Professor of Human Machine Intelligence brings AI expertise to digital aviation

Professor Weisi Guo (above) joined Cranfield University’s Centre for Autonomous and Cyber-Physical Systems from the University of Warwick.

Professor Guo will play a key role in the design, development and work of the university’s new £67 million Digital Aviation Research and Technology Centre (DARTeC), due to open in 2020. He sees the interaction between data and humans and the trust placed in that relationship, as key to establishing an autonomous and digitally enhanced future.

Professor Antonios Tsourdos, Head of the Centre for Autonomous and Cyber-Physical Systems, said: “I am very happy to have welcomed Weisi onto our team. As a university, we are fast-developing our capabilities in the area of human-machine learning."

Commenting on his appointment, Professor Guo said: “I’m delighted to be joining the team at Cranfield. Society is at a crossroads of wanting to increase interactions through new information networks, but without compromising our safety both in cyber and the physical domains.

“At the heart of my research is the challenge of using data science, including explainable machine learning, to discover and model relationships between our virtual and physical systems.  The need to better understand how traditional human knowledge and artificial intelligence can work together is more important than ever.”

After studying for a combined Bachelor and Master’s degree and PhD at Cambridge University, Professor Guo began his career as a radio engineer, before joining the University of Sheffield as a research associate, later progressing to his faculty role at Warwick.

He is a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy and the Alan Turing Institute, a senior member of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) and a Fellow of the Royal Statistical Society. In 2015 he received the IET’s Innovation Award for his work.