dr Gerardo Aragon-Camarasa and Dr Edmond Shu-lim Ho alongside an organsing team from the Computer Vision and Autonomous Systems and a team of PGR students from the School of Computing Science who all ensured the event ran smoothly.
With 519 attendees, 263 papers, 8 workshops and a doctoral consortium over the course of the 4 days, the conference is considered to have been a resounding success. The papers published ranged from segmentation in medical imaging, to depth estimation, to inpainting methods and everything in-between! Notably, there were also 4 keynote presentations on robotic vision (Prof Margarita Chli, ETH Zurich), privacy in AI (Prof Mubarak Shah, University of California), video understanding (Dr Laura Sevilla-Lara, University of Edinburgh) and 3D GenAI (Federico Tombari, Google). Four sponsors Technovative Solutions LTD (TVS), VIVO, Living Optics and Nokia Bell Labs also attended the event, each having a booth with which to represent their company.

July 2024: Best Paper Runner Up at SIGIR 2024

Sean MacAvaney's paper A reproducibility study of PLAID was a runner-up for the best paper award at SIGIR 2024, the #1 conference for Information Retrieval.

June 2024: Newly funded EU/Horizon project COIN-3D

The EU Horizon-awarded project COIN-3D: Collaborative Innovation in 3D VLSI Reliability (2024-2027) led by Christos (Technical Coordinator), fosters strategic networking and knowledge exchange between leading European research institutions (incl. University of Bremen and University of Amsterdam) to enhance research management and commercialization capacities in the area of 2.5/3D AI-chiplet architectures. The University of Glasgow/IDA plays a crucial role within this project by contributing not only to the advancement of ML/AI-driven VLSI design and reliability but also to strengthening international collaborations and sharing critical technological insights.

March 2024: Glasgow hosted the European Conference on Information Retrieval (ECIR)

Graham McDonald, Craig Macdonald and Iadh Ounis co-chaired the 46th European Conference on Information Retrieval (ECIR 2024, https://www.ecir2024.org) which was held in Glasgow, Scotland, UK, during March 24–28, 2024. The conference was organised by the University of Glasgow, in cooperation with the British Computer Society’s Information Retrieval Specialist Group (BCS IRSG) and with assistance from the Glasgow Convention Bureau. ECIR 2024 was a great success with over 400 in-person attendees, the largest number of in-person attendees of any ECIR so far.

February 2023: The Tony Kent Strix Award – 8th Annual Memorial Lecture

Professor Iadh Ounis presented his award lecture on Thursday 23rd February 2023.

Dr. Ryen White (Glasgow IR Group Alumni) also gave his award presentation.

December 2022:  was awarded the prestigious international 2022 Tony Kent Strix Memorial Award in recognition of his significant contributions to the field of information retrieval research and development.

Professor Ounis is noted for his sustained contributions to advances in information retrieval, his inspirational leadership, commitment to PhD education, research and contributions to R&D through open-source software and information retrieval tools. The highly valued Terrier and PyTerrier platforms have been utilised extensively across the information retrieval community and advanced research significantly. His work on many information retrieval tasks including expert search models, search results diversification, search ranking, recommendation, fake news detection and query performance prediction has furthered the community’s understanding of some of the most fundamental information retrieval questions.

October 2022: Graham McDonald (PI), Jake Lever and Iadh Ounis secured an EPSRC New Horizons award for their project SIEPH: Safe Information Extraction from Patient Histories. The project will develop machine learning methods for safely extracting useful information from patients’ medical records for medical researchers while maintaining patient privacy.

June 2022: A team of students, led by , are the winners of a major international competition to develop next-generation conversational assistants. The GRILL team (grilllab.ai) took first place in Amazon’s Alexa Prize TaskBot Challenge, beating out nine leading research teams worldwide. The competition, launched in June 2021, challenged university students to develop conversational agents that assist people in completing cooking and do-it-yourself home improvement tasks that required multiple steps and complex decisions. 

April 2022: Fani Deligianni (PI) secured an three year (2022-2025) EPSRC New Investigator Award for the project Privacy-Preserved Human Motion Analysis for Healthcare Applications, which will develop artificial intelligence algorithms for human motion analysis in healthcare applications that preserve users' privacy.

November 2020: Dr Jeff Dalton has recieved a prestigious Turing AI Acceleration Fellowship supported by a £20 million government investment (UKRI) to develop smarter, more helpful virtual personal assistants over the next five years. Read more about the award here.