Sarah L. Thomson
sarah l thomson

Dr Sarah L. Thomson

Lecturer

  S.Thomson4@napier.ac.uk

  

Biography

Dr Sarah L. Thomson is a lecturer in data science at Edinburgh Napier University, having started there in August 2023. She was previously at the University of Stirling: she was awarded her PhD there in March 2021, and worked as a research fellow from September 2020 until May 2022; after that. she took up a lectureship in June 2022, before moving to Edinburgh Napier in August 2023.

Dr Thomson's expertise is predominantly in evolutionary computation, optimisation, and machine learning. She has worked on problems from healthcare, aviation, vehicle management, and agriculture. Additionally, she has a passion for fundamental research and is particularly interested in fitness landscapes and explainable artificial intelligence (XAI).

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3 results

Can HP-protein folding be solved with genetic algorithms? Maybe not

Conference Proceeding
Jansen, R., Horn, R., van Eck, O., Version, K., Thomson, S. L., & van den Berg, D. (2023)
Can HP-protein folding be solved with genetic algorithms? Maybe not. In Proceedings of the 15th International Joint Conference on Computational Intelligence (131-140). https://doi.org/10.5220/0012248500003595
Genetic algorithms might not be able to solve the HP-protein folding problem because creating random individuals for an initial population is very hard, if not impossible. The...

The Opaque Nature of Intelligence and the Pursuit of Explainable AI

Conference Proceeding
Thomson, S. L., van Stein, N., van den Berg, D., & van Leeuwen, C. (2023)
The Opaque Nature of Intelligence and the Pursuit of Explainable AI. In Proceedings of the 15th International Joint Conference on Computational Intelligence (555-564). https://doi.org/10.5220/0012249500003595
When artificial intelligence is used for making decisions, people are more likely to accept those decisions if they can be made intelligible to the public. This understanding ...

Too Constrained for Genetic Algorithms. Too Hard for Evolutionary Computing. The Traveling Tournament Problem.

Conference Proceeding
Verduin, K., Thomson, S. L., & van den Berg, D. (2023)
Too Constrained for Genetic Algorithms. Too Hard for Evolutionary Computing. The Traveling Tournament Problem. In Proceedings of the 15th International Joint Conference on Computational Intelligence (246-257). https://doi.org/10.5220/0012192100003595
Unlike other NP-hard problems, the constraints on the traveling tournament problem are so pressing that it’s hardly possible to randomly generate a valid solution, for example...

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