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. 

Teaching Support Staff 

Details will appear here once new course staff is appointed to relevant roles.