The Data science And Intelligent Systems (DAIS) Research Group are a group of academics, researchers and PhD students within the Division of Computing Science and Mathematics at the University of Stirling. We are interested in the development, theory, and application of data-driven methods to understand, model and optimise the world.
Data is all around us, and humanity generates over 2 quintillion bytes (that’s a 2 followed by 18 zeroes) of new data every day. Cutting-edge techniques are able to make sense of this data and explore it for the greater good. DAIS researchers have embraced data to: inform healthcare decisions through modern statistical analysis; assist those with impairments communicate, using machine learning algorithms to spot c at the momenomplex patterns in sound and brain patterns; predict outcomes of complex systems, with intelligent models that explain their decisions so that they can be trusted; perceive the world through computer vision to assist with sight loss and monitor our environment from space; schedule planes to arrive on time and design buildings to be more comfortable and energy efficient through advanced optimisation methods; and understand how all these techniques work and fit together using novel visualisations methods. These are just some of the areas where our group is advancing knowledge.
We are always happy to talk to companies and other academics about how we might work together. In the first instance please contact Dr Sandy Brownlee (alexander.brownlee@stir.ac.uk), DAIS group leader.
Dr Hazrat Ali has had several publications recentlym and an invited talk: A paper titled ‘Foundation Models in Biomedical Imaging: Turning Hype into Reality’ published in the prestigious Nature Biomedical Engineering. The paper presents REAL-FM framework for assessment of foundation models in biomedical imaging. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41551-026-01762-z A paper presentation ‘Fixing the Background: Segmentation-Guided Feature Refinement for
Congratulations to Dr Giancarlo Catalano on passing his viva! His thesis is entitled Explaining solutions for decision support via Partial Solutions. Thanks are due to BT Group and The Data Lab – Innovation Centre for funding the project and hugely valuable input beyond that.
Dr Hazrat Ali is organising a special session at the International Conference on AI in Healthcare, which takes place at Imperial College London on 26-29 August 2026. More details about the session can be found at https://aiih.cc/special-session-multimodal-generative-ai-in-healthcare/ .
The PHAWM project, with Stirling’s contribution coming from Leonardo Bezerra, Sandy Brownlee, and Penny Johnston, reached a major milestone this week with the launch of the PHAWM workbench and methology for paticipatory auditing of AI systems. Penny in particular has put in a huge amount of work to the workbench implementation. This has been broadly