Founded | 2015 |
---|---|
Founder | UK Government |
Type | Research institute |
Registration no. | England and Wales: 09512457 |
Focus | Data sciences |
Location | |
Membership |
|
CEO | Jean Innes |
Website | www |
The Alan Turing Institute is the United Kingdom's national institute for data science and artificial intelligence, founded in 2015 and largely funded by the UK government. It is named after Alan Turing, [1] the British mathematician and computing pioneer.
The Alan Turing Institute is an independent private-sector legal entity, operating not-for-profit and as a charity. [2] It is a joint venture among the University of Cambridge, the University of Edinburgh, the University of Oxford, University College London (UCL) and the University of Warwick, selected on the basis of international peer review. [3] In 2018, the institute was joined by eight additional university partners: Queen Mary University of London, University of Leeds, University of Manchester, University of Newcastle, University of Southampton, University of Birmingham, University of Exeter and University of Bristol. [4]
The Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC), the primary funder of the institute, is also a member of the joint venture. The primary responsibility for establishing the Alan Turing Institute has been assigned to the EPSRC, with continuing engagement in the shaping of the institute from the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (BEIS) and the Government Office for Science. The Chair, Doug Gurr, was appointed in 2022, and the CEO, Jean Innes, in 2023. Between 2018 and 2023, the Director and CEO was Sir Adrian Smith.
Funding for the creation of the institute came from a £600m investment for the "Eight Great Technologies", [5] and specifically so-called "big data", signalled by the UK Government in 2013 [6] and announced by George Osborne, Chancellor of the Exchequer, in the 2014 budget. [7] The bulk of the investment in "big data" was directed to computational infrastructure. Of the remainder, £42m was allocated to the institute to cover the first five years of its operation. [7] The five founder universities each contributed £5m to the institute. [8] Further funding has come primarily through grants from Research Councils, university partners and from strategic and other partnerships. [4]
In June 2021, the EPSRC awarded the institute £10 million, on behalf of UK Research and Innovation, for 2021/22. [9]
The government's 2024 Spring Budget provided a further £100m, spread over five years, directed towards applying data science and artificial intelligence to healthcare, protecting the environment and bolstering national defence. [10] Soon after, a review by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council recommended improvements in financial oversight of funding for the institute. [11]
Concurrently with the selection of founder universities, the EPSRC initiated a process to find a "location partner". The resulting selection of the British Library in London was announced by the Chancellor of the Exchequer in December 2014 during the launch of the Knowledge Quarter, a partnership of organisations in and around the King's Cross area of the capital. [12]
As of 2023, the Alan Turing Institute is housed within the current British Library building, but it is anticipated it will occupy new premises in a development planned on land between the Francis Crick Institute and library. [13] In February 2023 the plans for the new building were approved by the local council. [14]
The Alan Turing Institute was founded following a letter from the Council for Science and Technology (CST) to the UK prime minister (7 June 2013), describing the "Age of Algorithms". The letter presented a case that "The Government, working with the universities and industry, should create a National Centre to promote advanced research and translational work in algorithms and the application of data science".
The Alan Turing Institute fits into a complex organisational landscape that includes the Open Data Institute, the Digital Catapult and infrastructure investments. The role of the institute is to provide the expertise and fundamental research into data science and artificial intelligence needed to solve real-world problems. [4]
The Alan Turing Institute has since 2021 run an annual event called AI UK, [15] which is described as a national showcase of data science and artificial intelligence.
The organisation's intranet is called Mathison, which was Alan Turing's middle name.
In 2015 Lloyd's Register Foundation became the institute's first strategic partner, providing a grant of £10 million over five years to support research into the engineering applications of big data. [8] [16] [17]
Artificial intelligence (AI), in its broadest sense, is intelligence exhibited by machines, particularly computer systems. It is a field of research in computer science that develops and studies methods and software that enable machines to perceive their environment and use learning and intelligence to take actions that maximize their chances of achieving defined goals. Such machines may be called AIs.
Alan Mathison Turing was an English mathematician, computer scientist, logician, cryptanalyst, philosopher and theoretical biologist. He was highly influential in the development of theoretical computer science, providing a formalisation of the concepts of algorithm and computation with the Turing machine, which can be considered a model of a general-purpose computer. Turing is widely considered to be the father of theoretical computer science.
John McCarthy was an American computer scientist and cognitive scientist. He was one of the founders of the discipline of artificial intelligence. He co-authored the document that coined the term "artificial intelligence" (AI), developed the programming language family Lisp, significantly influenced the design of the language ALGOL, popularized time-sharing, and invented garbage collection.
Irving John Good was a British mathematician who worked as a cryptologist at Bletchley Park with Alan Turing. After the Second World War, Good continued to work with Turing on the design of computers and Bayesian statistics at the University of Manchester. Good moved to the United States where he was a professor at Virginia Tech.
Geoffrey Everest Hinton is a British-Canadian computer scientist and cognitive psychologist, most noted for his work on artificial neural networks. From 2013 to 2023, he divided his time working for Google and the University of Toronto, before publicly announcing his departure from Google in May 2023, citing concerns about the risks of artificial intelligence (AI) technology. In 2017, he co-founded and became the chief scientific advisor of the Vector Institute in Toronto.
The School of Informatics is an academic unit of the University of Edinburgh, in Scotland, responsible for research, teaching, outreach and commercialisation in informatics. It was created in 1998 from the former department of artificial intelligence, the Centre for Cognitive Science and the department of computer science, along with the Artificial Intelligence Applications Institute (AIAI) and the Human Communication Research Centre.
The history of artificial intelligence (AI) began in antiquity, with myths, stories and rumors of artificial beings endowed with intelligence or consciousness by master craftsmen. The seeds of modern AI were planted by philosophers who attempted to describe the process of human thinking as the mechanical manipulation of symbols. This work culminated in the invention of the programmable digital computer in the 1940s, a machine based on the abstract essence of mathematical reasoning. This device and the ideas behind it inspired a handful of scientists to begin seriously discussing the possibility of building an electronic brain.
Zoubin Ghahramani FRS is a British-Iranian researcher and Professor of Information Engineering at the University of Cambridge. He holds joint appointments at University College London and the Alan Turing Institute. and has been a Fellow of St John's College, Cambridge since 2009. He was Associate Research Professor at Carnegie Mellon University School of Computer Science from 2003–2012. He was also the Chief Scientist of Uber from 2016 until 2020. He joined Google Brain in 2020 as senior research director. He is also Deputy Director of the Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence.
Howard Covington is a British investment banker who was a founding shareholder and director of New Star Asset Management. He was also the first non-academic chairman of the Isaac Newton Institute for Mathematical Sciences Management Committee and the inaugural chairman of The Alan Turing Institute.
Sir John Michael Brady is an emeritus professor of oncological imaging at the University of Oxford. He has been a Fellow of Keble College, Oxford, since 1985 and was elected a foreign associate member of the French Academy of Sciences in 2015. He was formerly BP Professor of Information Engineering at Oxford from 1985 to 2010 and a senior research scientist in the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) in Cambridge, Massachusetts, from 1980 to 1985.
The Henry Royce Institute is the UK’s national institute for advanced materials research and innovation.
Douglas John Gurr is a British businessman, and the Director of the Natural History Museum, London. He was a global vice-president and head of Amazon UK from 2016 to 2020. He was chairman of the British Heart Foundation. He formerly taught at Aarhus University and held positions in the United Kingdom civil service, at McKinsey & Co, and at Asda.
Marina Denise Anne Jirotka is professor of human-centered computing at the University of Oxford, director of the Responsible Technology Institute, governing body fellow at St Cross College, board member of the Society for Computers and Law and a research associate at the Oxford Internet Institute. She leads a team that works on responsible innovation, in a range of ICT fields including robotics, AI, machine learning, quantum computing, social media and the digital economy. She is known for her work with Alan Winfield on the 'Ethical Black Box'. A proposal that robots using AI should be fitted with a type of inflight recorder, similar to those used by aircraft, to track the decisions and actions of the AI when operating in an uncontrolled environment and to aid in post-accident investigations.
Sandra Wachter is a professor and senior researcher in data ethics, artificial intelligence, robotics, algorithms and regulation at the Oxford Internet Institute. She is a former Fellow of The Alan Turing Institute.
The Turing scheme is a student exchange programme. It was established by the United Kingdom Department for Education in 2021 as a replacement for the European Union Erasmus Programme. The scheme aims to fund the advantages of overseas learning to three categories of participants, young students at primary and secondary schools, older sixth form students and further education university students.
Stephen A. Jarvis is a British computer scientist and academic administrator. He is currently Provost and Vice-Principal at the University of Birmingham. Prior to this he served as Pro-Vice-Chancellor at the University and Head of its College of Engineering and Physical Sciences.
Melissa Mhairi Terras is a British scholar of Digital Humanities. Since 2017, she has been Professor of Digital Cultural Heritage at the University of Edinburgh, and director of its Centre for Digital Scholarship. She previously taught at University College London, where she was Professor of Digital Humanities and served as director of its Centre for Digital Humanities from 2012 to 2017: she remains an honorary professor. She has a wide ranging academic background: she has an undergraduate degree in art history and English literature, then took a Master of Science (MSc) degree in computer science, before undertaking a Doctor of Philosophy (DPhil) degree at the University of Oxford in engineering.
Alan Winfield is a British engineer and educator. He is Professor of Robot Ethics at UWE Bristol, Honorary Professor at the University of York, and Associate Fellow in the Cambridge Centre for the Future of Intelligence. He chairs the advisory board of the Responsible Technology Institute, University of Oxford.
Stephen Roberts FREng is a British academic and scientist. He is a professor of machine learning at University of Oxford and leads the Machine Learning Research Group, a sub-group of the Department of Engineering Science.
Cristián Bravo is a Chilean academic. He currently holds a Professor position at the Departments of Statistical & Actuarial Science, and is the Canada Research Chair in Banking and Insurance Analytics at Western University. He is also the Director of the Banking Analytics Lab and a lead researcher at Canada's Financial Wellness lab.