PhDs to embrace challenges with AI

25 October 2019

Russell Group universities will host new AI Centres for Doctoral Training, the government announced this week. The centres plan to train 1000 students over the next 5 years. The full list of training centres is below. 48 institutions bid to host the Centres for Doctoral Training, with 12 of the 14 selected hosts based at Russell Group universities.

The AI talent initiative, funded by universities, government and business, will also create new Turing AI Fellowships delivered through the UKRI, with the first fellows announced today by the Alan Turing Institute. They will conduct research at Russell Group universities in Cambridge, Exeter, Manchester, Oxford, and Warwick.

From UKRI:

The first five Turing AI Fellows announced today by The Alan Turing Institute are:

• Professor Neil Lawrence, University of Cambridge, Senior Turing AI Fellow – Professor Lawrence is world-renowned for his work and as the first Senior Turing AI Fellow. He will focus on machine learning systems design ensuring that monitoring for performance, interpretability and fairness are key tenets of the ecosystem. Neil has also recently been named DeepMind Professor of Machine Learning at the University of Cambridge and is a member of the UK’s AI Council.
• Dr Maria Liakata, University of Warwick, Turing AI Fellow – Dr Liakata’s work will focus on novel natural language processing methods to capture changes in user behaviour over time. This work has direct applicability to mental health as it will help provide experts with evidence for personalised changes in mood and cognition from everyday use of digital technologies.
• Professor Yarin Gal, University of Oxford, Turing AI Fellow – Professor Gal will work on democratising safe and robust AI, by building community challenges derived from real-world applications of AI in industry to help develop new safe and robust AI tools for responsible use in industry.
• Professor Anna Scaife, The University of Manchester, Turing AI Fellow – Professor Scaife focuses on AI for discovery in astrophysics and will ensure for example that the rarest and most extreme astrophysical objects are not discarded or missed in our processing of images captured from outer space.
• Dr Tim Dodwell, University of Exeter, Turing AI Fellow – Dr Dodwell’s work addresses the challenge of building a more sustainable aviation industry, the benefits of which will not only allow the aerospace industry to build faster, lighter, more sustainable aircraft for the future, but also provide new applications across the high-value manufacturing sector and broader scientific communities.

The Centres for Doctoral Training are:

• UKRI AI Centre for Doctoral Training in Foundational Artificial Intelligence - UCL
• UKRI Centre for Doctoral Training in AI-enabled Healthcare Systems - UCL
• UKRI Centre for Doctoral Training in Environmental Intelligence: Data Science and AI for Sustainable Futures - University of Exeter
• UKRI Centre for Doctoral Training in Natural Language Processing - University of Edinburgh
• UKRI Centre for Doctoral Training in Artificial Intelligence and Music - Queen Mary University of London
• UKRI Centre for Doctoral Training in Speech and Language Technologies and their Applications - University of Sheffield
• UKRI Centre for Doctoral Training in Artificial Intelligence for Healthcare - Imperial College London
• UKRI Centre for Doctoral Training in Accountable, Responsible and Transparent AI - University of Bath
• UKRI Centre for Doctoral Training in Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning and Advanced Computing - Swansea University
• UKRI Centre for Doctoral Training in Machine Intelligence for Nano-electronic Devices and Systems - University of Southampton
• UKRI Centre for Doctoral Training in Biomedical Artificial Intelligence - University of Edinburgh
• UKRI Centre for Doctoral Training in Social Intelligent Artificial Agents (SOCIAL) - University of Glasgow
• UKRI Centre for Doctoral Training in Interactive Artificial Intelligence - University of Bristol
• UKRI Centre for Doctoral Training in Application of Artificial Intelligence to the study of Environmental Risks (AI4ER) - University of Cambridge
• UKRI Centre for Doctoral Training in Safe and Trusted Artificial Intelligence - King’s College London
• UKRI Centre for Doctoral Training in Artificial Intelligence for Medical Diagnosis and Care - University of Leeds

More information is available on the UKRI website, the Turing Institute, and the Office for Artificial Intelligence.

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