Professor Desmond Higham is an applied mathematician and Professor of Numerical Analysis. His main area of research is stochastic computation, with applications in artificial intelligence, data science, network science and computational biology. Des is interested in algorithm development and evaluation, as well as AI regulation.His research uses theory and algorithms to expose, and where possible fix, vulnerabilities in AI systems in high-stakes applications.Current AI projectsEuropean Research Council (ERC) Advanced Grant for the five-year project, 'Numerical Analysis for Stable AI' Awards and fellowshipsFellow of the Royal Society of EdinburghFormer Royal Society/Wolfson Research Merit Award holderSIAM Fellow and former editor-in-chief of SIAM ReviewFellow of Edinburgh's Generative AI Laboratory (GAIL)Senior Research Affiliate in the Centre for Technomoral Futures2024 Impact Award from the Edinburgh Mathematical Society2020 Shephard Prize from the London Mathematical SocietyGet in touchPlease visit Des' research website for contact details: Des Higham | School of Mathematics Recent publications using AI techniques (open access links)Vulnerability analysis of transformer-based optical character recognition to adversarial attacks | To appear in Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A, 2026Are we measuring oversmoothing in graph neural networks correctly? | The Fourteenth International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR 2026), 2026A Survey of Inevitability Results in AI Instability, (to appear in Phil. Trans. Royal Society A, 2026)Deceptive Diffusion: Generating Synthetic Adversarial Examples | Proceedings Scale Space and Variational Methods in Computer Vision: 10th International Conference, 2025Stealth Edits for Provably Fixing or Attacking Large Language Models | Proceedings NeurIPS 2024The feasibility and inevitability of stealth attacks | IMA Journal of Applied Mathematics, 2024How Adversarial Attacks Can Disrupt Seemingly Stable Accurate Classifiers | Neural Networks, 2024 This article was published on Thursday 4 September 2025
