Oxford e-Research Centre

Rethinking Robotics: How intelligent does a robot really need to be?

For Associate Professor Daniele De Martini, the answer is increasingly: less than we think — provided its environment is intelligent enough.

Daniele De Martini is Associate Professor in Mobile Robotics at the Oxford Robotics Institute and Oxford e-Research Centre at the University of Oxford, where he co-leads the Mobile Robotics Group with Professor Paul Newman. His research spans robotics and artificial intelligence, focusing on perception, localisation, mapping, and decision-making for autonomous systems. In recent years, his work has taken a distinctive direction, challenging long-held assumptions about where intelligence in robotic systems should reside.

Read our article to find out more about Daniele's work in this exciting field:

https://oerc.ox.ac.uk/news/rethinking-robotics-from-intelligent-machines-to-intelligent-environments

Introducing an Automated System to Evaluate Energy Demand Response Programmes.

At the 28th Conference and Exhibition on Electricity Distribution (CIRED) in Geneva, one of the world's leading conferences in the energy sector, DPhil student Katya Soegiharto introduced a new automated framework to help energy planners evaluate demand response programmes in diverse national contexts.

Her work focuses on enabling countries to make better use of existing research to develop flexible and low-cost demand-side solutions, particularly in places that have limited resources for analysing and designing these programmes.

https://oerc.ox.ac.uk/news/introducing-an-automated-system-to-evaluate-energy-demand-response-programmes/

Professor Janet B. Pierrehumbert is an experimental and computational linguist known for her research on prosody and intonation in languages, and her work to unravel the sound structure of English and other languages. She recently took part in a Q&A session for PNAS (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America) https://oerc.ox.ac.uk/news/q-as-with-janet-b-pierrehumbert/

Congratulations to Oxford e-Research Centre DPhil student Erin Canning, who has been awarded the ASIS&T 2025 Doctoral Dissertation Proposal Scholarship Award

The award aims to foster research in information science by recognising the year’s most outstanding doctoral dissertation proposal while encouraging and assisting doctoral students in the field with their dissertation research.

Find out more: https://eng.ox.ac.uk/news/oxford-e-research-centre-dphil-student-erin-canning-awarded-the-asist-2025-doctoral-dissertation-proposal-scholarship-award/

Like humans, ChatGPT favours examples and ‘memories’ – not rules – to generate language.

A new study led by researchers at the University of Oxford and the Allen Institute for AI (Ai2) has found that large language models (LLMs) – the AI systems behind chatbots like ChatGPT – generalize language patterns in a surprisingly human-like way: through analogy, rather than strict grammatical rules

https://eng.ox.ac.uk/news/like-humans-chatgpt-favours-examples-and-memories/

Turning proteins into crystals & studying them with X-rays helps scientists understand diseases & develop medicines. X-ray absorption correction for crystallography is used to correct errors. Yishun Lu aims to enhance this process with a method called ray tracing

https://oerc.ox.ac.uk/news/seeing-inside-proteins/

CHERI, a technology developed in the UK, offers the promise of a future where digital systems are less prone to malware and hackers. A recently completed project with digital security company Cyberhive explored the application of CHERI to real-world use cases

https://oerc.ox.ac.uk/news/oxford-e-research-centre-project-shows-the-way-to-a-secure-digital-future/

Welcome to the new University of Oxford Department of Engineering Science Women in Engineering Committee for 2025.

The Department's Women in Engineering Network was set up in 2012 to provide a support network for women in the department and facilitate their professional development. Each year hustings are held for positions on the WiE Committee, which plans and organises activities and initiatives during the subsequent year such as career talks, study sessions and wellness walks. They also aim to empower more girls to pursue engineering through outreach initiatives and collaborations.

Women in Engineering Senior Faculty Advisor Professor Susanna-Assunta Sansone says, "With appreciation for the past and excitement for the future, I want to thank our outgoing members for their service and extend a warm welcome to our new WiE Committee. Do not forget we welcome people of all genders to join our inclusive events!"



https://eng.ox.ac.uk/news/welcome-to-our-new-women-in-engineering-committee/

Oxford e-Research Centre is delighted to have played its part in the creation of Linked Art 1.0, which has been officially released this week. The Linked Art 1.0 specifications are a major milestone providing the cultural heritage sector with a standard method to share and connect information about their collections and the items’ historical contexts.

Already adopted by major organisations across the museum sector, Linked Art offers a robust and proven framework, built on top of existing international standards, for representing complex relationships between artworks, archives, reference material, artists, places, organisations, concepts and events such as exhibitions or provenance information.

https://oerc.ox.ac.uk/news/oxford-e-research-centre-celebrates-the-release-of-linked-art/

Traditional exhibition catalogues are extremely informative documents, but may be daunting, perhaps even intimidating, both to those who read them and those new to writing them. The Enriching Exhibition Stories project is helping museums more easily create a wider range of digital resources for their exhibitions.

The EES2 project builds upon a successful international collaboration (the Enriching Exhibition Scholarship project) between leading researchers at the Oxford e-Research Centre, University of Oxford, the University of Edinburgh, and Yale University in the US, alongside the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford and the Yale Center for British Art.

https://oerc.ox.ac.uk/news/enriching-exhibition-stories-with-the-quire-linked-art-extension/

Jupyter Notebooks and AI Chatbots are increasingly popular in scientific research and data analysis, however allocating expensive GPU resources is challenging due to unpredictable usage patterns. A team of Researchers presented work on a novel solution to this challenge at FOSDEM 2025 in Brussels.

The talk was entitled “Optimizing Resource Utilization for Interactive GPU Workloads with Container Checkpointing”

Oxford e-Research Centre DPhil student Radostin Stoyanov delivered the talk, alongside colleague Viktória Spišaková (PhD student at the Faculty of Informatics at Masaryk University, and IT architect at centre the CERIT-SC). Adrian Reber (Senior Principal Software Engineer at Red Hat) contributed to the research.

https://oerc.ox.ac.uk/news/optimizing-resource-utilization-for-interactive-gpu-workloads-with-transparent-container-checkpointing/

The International Conference on AI and Musical Creativity was held in Oxford from 9th to 11th September. As well as an exciting academic programme, the conference featured three evenings of live concerts – “Collisions” in the Leonard Wolfson Auditorium, “Machine Self” in the Denis Arnold Hall in Oxford’s Music Faculty, and a “Club Night” in the Common Ground community arts space. Find out more:
The International Conference on AI and Musical Creativity was held in Oxford from 9th to 11th September. As well as an exciting academic programme, the conference featured three evenings of live concerts – “Collisions” in the Leonard Wolfson Auditorium, “Machine Self” in the Denis Arnold Hall in Oxford’s Music Faculty, and a “Club Night” in the Common Ground community arts space. Find out more:

https://oerc.ox.ac.uk/news/international-ai-and-musical-creativity-conference-held-in-oxford/