SPS SPTM TC Webinar: Machine Learning Methods for Trustworthy Autonomous Systems
Date: 14-August-2025
Time: 08:30 AM ET (New York Time)
Presenter: Dr. Lyudmila Mihaylova
Abstract
There is a fast development of different machine learning methods – for object classification, tracking, action recognition and other tasks with multiple types of data – from images and videos to data from wireless sensor networks. Autonomous image and video analytics face a number of challenges due to the huge volumes of data that sensors provide, the changeable environmental conditions and other factors. However, it is important to know when the methods work well and when they are not reliable, e.g. how much could we trust the obtained results? How could we characterize trust is a related question. How could we quantify the impact of uncertainties on the developed solutions? This talk will discuss current trends in the area of machine learning and show results for image and video analytics for autonomous systems.
Recent advance of data-driven and model-based approached have led to increasing the level of autonomy in a number of areas. Gaussian Process methods are one type of Machine Learning methods that have proven their power to solve for such tasks for autonomous systems. This talk will present recent results on tracking, automated video analytics especially with Gaussian process methods and other methods, with their pros and cons. Some of these results are part of Digital twins, recently developed new tools that incorporate machine learning and artificial intelligence methods. The presenter will also discuss the big potential of Digital Twins, the opportunities and challenges that they bring. Other related applications will be discussed such and autonomous fire detection and robot pipe networks inspection.
Biography
Lyudmila Mihaylova (SM IEEE) received the Ph.D. degree in systems and control engineering from the Technical University of Sofia, Sofia, Bulgaria, in 1996.
She is currently a Professor of Signal Processing and Control in the School of Electrical and Electronic Engineering at the University of Sheffield, Sheffield, United Kingdom. With a wide experience on developing methods for knowledge extraction from different data and introducing autonomy, including for uncrewed aerial vehicles (UAVs), human-robot interactions, Dr. L. Mihaylova is leading a strong team with activities part of the School of Electrical and Electronic Engineering (SoEEE) and Sheffield Robotics. Her research interests are in the areas of trustworthy autonomous systems with applications to UAVs, smart cities, sensor networks, and others. She has expertise in the areas of machine learning, intelligent sensing and sensor data fusion.
She won the Tammy Blair best award from the International Conference of Information Fusion 2017, best paper awards from the IEEE DESSERT’2019, 17th IEEE SPA’2013 Conference and IEEE Sensor Data Fusion Workshop, 2013. She has published more than 200 scientific papers in peer reviewed international journals such as IEEE Transactions on Aerospace and Electronic Systems, IEEE Transactions on Signal Processing, Automatica, IEEE Transactions on Industrial informatics and in a number of conferences. She has more than 6200 citations on google scholar. She is an Associate Editor-in-Chief for the IEEE Transactions on Aerospace and Electronic Systems, Senior Editor for the Target Tracking and Multi-sensor data Fusion area and a Subject Area Editor for the Elsevier Signal Processing Journal. She was a guest Editor for a special issue for Frontiers of Robotics and AI (2022-2023).
Dr. Mihaylova is also on the Board of Directors of the International Society of Information Fusion (ISIF) and was the ISIF President in the period 2016–2018 and has given a number of talks and tutorials, including NATO SET- 262 AI 2018 (Hungary), Fusion 2017 (Xi’an, China), plenary talks for the IEEE Sensor Data Fusion 2015 (Germany), invited talks at IPAMI Traffic Workshop 2016 (USA) and others. She is a member of the organizing committee of the International Conference of Information Fusion2025, 2022, 2021, IEEE MFI’ 2021, UKCI’ 2021 and vice-chair of the UKCI 2022. She was the general vice-chair for the International Conference on Information Fusion 2018 (Cambridge, UK), of the IET Data Fusion & Target Tracking 2014 and 2012 Conferences, publications chair for ICASSP 2019 (Brighton, UK) and others.
