UCL Computer Science

⚛️ It’s the end of Quantum Week! In true quantum style, we’re both at UCL and at the UK National Quantum Technologies Workshop, at least until someone takes a measurement! 🐈 💻 Brilliant to see Phasecraft, co-founded by UCL Computer Science’s Toby Cubitt, showcasing how they’re turning quantum theory into real-world breakthroughs. With over 3,000 visitors to the event, they have been incredibly busy all day. ⭐ Our Director of Research, Professor Mehrnoosh Sadrzadeh, attended the event with her MSc student Hugo W. and Research & Innovation Comms Manager Michelle McGrath. 👏 Great talks on quantum computing from SEEQC, Oxford Quantum Circuits (OQC) and UCL spinout, Quantum Motion. 💡The UK National Quantum Technologies Showcase 2025, organised by Innovate UK with EPSRC and the UK National Quantum Technologies Programme, is the UK’s biggest quantum event, bringing together researchers, industry, investors and policymakers to turn cutting-edge science into real-world impact. 

Congratulations to our CS students who won the 'How to Change the World' category of the awards of 2025 CEE Education awards! How to Change the World challenges students to apply their learning to real-world global issues linked to the UN Sustainable Development Goals. Working in interdisciplinary teams, they develop innovative ideas assessed by academics and industry partners. Winners of the Change the World category are recognised for designs that: • Advocate for change and raise awareness of key issues • Demonstrate sustainable, scalable impact • Show strong ethical awareness across social, economic and environmental contexts Well done Adwit Hans, Felicia Ong, Ibrahim Gabol, and Zizhou Shi. 🏆 And well done to all UCL Engineering students and staff who were recognised in the awards. 👏 Congratulations also to Dr Chika Nweke, Ph.D., UCL Biochemical Engineering who won the Rae Harbird Staff Award. The award was presented to Chika by Professor Elaine Pimentel. The award is named after Rae Harbird, a dear colleague in CS who passed away in 2023. Rae leaves a considerable legacy, particularly her thoughtful and untiring work for her students and outreach activities. We try to honour through this award. Read more about the awards at the link: https://lnkd.in/ereREi6t UCL Engineering, UCL Centre for Engineering Education #SustainableDevelopment #SDG #awards #outreach #ChangeTheWorld

We're excited to share another interview in our 'Conversations with PhD Researchers' series! Augustine Mavor-Parker talks with Reuben Adams about his fascinating approach to the so-called “noisy TV problem”, his other PhD projects, and his current work constructing reward functions for LLMs. Montezuma’s Revenge was a problem for DeepMind around 2015. While their technique of Deep Q-Learning crushed other Atari games, it completely failed at Montezuma’s Revenge, frequently scoring zero points. Why? Sparse rewards. The agent might have to take hundreds of actions before gaining a single point. One solution is to give the agent an innate curiosity-drive. The hope is that by seeking novelty, it will eventually pick up enough rewards for RL to get going. But there’s an eerily human problem. What if the environment contains a TV? The agent may become fixated on this stream of novel experiences. The more novel the content, the more likely it is to trap a curiosity-driven agent. This is called the noisy TV problem. It’s hard. Augustine tackled a variation of it in his paper “How to Stay Curious While Avoiding Noisy TVs Using Aleatoric Uncertainty Estimation”. Interested to know more? View the full interview here https://lnkd.in/dpwi5avT UCL Computer Science

✨ UCL Computer Science Spotlight Series ✨ Meet Doğukan Eftal Türköz, a recent graduate from our Computer Science conversion Master's. Learn about projects he worked on, inspirational teachers he had, and what his dream day out in London looks like. #uclcsspotlightseries UCL Engineering

Are you a new student who joined UCL this year? We would appreciate your feedback via this survey, as it helps improve the student experience. All responses are anonymous, and students who complete the survey will be automatically entered into a prize draw:   1 x £500 cash 2 x £250 cash 10 x £25 cash Further information and survey link: https://lnkd.in/eXaT--HZ

To mark Black History Month in October 2025 the Computer Science Race Equality Working Group hosted a cross-departmental showcase titled from From Past to Progress 💛 Thank you to everyone who joined us for an evening of reflection and conversation. Our speakers Kananda Eller, Maud M Waret, and Dr Maria-Novella Mercuri reminded us how powerful it is when we bring different stories, histories, and perspectives into the same room. Read more about the event: https://lnkd.in/eeH9EDp3 #BlackHistoryMonth #BlackBrilliance #InclusiveEducation

Check out my interview next week with Claire Asher! I'll be talking about using robots to understand cheetahs 🐆 🤖 UCL Computer Science UCL Robotics Institute UCL

Congratulations to CS research students Anthi Papouli and Dhruv Trehan, who were selected in the 2025/26 cohort of 19 IHE Fellows. We wish you the best and look forward to seeing how the fellowship develops. 👏