Interview with Vaishak Belle, Chancellor’s Fellow and Reader at the School of Informatics, University of Edinburgh 

Dr Vaishak Belle is a Chancellor’s Fellow and Reader at the School of Informatics, University of Edinburgh. He is an Alan Turing Institute Faculty Fellow, a Royal Society University Research Fellow, and a member of the RSE (Royal Society of Edinburgh) Young Academy of Scotland.

At the University of Edinburgh, he directs a research lab on artificial intelligence, specialising in the unification of logic and machine learning, with a recent emphasis on explainability and ethics. He has given research seminars at academic institutions such as MIT and Oxford, tutorials at AI conferences, and talks at venues such as Ars Electronica and the Samsung AI Forum.

He has co-authored over 70 scientific articles on AI, at venues such as IJCAI, UAI, AAAI, MLJ, AIJ, JAIR, AAMAS, and along with his co-authors, he has won the Microsoft best paper award at UAI, the Machine learning journal best student paper award at ECML-PKDD, and the Machine learning journal best student paper award at ILP. In 2014, he received a silver medal by the Kurt Goedel Society.

Belle has served on the senior program committee/area chair of major AI conferences, co-chaired the ML track at KR, among others, and as PI and CoI secured a grant income of close to 8 million pounds. Recently, he has consulted with major banks on explainable AI and its impact in financial institutions.