Peter A. Flach

Professor of Artificial Intelligence

Intelligent Systems Laboratory

School of Computer Science

University of Bristol

The Merchant Venturers Building, Room 3.31

Woodland Road

Bristol BS8 1UB, United Kingdom

Phone: +44-117-95-45162

Fax: +44-117-95-45208

School reception: +44-117-33-15201

Email: Peter.Flach@bristol.ac.uk

News | Join our Centre for Doctoral Training in Interactive Artificial Intelligence | Read my AAAI paper on "Performance Evaluation in Machine Learning: The Good, The Bad, The Ugly and The Way Forward" (slides) | Watch me discuss our SubSift reviewer matching system for Communications of the ACM | Check out my books on machine learning and Prolog | Find out about Beta Calibration as presented at AISTATS | Find out about Background Check as presented at ICDM | Find out about Precision-Recall-Gain curves as presented at NIPS | Read my encyclopedia entry on Classifier Calibration |

Short bio

Peter Flach has been Professor of Artificial Intelligence at the University of Bristol since 2003. An internationally leading scholar in the evaluation and improvement of machine learning models using ROC analysis and calibration, he has also published on mining highly structured data, on knowledge-driven and explainable AI, and on the methodology of data science. His books include Simply Logical: Intelligent Reasoning by Example (John Wiley, 1994; interactive online edition, 2022) and Machine Learning: the Art and Science of Algorithms that Make Sense of Data (Cambridge University Press, 2012), the latter of which has, to date, sold over 20,000 copies and has established itself as a key reference in machine learning with translations into Russian, Mandarin and Japanese.

From 2010 until 2020, Prof Flach was Editor-in-Chief of the Machine Learning journal, one of the two top journals in the field that has been published for over 25 years by Kluwer and now Springer. He was Programme Co-Chair of the 1999 International Conference on Inductive Logic Programming, the 2001 European Conference on Machine Learning, the 2009 ACM Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining, and the 2012 European Conference on Machine Learning and Knowledge Discovery in Databases in Bristol. He is a founding board member, previous President and current Vice-President of the European Association for Data Science. He is a Fellow of the Alan Turing Institute for Data Science and Artificial Intelligence, of the European Lab for Learning and Intelligent Systems, and of the European Association for Artificial Intelligence. From April 2019 he directs a UKRI-funded Centre for Doctoral Training in Interactive Artificial Intelligence, which awards PhD scholarships to cohorts of around 10 students annually. He was instrumental in setting up and managing a peta-scale Research Data Storage Facility at Bristol.

Prof Flach has a strong track record of collaborations both in academia and in industry. In Bristol he collaborates with colleagues in Engineering on the SPHERE project, with colleagues in Population Health Science in the MRC-funded Integrated Epidemiology Unit, and others. International collaborations include Monash University, the Polytechnic University of Valencia, the University of Strasbourg, the University of Tartu, and several universities in Brazil. He leads the work package on Network Collaboration in the TAILOR European network of AI excellence centres. Non-academic collaborators include LV=, Thales, the Centre for Sustainable Energy, and over 20 partners in the Interactive AI CDT. Prof Flach is a member of the Advisory Board of XMOS.

Research interests

Classifier evaluation and calibration
Human-centred, knowledge-intensive AI
Foundations of data science
More info on UoB web site
Google Scholar profile
Short CV (August 2023)