Students win prizes at Poster Competition

Seyed Ali Hosseini and Luke Day, both third year PhD students in the Department of Informatics, won second and third prize respectively in the Faculty of Natural & Mathematical Sciences' annual poster competition.

Each year the faculty of Natural & Mathematical Sciences hosts a poster competition for all third year PhD students to showcase their research. This year there were a record number of posters on display, highlighting the broad range of research taking place across the Faculty.

The title of Seyed Ali Hosseini’s poster is “Economising on what you say based on knowing what others know”. Ali describes his work: “We humans engage in dialogues in our day-to-day lives. This can be in the form of negotiating a deal with a second-hand car dealer, persuading your son to do his homework before playing video games, formal debates about moral issues à la Moral Maze on BBC Radio 4, … In all these dialogues, we rely on various techniques to reduce the amount of information we exchange in order to make our dialogues focused, efficient and altogether natural. Recent advancements in Artificial Intelligence have led to the development of reasoning and communication models that are based on argumentation. Although these models are closer to the way humans communicate and reason than traditional ones, they still do not capture the economy and efficiency of human dialogues. In this study, we bring these models closer to humans’ approach of conducting argumentation, focussing on economy and efficiency, by proposing a system in which computational agents engage in efficient dialogues. In realising the above goal, different concepts and techniques need to be formalised, such as the structure of natural arguments and formal dialogues, as well as those that are indirectly related, such as estimating the knowledge of others, discovering communities, and identifying the knowledge shared among their members.” See Ali’s poster here. 

Luke Day’s poster, “Analysis of RNA Energy Folding Landscapes”, describes a published study on the accessibility of microRNA (miRNA) binding sites to metastable messenger RNA (mRNA) secondary structures close to minimum free energy conformations in the context of Single Nucleotide Polymorphisms (SNPs) and mRNA concentration levels. The motivation for this work was to determine if features of miRNA bindings to metastable conformations could provide additional information supporting the differences in expression levels of two sequences defined by a SNP. You can download Luke’s poster here.

For further information please contact Seyed Ali Hosseini (ali.hosseini@kcl.ac.uk) or Luke Day (luke.day@kcl.ac.uk).