Bio and CV

Short Bio

Prof. Sarvapali Ramchurn is a Professor of Artificial Intelligence, Turing Fellow, and Fellow of the Institution of Engineering and Technology. He is the CEO of Reponsible AI UK, Director of the UKRI Trustworthy Autonomous Systems hub. He is also a Co-CEO of Empati Ltd, an AI startup working on decentralised green hydrogen technologies. His research is about the design of Responsible Artificial Intelligence for socio-technical applications including energy systems and disaster management. His research involves applying techniques from Machine Learning, HCI, and Game Theory.   He has won multiple best paper awards for his research and  is a winner of the AXA Research Fund Award (2018) for his work on Responsible Artificial Intelligence. He has pioneered the development of AI-based disaster response systems using multi-UAV systems, AI-driven large-scale battery management for smart grids, and an AI bot that outperformed more than 5M human players (top 0.7%) in the English Premier League Fantasy Football Tournament. His papers have been cited more than 8500 times (according to Google scholar). He is originally from Mauritius and is passionate about AI for Social Good and Environmental Sustainability.

CV

 Education and Appointments

2020 – Director of the UKRI Trustworthy Autonomous Systems Hub (£11.7m)

  • Member of the IPCO Technology Advisory Panel
  • Co-CEO Empati Limited
  • Co-Director Shell-Southampton Centre for Maritime Futures

2019 – Turing Fellow – The Alan Turing Institute

  • Flexible Autonomy for Responsible Human Agent Collectives

2018 – Professor of Artificial Intelligence and Chief Scientist (North Star Solar Ltd)

  • Co-I on the BRECCIA GCRF Project on Food and Water Security (£4M)
  • PI on the REACH Project (AXA Research Fund)
  • Co-I on the EPSRC Platform Grant on Wearable Computing at Southampton

2017 – Associate Professor (Part-Time) and Chief Scientist North Star Solar Ltd

  • Leading the development of an AI platform for Smart Energy Systems and Assisted Living
  • Developing the next generation of Autonomous IoT-based services
  • AXA Research Award for work on Responsible AI (250K Euros)

2015 – Associate Professor (University of Southampton)

  • Research into Human-Agent Collectives
  • Teaching Data Management
  • ECS Placements Tutor
  • Co-I on the A-IoT project (£800K) funded by EPSRC
  • Co-I on the CharIoT project (£300K) funded by EPSRC
  • Co-I on the SEACORES project (£1.2M) funded by InnovateUK

2009 – 2015  Roberts Fellow (University of Southampton)

  • Co-I on the EPSRC funded ORCHID Programme (£5M)
  • Co-I on the EPSRC-funded ICIF project (£350K / £3.5M)
  • PI on the EPSRC-funded KTS (£55K) with BAE Systems (2014-2015)
  • PI on the EPSRC-funded KTS (£50K) with Hampshire County Council (2011-2012).
  • Supervising 6 PhD students
  • Leading work on energy, disaster response, and crowdsourcing applications.

2005-2009 – Senior Research Fellow – University of Southampton

2001-2004 – PhD in Multi-Agent Systems – University of Southampton 

  • Supervisors: Prof. Nicholas R. Jennings and Prof. Carles Sierra.
  • Examiners: Han La Poutre and Michael Luck.

1998 – 2001 – BEng (Hons.) in Information Systems Engineering – Imperial College London

  • First Class First.
  • Governor’s medal winner.

Awards

  • Winner of the AXA Research Fund Award for my work on Responsible AI (2018)
  • Honourable mention of the IJCAI-JAIR Award (2016)
  • Winner of the Best Paper on the Innovative Applications Track at AAMAS 2015
  • Winner of the best student paper award (with my student Muddasser Alam) at AAMAS 2013.
  • Runner up of the TREC 2012 (Text Retrieval Conference) Crowdsourcing challenge (AUC metric).
  • Nominated for the best paper award at AAMAS 2011 (Applications) for work on agent-based optimisation for demand-side management.
  • Winner of the best paper award at AAMAS 2010 for work on agent-based energy storage work on energy exchange in rural communities (out of 685 papers submitted).
  • Winner of the Infrastructure Competition of the RoboCupRescue league at RoboCup 2007  – RoboCup is an international competition held every year and attracts more than a thousand participants from more than 30 different countries.
  • Winner of the International Prisoner’s Dilemma Competition (Comp 2) at the IEEE Symposium on Computational Intelligence and Games 2005)
  • Winner of the International Prisoner’s Dilemma competition at the Congress on Evolutionary Computing (CEC 2004) – we designed the first strategy to beat Tit-For-Tat in 20 years since the original Axelrod experiment.
  • PhD studentship for 3 years from University of Southampton.
  • Governor’s medal award (first class first) for being the top student across the BEng Information
  • Mauritius National Science Side Scholarship Winner (4th).

Funding (bold still active)

  • 2018 – £200K (PI) AXA Research Fund Award for Responsible AI
  • 2018  – £4M (Co-I) GCRF BReCCIA project on Capacity Building for Food and Water Security in Sub-Saharan Africa
  • 2017 – £2M (Co-I) EPSRC Platform on Wearable Computing for Smart Cities
  • 2017 – £75K (PI) DSA Human-UAV Teaming
  • 2016 – £40K (PI) EPSRC IAA (Southampton) – CharIoT 2.0
  • 2016 – £800K (Co-I) A-IoT: Future Interactions with the Autonomous Internet of Things.
  • 2015 – £1.2M (Co-I) InnovateUK – SEACORES: energy management on marine platforms.
  • 2015 – £47K (PI) Newton Fund – International Disaster Management Workshop.
  • 2014 – £200K  (Co-I) EPSRC- CharIot Project on Internet of things for Charitable Energy Advisors.
  • 2014 – £35K (PI) ASUR Phase 1 Project with BAE Systems.
  • 2014 – £55K – (PI) EPSRC- Knowledge Transfer Secondment with BAE Systems Maritime systems
  • 2013 – £1.2M (Co-I) EPSRC – Distributed Sensing and Flexible Autonomy (MOSAIC)
  • 2012 – £350K – (Co-I) EPSRC – International Centre for Interdependent Infrastructures.
  • 2011 – £20K – (Co-I) Southampton Adventures in Research Grant.
  • 2011 – £5M – (Co-I) EPSRC Programme Grant (ORCHID)
  • 2011 – £50K – (PI) EPSRC Knowledge transfer secondment with Hampshire County Council.
  • 2003 – £3K – EU Research Mobility Grant with IIIA, Spain.

Academic and Professional Activities

PhD Students and Post Docs Supervised, Current and Past (7):

  • Kathryn Macarthur (With Prof. Nick Jennings), 2008-2011
  • Mudasser Alam (with Dr. Alex Rogers), 2009-2014
  • Truong Cuong (with Dr. Enrico Costanza), 2010-2014
  • Sam Miller (with Dr. Alex Rogers), 2010-2014
  • Chris Baker (with Prof. Nick Jennings), 2012-2016
  • Elliot Salisbury (with Dr. Sebastian Stein), 2013-2017
  • James Holyhead (with Prof. Alex Rogers), 2013-2017
  • Alper Alan Turan (with Dr. Enrico Costanza), 2012-2016
  • Manolis Rigas (with Dr. Nick Bassilides), 2012-2018
  • Olabambo Oluwasuji (with Dr. Enrico Gerding) 2015-
  • Jorge Palominos (With Dr. Long Tran Tanh) 2017-
  • Shaun Lamb (with Prof. Tim Norman) 2018-
  • Luca Capezutto (with Dr. Danesh Tarapore) 2018-
  • Ryan Beal (with Prof. Tim Norman) 2018-
  • Ayodeji Abioye (with Dr. Stephen Prior) 2017-
  • Andre Ortega Alban (with Dr. Geoff Merrett) 2017-
  • Pedro Garcia (with Enrico Costanza) 2014-2017
  • Jhim Verhame  (with Enrico Costanza) 2014-2018
  • Sherry Yang 2014
  • Dengji Zhao 2014-2017

Reviewer for:

  • EPSRC
  • AAMAS, AAAI, IJCAI, ECAI, ACM E-Energy
  • Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research (JAIR) – Highly rated AI Journal.
  • Artificial Intelligence Journal (AIJ) – the top AI Journal.
  • Constraints
  • Computational Intelligence
  • IEEE Intelligent Systems
  • International Journal of Human-Computer Studies
  • Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems Journal – the top Agents Research Journal

 

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