Skip to main content
Overview

Professor Noura Al Moubayed

Professor


Affiliations
AffiliationTelephone
Professor in the Department of Computer Science
Associate Fellow in the Institute of Advanced Study
Fellow of the Wolfson Research Institute for Health and Wellbeing

Biography

Noura Al Moubayed is Professor of Machine Learning and AI in the Department of Computer Science at Durham University. She leads research in trustworthy machine learning and AI, developing methods that improve the interpretability, reliability and deployment of AI systems in high-stakes settings. Her work covers explainable AI, multimodal machine learning, natural language processing, AI safety and mechanistic interpretability, with applications in healthcare, materials science and other data-intensive domains.

Her research addresses the full pipeline from methodological development to deployment. Working with the NHS, industry and multidisciplinary scientific teams, she develops AI systems for clinical decision support, healthcare operations, patient safety and foundation models. Her work has informed national policy through the NIHR and HDR UK Winter Pressures Policy Briefing to the Department of Health and Social Care, informed national audit priorities through the Society for Acute Medicine Benchmarking Audit (SAMBA), contributed to national guidance on the safe adoption of AI in oncology through the British Oncology Pharmacy Association (BOPA), and led to the creation of healthcare AI technologies and commercial ventures.

Professor Al Moubayed has secured competitive research funding as Principal Investigator and Computer Science Lead Co-Investigator from EPSRC, NIHR, Innovate UK, UKRI and ERDF. In these roles, she has contributed to collaborative research programmes that have attracted more than £13 million in external funding.

She is the Computer Science Lead for the EPSRC Programme Grant MoSS (Molecular Solid Solutions), EPSRC's flagship grant supporting long-term multidisciplinary research. She leads the AI and machine learning research that underpins data-driven discovery and design of molecular crystalline materials for applications including pharmaceuticals and agrochemicals.

Her research has been published in leading venues across machine learning, artificial intelligence and medical research, including ICLR, ICML, ICCV, ACL, EMNLP, TACL, IEEE TMM, IEEE TNNLS, npj Digital Medicine and BMJ Oncology... Her work has received international media coverage through the BBC, ITV, Time, Wired and New Scientist. In 2019, she was recognised by RE•WORK as one of the UK's Top 20 Women in AI.

Professor Al Moubayed is Chair of the MRC/NIHR Liaison Group and Associate Editor for IEEE Transactions on Emerging Topics in Computational Intelligence, where she received the Outstanding Associate Editor Award in 2024. She directs the MSc in Business Analytics at Durham University, leads Durham University's Machine Learning theme within N8 CIR, and co-led the BioLaySumm Shared Task on Lay Summarisation of Biomedical Research Articles and Radiology Reports at BioNLP (ACL).

Research interests

  • Machine Learning for Healthcare
  • Mechanistic Interpretability
  • Multimodal Machine Learning
  • Bias and Fairness in Machine Learning
  • Explainable Machine Learning
  • Natural Language Processing

Esteem Indicators

  • 2026: Speaker at 'The Hidden Logic Behind Everyday Tech' at Pint of Science 2026:
  • 2026: Speak at Next Frontier in Medical Data 2026:
  • 2026: Speaker at the Royal Society Conference: Women and the future of science:
  • 2025: Organiser and Co-Lead of the BioLaySumm Shared Task at BioNLP Workshop, ACL:
  • 2025: Named in the #NorthInnovationWomen 2025 list by the Northern Health Science Alliance (NHSA):
  • 2024: Named Outstanding Associate Editor for IEEE Transactions on Emerging Topics in Computational Intelligence:
  • 2024: Invited Speaker at the Society for Acute Medicine International Conference:
  • 2024: Speaker and a Panellist at The North East Life Sciences Conference:
  • 2024: Successfully applied to and participated in the NIHR Team Science Camp following a competitive selection process.:
  • 2024 - 2028: Member of the management committee of the European Cooperation in Science and Technology (COST) Action- CA23141 Managing Artificial Intelligence in Archaeology (MAIA).: The MAIA COST Action will create a community of archaeologists, digital archaeologists and computer scientists who will work together to develop a shared understanding of AI applications in archaeology. This will include meetings and workshops bringing together researchers who wish to create or use digital collections and training data. Key to this will be training opportunities in the field for documenting archaeological resources optimised for AI research and Short Term Scientific Missions, where researchers can work across borders to understand how to create comparative and training data.
  • 2023: Best Talk Award at the Society for Acute Medicine International Conference:
  • 2023: Invited speaker at VentureFest North East:
  • 2023: Podcast Interview guest at Make data human podcast:
  • 2023: Invited speaker for a specialist lecture at 64th London International Youth Science Forum, Imperial College:
  • 2023: Panellist at AI and how it fits into Healthcare – Transforming medicine and improving patient outcomes, Organised by Manchester-pro:
  • 2019: Named among the top 30 women in AI in the UK by RE-WORK:
  • 2019: ACM-W Inspire Conference Chair:
  • 2019: Invited Speaker @ Robert Gordon University, Aberdeen:
  • 2019: Organiser of the Computational Neurosciences Special Session: at the 15th Conference on Computability in Europe (CiE 2019)
  • 2019: Program Committee member: International Workshop on Social & Emotion AI for Industry
  • 2019: Invited Speaker: A Celebration of the University’s Diverse Strengths in Research Symposium
  • 2019: Debate Panel member: AI & Society: for better or for worse? 
    Panel of AI and social science experts to discuss the role of artificial intelligence in our society, organised by Durham University and NINE DT
  • 2019: Roundtable Panel Member: Machine Learning and Digital Humanities. The event is supported by the Newcastle University Humanities Research Institute (NUHRI) and Animating Text Newcastle University (ATNU)
  • 2019: Keynote Speaker at NGSchool: Summer School in Bioinformatics & NGS Data Analysis,
  • 2019: Invited Speaker: Unconventional Computation and Natural Computation Conference 2019, Tokyo, Japan
  • 2018: ITV news coverage for the pilot study at Fellside Primary School: Discussing how the robotic head 'Robbie', will be used to help children with autism in the future.
  • 2018: Sponsorship Chair: 29th British Machine Vision Conference
  • 2018: Invited Speaker and Panel Member: 3rd ACM-W UK Inspire Conference
  • 2018: Technical Program Committee Chair: ACM Multi Media Conference
  • 2018: BBC News coverage for the pilot study at Fellside Primary School: Discussing how the robotic head 'Robbie', will be used to help children with autism in the future.
  • 2018: Invited Speaker: Technologies of Crime, Justice and Security Conference
  • 2017: Invited Speaker: Re-Work Deep Learning Summit - London
  • 2017: Area Chair: Women in Machine Learning Workshop (part of NIPS)
  • 2016: Keynote Speaker: NVIDIA's GPU Programming and Machine Learning Workshop 'Deep Learning Applications powered by GPGPUs'
  • Grants Reviewer for the European Commission:
  • Grants Reviewer for EPSRC:

Publications

Chapter in book

  • In-Materio Extreme Learning Machines
    Jones, B. A., Al Moubayed, N., Zeze, D. A., & Groves, C. (2022). In-Materio Extreme Learning Machines. In G. Rudolph, A. V. Kononova, H. Aguirre, P. Kerschke, G. Ochoa, & T. Tušar (Eds.), Parallel Problem Solving from Nature – PPSN XVII (pp. 505-519). Springer Verlag. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-14714-2_35
  • ExBERT: An External Knowledge Enhanced BERT for Natural Language Inference
    Gajbhiye, A., Al Moubayed, N., & Bradley, S. (2021). ExBERT: An External Knowledge Enhanced BERT for Natural Language Inference. In I. Farkaš, P. Masulli, S. Otte, & S. Wermter (Eds.), Artificial Neural Networks and Machine Learning – ICANN 2021 30th International Conference on Artificial Neural Networks, Bratislava, Slovakia, September 14–17, 2021, Proceedings, Part V (pp. 460-472). Springer Verlag. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-86383-8_37
  • Bilinear Fusion of Commonsense Knowledge with Attention-Based NLI Models
    Gajbhiye, A., Winterbottom, T., Al Moubayed, N., & Bradley, S. (2020). Bilinear Fusion of Commonsense Knowledge with Attention-Based NLI Models. In I. Farkaš, P. Masulli, & S. Wermter (Eds.), Artificial Neural Networks and Machine Learning – ICANN 2020. (pp. 633-646). Springer Verlag. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-61609-0_50
  • Identifying Changes in the Cybersecurity Threat Landscape using the LDA-Web Topic Modelling Data Search Engine
    Al Moubayed, N., Wall, D., & McGough, A. (2017). Identifying Changes in the Cybersecurity Threat Landscape using the LDA-Web Topic Modelling Data Search Engine. In T. Tryfonas (Ed.), Human aspects of information security, privacy and trust : 5th International Conference, HAS 2017, held as part of HCI International 2017, Vancouver, BC, Canada, July 9-14, 2017, proceedings. (pp. 287-295). Springer Verlag. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-58460-7_19
  • A Novel Smart Multi-Objective Particle Swarm Optimisation using Decomposition
    Al Moubayed, N., Petrovski, A., & McCall, J. (2010). A Novel Smart Multi-Objective Particle Swarm Optimisation using Decomposition. In Parallel Problem Solving from Nature, PPSN XI (pp. 1-10). Springer Berlin Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-15871-1_1
  • D 2 MOPSO: Multi-Objective Particle Swarm Optimizer Based on Decomposition and Dominance
    Al Moubayed, N., Petrovski, A., & McCall, J. (n.d.). D 2 MOPSO: Multi-Objective Particle Swarm Optimizer Based on Decomposition and Dominance. In Evolutionary Computation in Combinatorial Optimization [Contracted by publisher] (pp. 75-86). Springer Berlin Heidelberg.
  • Mutual Information for Performance Assessment of Multi Objective Optimisers: Preliminary Results
    Al Moubayed, N., Petrovski, A., & McCall, J. (n.d.). Mutual Information for Performance Assessment of Multi Objective Optimisers: Preliminary Results. In Intelligent Data Engineering and Automated Learning – IDEAL 2013 [Contracted by publisher] (pp. 537-544). Springer Berlin Heidelberg.
  • Clustering-Based Leaders’ Selection in Multi-Objective Particle Swarm Optimisation
    Al Moubayed, N., Petrovski, A., & McCall, J. (n.d.). Clustering-Based Leaders’ Selection in Multi-Objective Particle Swarm Optimisation. In Intelligent Data Engineering and Automated Learning - IDEAL 2011 [Contracted by publisher]. Springer Berlin Heidelberg.

Conference Paper

Doctoral Thesis

Journal Article

Supervision students