AI specialist from London appointed to the University of Bayreuth
Prof. Dr. Aldo Faisal has held the professorship for Digital Health with a focus on Data Science in the Life Sciences since 1 January 2022.
"Germany is the land of opportunity for researchers and scientists, and this is often not recognised in the country itself," says Prof. Dr. Aldo Faisal. "I find the science location exciting: with the faculty in Kulmbach and the plans we have for Artificial & Human Intelligence, really new things can be created. There is a spirit at the University of Bayreuth that sees the possibilities of artificial intelligence in every faculty of the university and thus makes great steps possible."
Prof. Dr. Aldo Faisal with Julia Gross at the German Embassy in London.
Deutsche Botschaft London
Faisal has experience in building new, internationally renowned research structures: he comes from the Faculty of Engineering at Imperial College in London. There he is Professor of AI & Neuroscience and Director of the £20M Centre in AI for Healthcare. In his own two departments, Faisal leads the Brain & Behaviour Lab, focusing on artificial intelligence and neurotechnology, and the Behaviour Analytics Lab at the Data Science Institute, both with the aim of creating AI for the benefit of patients and for the benefit of healthy ones. He will also set up his own labs in Bayreuth and Kulmbach.
In his work, Faisal combines cross-disciplinary computer-based and natural science approaches to investigate how humans and machines can learn and control goal-directed complex behaviour. In the example of AI Clinician, a decision support system for intensivists treating patients with sepsis, an AI system learned optimal personalised therapies from hundreds of thousands of patient histories that can reduce mortality by up to 8%. The system is currently being installed in four London hospitals.
But Faisal thinks beyond medicine; for example, he and his team have measured the brain waves of a racing driver, tracked his eye movements and his body movements via sensors. This has provided insights into anticipatory behaviour in dangerous driving situations that can be used in AI systems for autonomous driving. Faisal is interested in seeing how we can augment human capabilities through technologies like AI. His experiments with piano players, who learned to use an AI-controlled third robotic thumb and play the piano with eleven fingers, caused a sensation.
Prof. Dr. Aldo Faisal in the new offices in Kulmbach, where he will research and teach on humans and artificial intelligence.
Universität Bayreuth
These are areas in which Faisal will work at the University of Bayreuth:
- AI for Healthcare: learning decision systems in hospitals, telemedicine, AI-assisted home and care health interventions, etc.
- Human Augmentation with a focus on the restoration of mobility and motor skills of the hand or arm after illness, accident or ageing through robotic systems, the support of cognitive skills in the home and on the move (cognitive prosthetics), as well as through robotic-digital support of patients at home and in care facilities.
- Human-AI Interaction with core objectives in the area of Explainable AI and Trusted AI that are essential if AI is to act in medicine and in society as a valuable individual "agent" that supports people and who are to trust AI.
- Foundations of Artificial Intelligence: prioritising Deep Reinforcement Learning, embedded AI, Causal Inference in Machine Learning and knowledge integration and context integration of biomedical and non-biomedical data.