EIP: Teaching Team

Professor Michael Rovatsos

Course Organiser and Instructor

I have been a academic teaching and research staff member of the School of Informatics since 2004, and have taught a range of AI courses to many undergraduate and postgraduate students. In 2018, the amazing opportunity of leading the University's brand-new Bayes Centre came up, and my six years as its Director gave me lots of opportunities to work with tech start-ups in the context of the many incubation and acceleration programmes we ran, building on long-standing activities the School of Informatics had initiated many years before in collaboration with MIT and Stanford.

I am really excited to teach EIP this year for the first time. Apart from the fact that I find teaching to be one of the most rewarding experiences in my professional career, it will allow me to put these experiences to use, and also my own experience of working in a tech startup during the Dotcom bubble in the early 2000s. Much has changed since, of course, but the current AI hype is quite similar to what we experienced then, and one can learn a lot from past failures. 

When I don't teach, I conduct research in AI, something I have done for the past 25 years. My main area is multi-agent systems and distributed AI, but I have also focused a lot on ethical and responsible AI for the last ten years, and I have worked with social scientists and people from the arts and humanities since the early days of my PhD. Currently, I am trying to understand what Generative AI means for the design of future AI 'agents' and collective human-AI intelligence. You can find out more about what I do on my University and LinkedIn profiles.

I am Greek and grew up mostly in Germany before moving to Scotland many years ago - the opportunity to work with people from so many different backgrounds is one of the things I find most enjoyable about my job. 

Gleb Orlov

Lab Demonstrator

I am a Master’s student in AI. In the summer of 2024, I graduated with a degree in AI and CS from The University of Edinburgh. In my final undergraduate year, I focused on explainable AI (XAI) techniques and their application to time series data. Currently, my research interests lie in using XAI for real-time decision-making in the financial domain, specifically in portfolio optimisation.

Last year, I was part of the teaching team for the EIP course during its first iteration. This experience gave me insight into the challenges and questions students might encounter during the course. Outside of academia, I enjoy working on entrepreneurial projects. Currently, I am working with the School of Informatics’ entrepreneurship trainer on projects where my roles involve software development as well as business strategy development.

Originally from Lithuania, I moved to Scotland nearly nine years ago and have been living in Edinburgh for the past four years.

Claire Barale 

Coursework Marker

I am a final year PhD candidate in NLP. My research focuses on legal NLP, utilising the framework provided by legal texts to explore knowledge integration, the capabilities of LLMs, and how to enhance their reasoning capabilities.

I have been teaching every year since my PhD started and have taken various roles for Data Science and NLP courses. Many years ago, I studied economics and finance and was a student in courses similar to this one. They are an excellent opportunity to learn practical concepts and skills beyond purely theoretical knowledge.

I am from Nice, France, and I moved to Scotland three years ago when starting the PhD program.