Global leaders named as first Turing AI World-leading Researcher Fellows

The five new Researcher Fellows will conduct ground-breaking work on some of AI’s biggest challenges, and will have a transformative effect on the international AI research and innovation landscape.

This could also have a major societal impact in areas  including:

• decision-making in personalised medicine
• synthetic biology and drug design
• financial modelling, and
• autonomous vehicles.

The Alan Turing Institute, the national institute for data science and artificial intelligence, and its university partners are well-represented among the first cohort of internationally-recognised researchers appointed as Turing AI World-Leading Researcher Fellows.

The five fellows are:

• Professor Michael Wooldridge, The Alan Turing Institute’s Programme Co-director for AI and University of Oxford. He aims to improve the agent-based AI models that are increasingly used in sectors such as financial modelling and logistics.
• Professor Samuel  Kaski, University of Manchester and current Fellow of The Alan Turing Institute. He aims to overcome a fundamental limitation in current AI sytems to develop new tools to help in drug design and to improve diagnoses and treatment decision making in personalised medicine.
• Professor Zoubin Ghahramani, University of Cambridge and former Fellow of The Alan Turing Institute. He aims to develop new algorithms and applications to address the limitations of some current AI methods.
• Professor Mirella Lapata, Fellow of the University of Edinburgh and Director of the UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) Centre for Doctoral Training in Natural Language Processing. She aims to develop an AI system, inspired  by the human brain, that is capable of advanced reasoning and able to draw conclusions from large and varied sets of data.
• Professor Philip Torr, University of Oxford, a Fellow of the Royal Society and the Royal Academy of Engineering. He aims to make deep neural networks more robust.

The fellowships, named after AI pioneer Alan Turing, are part of the UK’s commitment to further strengthen its position as a global leader in the field.

Government Chief Scientific Adviser, Sir Patrick Vallance, said:

“These five internationally-recognised researchers appointed as the first Turing AI World-leading Researcher Fellows will help enable us to attract top talent from across the globe and ensure that the UK stays at the forefront of AI research and innovation.”

The fellows are supported with an £18 million investment by UK Research and Innovation (UKRI). In addition, 39 different collaborators including IBM, AstraZeneca and Facebook are making contributions worth £15.7 million to the fellows’ research programmes. The fellowships are being delivered by UKRI’s Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council.

Future Care Capital has reported on a recent AI breakthrough which could spark a medical revolution.