Partner Summit

Every year, the CDT hosts a gathering for our partners (representing industrial, public sector, and non-profit organisations) to meet with our students and get the opportunity to see some of the in-progress research they are conducting in their PhDs.

The 2025 Partner Summit was jointly organised by our CDT and the CDT in Natural Language Processing (funded in 2019), whose students are further along in their research.

The 2025 summit welcomed over 40 external representatives and kicked off with a public keynote AI and Society: Cultivating Responsible Innovation for Our Future by Ofcom’s Director of Online Safety, Dr Fred Langford followed by panel discussion with NatWest’s Head of AI Hub, Emma Wong and Head of the Scottish AI Alliance, Steph Wright.

The rest of the day featured PhD student presentations across varied formats – poster sessions, panels, fireside chats, and formal talks. A small selection of topics include:

• Bias and Multilingualism in Language Technologies
• Compose and Conquer: Out-of-Distribution Generalization in Humans and AI
• The Sparse Frontier: Sparse Attention Trade-offs in Transformer LLMs

Beyond the morning’s public session that featured external partners of the CDTs, partners also participated in presentations and panels, including JaguarLandRover, G-Research, Cohere, and Historic Environment Scotland.  They also provide feedback on their engagement with the CDT/School thus far and shared suggestions and ideas which we are implementing in 2025/2026.

The next Partners Summit will be in June 2026, and we’re already planning ahead to build on the experiences of our first year!

Image credits: Chris Scott