The AI and robotics team is responsible for:
- EPSRC AI Hubs
- Turing AI Fellowships
- UKRI AI Centres for Doctoral Training
- The Alan Turing Institute
- Responsible AI UK
- Trustworthy Autonomous Systems (TAS) programme
- AI research to enable UK’s net zero target
- AI research to accelerate health research
EPSRC AI hubs
The following proposals were successful at the AI hubs’ outline panels in 2023:
EPSRC has invested £80 million in nine new AI research hubs, announced in February 2024, that will push the UK to the forefront of advanced AI research.
The hubs will provide focused investment that will enable AI to evolve and tackle complex problems across applications from healthcare treatments to power-efficient electronics.
Three of the hubs will address the mathematics and computational research, which is foundational to AI. They will play a pivotal role in increasing our understanding of new, efficient AI systems.
Six of the hubs will explore AI for science, engineering and real-world data. They will provide the tools needed to accelerate future AI innovations and advance its application in key areas such as healthcare.
The AI hubs are major larger-scale investments that are expected to form connections to the wider AI community and research and innovation ecosystem. Hubs are expected to:
- evolve and expand over time
- flexibly allocate resources and effort to new problems
- collaborate with other hubs, investments and groups that are working on similar problems
- bring in additional partners and interested parties
Turing AI fellowships
The Turing AI Fellowships are a £46 million investment by the UK government in the retention, attraction and development of world-leading academic talent in AI. EPSRC is delivering these fellowships on behalf of UKRI, in partnership with the Office for Artificial Intelligence and The Alan Turing Institute.
The aims of the investment in Turing AI Fellowships
Accelerate and support the careers of a diverse cadre of the best and brightest AI international researchers, retaining them in and attracting them to UK academia.
Allow better connections between AI academia and industry across sectors. This will help leading AI researchers and thinkers move forward in their careers between academia and industry or the third sector, accelerating the pathway to impact of AI technologies.
Enable leading researchers to undertake world leading creative and innovative AI research in the UK, with a broad range of potential impacts across sectors and timescales.
Boost the UK’s global reputation as a great place to study, invest or work in AI.
The investment supports 30 fellows through three components:
- phase one announced in 2019
- Turing AI Acceleration Fellowships announced in 2020
- Turing AI World-Leading Researcher Fellowships announced in July 2021
A further £20 million investment to double the number of Turing AI World-Leading Researcher Fellows was announced by the then Chancellor Rishi Sunak, following the success of the first five fellows announced in 2021.
This investment is being delivered in a further two rounds. The first round was awarded to two fellows who started in October 2023. The second round was awarded to three new fellows who started in October 2024.
UKRI AI Centres for Doctoral Training
The UKRI Artificial Intelligence Centres for Doctoral Training (CDTs) are training a new generation of PhD students. They will develop novel AI methodology and use AI technology in areas such as:
- improving healthcare
- tackling climate change
- creating new commercial opportunities
Following the £100 million investment in 2018 in 16 UKRI AI CDTs, in 2023 UKRI invested a further £117 million in 12 new centres to continue training doctoral researchers in AI across the remit of UKRI. These new centres will train around 900 students over eight years. The first cohort started in the 2024/25 academic year. EPSRC has also funded CDTs relevant to AI.
If you are interested in studying at one of the CDTs, or partnering with them, contact the centre directly.
The Alan Turing Institute
The Alan Turing Institute is the UK’s national institute for data science and AI. Founded in 2015, the institute has developed to meet the needs of the data science and AI research community, responding to the vibrant UK research and innovation ecosystem.
EPSRC has recently invested a further £100 million in The Alan Turing Institute to work with academic, industrial and government partners to:
- advance world-class research and apply it to national and global challenges
- build skills for the future and drive an informed public conversation
Working in collaboration with EPSRC and other key stakeholders, the institute helps ensure the UK is one of the best places in the world for data science and AI research, collaboration, and business.
Find more information about The Alan Turing Institute.
Responsible AI UK (RAi UK)
£30.7 million has been awarded to a large, UK-wide consortium led by the University of Southampton. The consortium aims to create a UK and international research and innovation ecosystem for responsible and trustworthy AI that will respond to the needs of society.
This builds on UKRI’s commitment to ensuring responsible AI development is a cross-cutting strategic theme across all UKRI’s AI research, training, skills and innovation activities.
Find out more about the research RAi UK supports as well as their skills and enterprise provisions.
The RAi UK team produced the RRI Toolkit. The toolkit clearly lays out some best practices to ensure responsible research and innovation, including:
- prompts
- case studies
- cards
- videos
- overall support
Trustworthy autonomous systems (TAS) programme
The TAS programme was a £33.7 million investment funded through the Strategic Priorities Fund. It was developed from a community-led submission to the EPSRC Big Ideas process and was led by EPSRC, working across UKRI with AHRC, ESRC, Innovate UK and STFC.
This activity aimed to bring together research communities and key stakeholders from across all sectors and disciplines to drive forward multidisciplinary fundamental research, to ensure that autonomous systems are safe, reliable, resilient, ethical, and trusted.
The TAS programme consisted of two separate and interdependent parts:
- a central hub whose role was to build a community, fostering collaborations across disciplines and driving culture change around the design of autonomous systems
- six research nodes that undertook fundamental, multidisciplinary research into a particular topic, and supported the hub in delivering the objectives of the programme
The hub and the six nodes were funded in 2020. These are the:
In February 2024, the TAS team created the TAS impact brochure. The brochure shows what difference the £33.7 million investment has made to various sectors including but not limited to energy and environment, health and wellbeing, defence and security.
AI research to enable UK’s net zero target
The UK faces some difficult challenges to reaching its aim of achieving net zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050.
This programme of research will apply AI to some of the many challenges in decarbonising energy, transport, the environment and agriculture and food production. It has taken a multidisciplinary approach, combining technical, social and environmental aspects of these issues in combined research projects.
The projects supported will have clear routes to application, so they can begin making a difference as soon as possible.
We have provided £13 million to fund seven projects to help the UK meet its net zero targets. The projects will look at developing AI technologies to:
- create more sustainable land management
- accelerate energy efficient carbon dioxide (CO2) capture
- improve resilience for natural hazards and extreme events
The programmes supported are:
- Imperial College London (lead): Real-time digital optimisation and decision making for energy and transport systems
- Heriot-Watt University (lead): Enabling CO2 capture and storage using AI
- University of Leicester: Self-Learning Digital Twins for Sustainable Land Management
- Durham University: Virtual Power Plant with Artificial Intelligence for Resilience and Decarbonisation
- University of Surrey (lead): Artificial Intelligence Enabling Future Optimal Flexible Biogas Production for Net-Zero
- University of Exeter: User-bespoke AI-enhanced decision support to deliver UK woodland expansion for Net Zero
- Aberystwyth University (lead): Miscanthus AI- Plant selection and breeding for Net Zero
The AI for net zero conference, hosted 16 to 19 December 2024, with many panels and outputs to show.
AI innovation to accelerate health research
A further £13 million has been provided to support 22 AI for health research projects.
The projects are developing innovations in AI to tackle a range of health, social, scientific and technical challenges. They tap into the rich UK AI research landscape, bringing communities with different backgrounds and new perspectives to work together to improve the health and wellbeing of the public.
