New partnership set to accelerate UK data science and artificial intelligence

12 Dec 2018 02:25 PM

The Alan Turing Institute and the Science and Technology Facilities Council’s (STFC) Hartree Centre to forge links between data science and artificial intelligence research and high-performance computing.

The UK’s national institute for data science and artificial intelligence and a leading UK supercomputing centre dedicated to industry engagement have joined forces in order to accelerate data science and AI innovation in the UK.

A collaboration agreement signed between The Alan Turing Institute and the Hartree Centre, part of the UK’s Science and Technology Facilities Council, will see the two organisations bridging their mutual interests in the areas of data analytics, machine learning, modelling and simulation. The agreement will focus on driving real-world impact, drawing on the state-of-the-art high performance computing facilities at the Hartree Centre and the cutting-edge research taking place at the Turing to develop trustworthy, scalable AI solutions for large-scale deployment in industry and the public sector.

Adrian Smith, Director of The Alan Turing Institute, yesterday commented:

“Data science and artificial intelligence research requires access to large computing facilities in order to enable intensive algorithms to operate and learn. It is critical that the Institute, as a national centre committed to driving impact in these sciences into real-world applications, partners with world-class facilities like the Hartree Centre to ensure we build data science and AI tools and software which match the needs of the UK’s industrial future. We look forward to working with the team at STFC to further develop our collaborative plans.”

Alison Kennedy, Director of the STFC Hartree Centre, yesterday said:

“In the rapidly evolving landscape of AI technology, there is an emerging need to develop standards and validation that can be used to assess bias, trustworthiness and ethics of an AI system. We need to be able to identify and explain where the decisions made by AI and big data algorithms come from. The development of trustworthy, explainable and ethical AI is just one area of work where, by combining the strengths of the Hartree Centre and The Alan Turing Institute, we have the potential to make a strong impact on the swift digitisation of UK industry.”

Notes to Editors

The centre offers access to one of the world’s most powerful supercomputing and data analysis infrastructures dedicated to industrial R&D. Currently this includes the UK’s first Atos Bull Sequana X1000 supercomputer system, alongside other Intel® platforms, large scale GPFS storage, an IBM data analytics cluster, immersive visualisation facilities and data-centric architecture from IBM. These are complemented by a growing team of internationally recognised research software engineers, data scientists and computational experts.

The Alan Turing Institute is the UK’s national institute for data science and artificial intelligence. The Institute is named in honour of Alan Turing, whose pioneering work in theoretical and applied mathematics, engineering and computing is considered to have laid the foundations for modern-day data science and artificial intelligence. The Institute’s goals are to undertake world-class research in data science and artificial intelligence, apply its research to real-world problems, driving economic impact and societal good, lead the training of a new generation of scientists, and shape the public conversation around data and algorithms.

Five founding universities – Cambridge, Edinburgh, Oxford, UCL and Warwick – and the UK Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council created The Alan Turing Institute in 2015.

Eight new universities – Leeds, Manchester, Newcastle, Queen Mary University of London, Birmingham, Exeter, Bristol, and Southampton – joined the Institute in 2018.