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Sussex AI seminar: Julian Gutierrez
By: Aleks Kossowska
Last updated: Thursday, 9 October 2025
Title: Neuro-Symbolic Systems: An Overview
Abstract:
Neuro-symbolic artificial intelligence (AI) is an emerging paradigm that seeks to combine the strengths of symbolic reasoning/AI with the learning capabilities of machine learning models. Traditional symbolic AI offers interpretability, compositionality, correctness guarantees, and the ability to encode structured knowledge, but struggles with perception, adaptability, and scalabilty. Conversely, machine learning models excel at pattern recognition, perception, and learning from large-scale data, yet often lack transparency, robustness/correctness, and systematic reasoning. By integrating these two approaches, neuro-symbolic AI aims to enable systems that can learn effectively from raw data while also reasoning over structured knowledge, rules, and logic, leading to systems that can reason effectively under uncertainty in a scalable and explainable way. As such, this field of AI promises to bridge this gap between machine learning and symbolic reasoning, offering a path towards more robust, interpretable, and human-aligned AI. This talk is a non-technical and high-level exposition of some of the models, languages, and results of this somewhat new field of AI.
Bio:
Julian Gutierrez is Associate Professor at the University of Sussex, Associate Member of the Oxford University Computer Science Department, and co-founder (and former co-Director) of the Monash Laboratory for the Foundations of Computing (MLFC). He did his PhD at the University of Edinburgh (Laboratory for Foundations of Computer Science) and was postdoctoral researcher at the University of Cambridge (Computer Laboratory) and at the University of Oxford (Department of Computer Science). From 2015 to 2020, he was Departmental Lecturer at the University of Oxford, and from 2020 to 2024 he was Faculty member (Lecturer and Senior Lecturer) at Monash University, in Australia. Most of Gutierrez's work is at the intersection of Theoretical Computer Science and the Foundations of Artificial Intelligence, and focuses on logic, game theory, discrete mathematics, and automated formal verification techniques for concurrent and multi-agent systems.
Talk was delivered as part of Sussex AI seminar series on 1st October 2025. You can watch the recording on our YouTube.