Black box AI and Women in Science award: News from the College

Credit: David Poultney - Here's a batch of fresh news and announcements from across Imperial. From efforts to demystify how neural networks operate , to an award supporting female researchers , here is some quick-read news from across the College. Demystifying black box AI. Neural networks - learning machines that recognise patterns in data - have revolutionised the way we analyse large datasets. However, although these networks have enjoyed rapid success, the way they work can be mysterious, even to those who built them - a major obstacle to their interpretability and trust in AI. Now, a team led Professor Danilo Mandic has uncovered a way to demystify the mechanisms that underpin convolutional neural networks. This is achieved through matched filtering - a tool that finds patterns in noisy data that has a physically meaningful interpretation.