The UK Research and Innovation’s (UKRI) Engineering and Physical Science Research Council (EPSRC) has invested £80m into nine new UK research hubs to deliver revolutionary artificial intelligence (AI) technologies.
The new hubs will help enable AI to evolve and overcome complex issues across applications, from healthcare treatments to power-efficient electronics.
This will involve combating cyber threats, supporting better health treatments and delivering faster development of electronic devices and microchips to transform how AI is developed and used.
Six of the hubs will focus on AI for science, engineering and real-world data and will provide the tools needed to advance future AI innovations and accelerate their application in key areas such as healthcare.
The remaining three will address mathematics and computational research to increase understanding of efficient AI systems.
The ‘AI hub for causality in healthcare AI with real data’, led by the University of Edinburgh, will improve healthcare using AI predicting outcomes and personalising treatments. It aims to develop novel methods to understand complex causal relationships within healthcare data.
The University of Bristol’s ‘AI for collective intelligence’ aims to develop new machine learning and smart agent technologies, using real-time data streams, to achieve collective intelligence for individuals and national agencies across healthcare and pandemics.
A further £9m investment has been announced and delivered by the EPSRC through the International Science Partnerships Fund to bring together researchers and innovators in bilateral research partnerships with the US.
The EPSRC partnership programme between the UK and US will focus on developing safer, responsible and trustworthy AI and AI for scientific uses, examining new methodologies for responsible AI development and use.
The investment will help to align understandings of technology development between nations to enhance inputs to the international governance of AI and shape research inputs for domestic policymakers and regulators.
Professor Ottoline Leyser, chief executive, UKRI, said: “The investments… will help to deliver the capability the UK needs to realise the opportunities of this transformative technology.”
Professor Charlotte Deane, executive chair, EPSRC, said: “These hubs will deliver revolutionary AI innovations and tools… to drive the increased productivity and economic growth promised by this technology.”