- Date(s)
- July 3, 2025
- Location
- Riddle Hall (Lecture Room 1) Queen¡¯s University Belfast 185 Stranmillis Rd, Belfast BT9 5EE
- Time
- 09:30 - 17:00
Artificial Intelligence (AI) is transforming the biosciences, offering powerful tools to uncover complex biological patterns, accelerate discovery, and drive innovation in healthcare, agriculture, and biotechnology. From understanding molecular mechanisms and disease progression to optimising diagnostics and drug development, AI is becoming an indispensable partner in bioscience research and application.
This Workshop brings together researchers and innovators to explore how AI can accelerate scientific discovery and address pressing challenges in health, antimicrobial resistance, and nutrition. It is part of the Northern Ireland Landscape Partnership in AI for Bioscience (NILAB), a BBSRC-funded doctoral training programme dedicated to advancing AI-bioscience research and talent development, with support from Centre for Sustainable and Intelligence Computing (CISC). It aims to:
- Share recent advances and research challenges at the intersection of AI and the biosciences.
- Foster academic and industrial collaborations in the form of PhD supervision, student placements, guest lectures, and joint research initiatives.
- Provide inputs from academic and industrial communities to help shape the vision and scope of the NILAB Programme.
Contacts: Prof Hui Wang (Director of NILAB) at nilab@qub.ac.uk
Workshop Programme
Title: AI Methods in Agriculture and Climate: Advances and Current Trends
Speaker: Prof. Georgios Leontidis, University of Aberdeen
Biography: Prof. Leontidis is Deputy Director of the £11M SUSTAIN CDT and Professor of Machine Learning at Aberdeen, leading university-wide AI strategy. He directs multiple major projects, including EPSRC and ESA initiatives, and focuses on self-supervised learning and its applications in agri-food, environment, and energy. He is an editor and area chair for top AI venues (ICLR, NeurIPS, TMLR), a BMVC chair, and a member of ELLIS and Scotland’s Beyond Net Zero group.
Title: AI for Medicine (tentative)
Speaker: Prof. Pietro Liò, University of Cambridge
Biography: Prof. Liò is Professor of Computational Biology at Cambridge and a key member of the Cambridge Centre for AI in Medicine. He holds PhDs in Complex Systems and Theoretical Genetics and is a Fellow and Council Member of Clare Hall, as well as a member of ELLIS and Academia Europaea.
His research combines AI and computational biology to tackle disease complexity and support personalised medicine. He focuses on Graph Neural Networks, integrating multi-omics and mechanistic models, medical digital twins, and interpretable AI. His work spans predictive modelling, explainability, and decision support systems that increase individual and societal health awareness.
Title: Learning Meta-Causal Worlds with Curious Agents
Speaker: Dr. Mengyue Yang, University of Bristol
Biography: Dr. Yang is Lecturer in AI at Bristol and a recognised Rising Star in AI (2024). Her research spans causality, reinforcement learning, and world modelling. She earned her PhD from UCL and is active in interdisciplinary research and academic community building.
Title: Digital Pathology & Artificial Intelligence – Clinical Applications
Speaker: Prof. Manuel Salto-Tellez, Queen’s University Belfast
Biography: Prof. Salto-Tellez is Chair of Molecular Pathology at QUB and leads the Precision Medicine Centre of Excellence. He also holds roles at the ICR and Royal Marsden. With over 330 publications and £100M in grant funding, he is a leading figure in translational and digital pathology. His work focuses on integrating phenotype and genotype for biomarker discovery in cancer.
Title: Chemoproteomics in Drug Discovery – Opportunities for AI?
Speaker: Prof. Ben Collins, Queen’s University Belfast
Biography: Prof. Collins leads the NI Centre of Excellence for Chemoproteomics and co-directs QUB’s proteomics platform. Formerly at ETH Zurich, his work includes DIA-MS development, protein interaction networks, and applications in immunity, cancer, and drug discovery. He received the HUPO Discovery in Proteomic Sciences Award in 2020.
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