As part of a series of investments totaling £54 million announced by UKRI today, the two new Fellowships represent an investment of £8 million.
Professors Michael Bronstein and Alison Noble of the University of Oxford have been given the prestigious UKRI Turing AI World Leading Fellowships to carry out innovative research on some of artificial intelligence’s (AI) most difficult problems.
As part of a series of investments totaling £54 million announced by UKRI today, the two new Fellowships represent an investment of £8 million. These investments will be used to develop reliable and secure AI to help address important challenges.
“I congratulate Professor Bronstein and Professor Noble on being awarded these prestigious Fellowships, and have no doubt they will achieve great things in such a rapidly developing field,” said Professor Chas Bountra, Pro-Vice Chancellor for Innovation at the University of Oxford.
Oxford is at the forefront of this revolution, which has the potential to have a profoundly positive effect on societies all over the world. Our brilliant researchers are making outstanding progress in AI, from scientific breakthroughs to security and ethics. They come from a variety of departments. This all-encompassing strategy can only be beneficial.
Professor Michael Bronstein
With the help of the Turing AI World-Leading Fellows’ Fellowship, Professor Michael Bronstein, a specialist in theoretical and computational geometric methods for machine learning and data science, will create a brand-new mathematical framework for geometric and graph machine learning.
The framework, which is based on physical principles, will be used to tackle difficult issues in the design of medications and foods. By mapping the “dark matter” of food-based bioactive ingredients, Bronstein hopes to develop new therapeutic protein molecules for diseases that are challenging to treat with currently available medications.
Professor Alison Noble
Professor of Biomedical Engineering Alison Noble focuses on the use of AI in clinical medicine and computer vision. In order to develop machine learning for ultrasound, her team has been collaborating with clinical research organisations in Oxford and abroad. She will research AI for shared human-machine decision-making in healthcare imaging with the Fellowship, focusing on ethics and dependability.
“I am thrilled and honoured to receive a Turing AI World-Leading Fellowships, Professor Noble said. My fellowship aims to develop new AI for shared human-machine decision making in healthcare imaging, including studying the ethical implications of the AI and the reliability of the technology, as well as federated learning-based analysis for real-world modelling scenarios where data cannot be shared between sites – a current barrier to international research collaboration.
“We will collaborate with clinical partners to apply machine learning-based analysis to video and other sensor data in order to develop human skill models of clinical tasks with the goal of providing new insights on the exchange of skill best practises and how clinical outcome may relate to human skill,” the company says.”
“Additionally, we will collaborate with business partners to create and test a career mobility programme for AI scientists at the postdoctoral level. On this new research programme, I am looking forward to working with both current and potential collaborators.
For the purpose of creating science and technology that will impact our lives, UKRI is funding individuals and groups with extensive AI expertise.
In order to build on its previous success with the first five Turing AI fellows in July 2021, the University of Oxford has announced two new Fellowships. Professors Philip Torr from Engineering Science and Michael Wooldridge from Computer Science are two of these fellows.