Program

2026 PhD Symposium Programme

Date: Wednesday 15 April 2026

Location: Wilfred Brown Building, Room WLFB 207/208

Symposium schedule

• 09:00 – 09:30: Tea & Coffee
• 09:30 – 09:35: Welcome & PhD Symposium overview — Dr. Matloob Khushi, Brunel University of London
• 09:35 – 09:45: PGR Introduction — Professor Allan Tucker, Brunel University of London
• 09:45 – 10:45: Session 1, Chair: Dr. Matloob Khushi
  • Haobin Cao: Robust Learning with Noisy Labels via Discriminative Transformer-Autoencoder Purification for Industrial Anomaly Detection
  • Han Wu: Bhattacharyya Distance for Byzantine Client Detection in Federated Learning
  • Sophie Chaveli: GitHub Dataset Selection for EEG Experiments
  • Juntao Han: FCMs-DETR: A DEtection TRansformer with Feature Fusion and Novel Penalty Term for Fibre Composite Materials Defect Detection
• 10:45 – 11:00: Short break
• 11:00 – 12:00: Session 2: First-year scholars talks, Chair: Ms. Suzy Zhu
  • Maen Rabie: Empirical Analysis for Robust Clusters
  • Chijindum Okpoechi: Explainability in Football Tactics: LLMs and Argumentation Frameworks
  • Yamama Shakaa: Automating Coursework Evaluation with LLMs
  • Tariq Ateeq: Technology-Driven Portfolio Optimization for Layer-1 Cryptocurrencies: Integrating Development Activity and Openness Metrics
• 12:00 – 13:00: Lunch & Networking
• 13:00 – 14:00: Keynote Talk — Associate Professor Shamith Samarajiwa (Imperial College London): The application of machine/deep learning using epigenomic state alterations to facilitate cancer early detection, subtype classification, and metastasis.
• 14:00 – 15:00: Session 3, Chair: Dr Monica Pereira
  • Areej Athama: Wireless Single-Camera Markerless Motion Capture System for Healthcare Applications
  • Venkatasubramaniam Gopal: AEO, GEO, and Agentic Selection: Representation Lift and Narrative Sensitivity in Generative Ranking
  • Traecy Elezi: A Co-Simulation Architecture for Advancing Safety Evaluation in Connected Automated Vehicles
  • Suzy Zhu: Addressing Fairness and Transparency in Dynamic AI Modelling
• 15:00 – 15:15: Short Break
• 15:15 – 16:15: Session 4, Chair: Dr. Armin Kashefi
  • Foluso Oyelakin: Dynamic Trust-Latency Routing for Decentralized Identifier Resolution in Distributed Hashing Table Zero Trust Architectures
  • Gerard Doran: Investigating Neural Markers of Emotional Processing in Social Interaction: An EEG Hyperscanning Study
  • Almaha Alrowaili: Dialect Recognition Using Machine Learning on Arabic Dialect - User Experience and Technology Acceptance of AI in Saudi Customer Service
  • Robert Shuttleworth: A Large-Scale Deduplicated Analysis of Smart Contract Evolution Across Solidity Versions
• 16:15 – 16:45: Invited talk — Professor Martin Shepperd: LLM-tools in Research: Fluent Is Not the Same as Correct
• 16:45 – 17:00: Awards and Closing

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