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The University of York is one of 16 universities to receive funding for a new Doctoral Training Centre in artificial intelligence (AI), that will specialise in developing a safe and trustworthy future for AI, whilst other centres will look at AI in healthcare, agriculture, impacts on media, and environmental sustainability amongst other things.
The investment, a total of £117 million, awarded by the UKRI to 12 doctoral training centres, aims to ensure that the UK has the skills needed to seize the potential of the AI era and to nurture talent that will push the AI field forward in a responsible way.
The Government is championing safe AI, envisioning a bright future for the UK both in terms of innovation and regulation. One question of particular significance is how safe are we from AI right now?
The important thing to emphasise here is that we already have systems and methodologies in place to address issues of safety, which means we don't need to reinvent the wheel, giving the UK a headstart on safe AI.
Our new doctoral training centre will give PhD students - the future generation of AI professionals - the opportunity to explore this very question, which will help ensure that we have a responsible approach to AI technologies as we go forward.
The UKRI AI Centre for Doctoral Training in Lifelong Safety Assurance of AI-enabled Autonomous Systems (SAINTS), will see its first cohort of students start in the 2024/2025 academic year, recruitment for which will begin shortly.
The UK is in a strong position to harness the power of AI to transform many aspects of our lives for the better. Crucial to this endeavour is nurturing the talented people and teams we need to apply AI to a broad spectrum of challenges, from healthy aging to sustainable agriculture, ensuring its responsible and trustworthy adoption.
This announcement came on the eve of the AI Safety Summit, being hosted at Bletchley Park from Wednesday 1 – Thursday 2 November, where policymakers and experts in the field will look at frontier AI technologies and address the benefits and risks that it has to offer.
The UK is at the very front of the global race to turn AI’s awesome potential into a giant leap forward for people’s quality of life and productivity at work, all while ensuring this technology works safely, ethically, and responsibly.
The plans we are announcing today will future proof our nation’s skills base, meaning we can reap the benefits of AI as it continues to develop. At the same time, we are taking the first steps to put the power of this technology to work, for good, across Government and society.
The York centre will focus on the lifelong safety assurance of increasingly autonomous systems in dynamic and uncertain contexts, building on methodologies and concepts in disciplines spanning AI, safety science, philosophy, law, and the social sciences.
It will bring together students from a diversity of backgrounds and sectors to deliver a new generation of experts who make leading contributions to the safety of AI.
Robots and autonomous systems are already part of our everyday lives, from robot vacuum cleaners and lawn mowers to grocery delivery robots to the AI within our phones. This year, however, a global report showed that three out of five people are wary of AI. At the new training centre, we will look at what is causing this disconnect and how we can satisfy the big question at the heart of AI alarm - 'is it safe?'.
Lloyd’s Register Foundation and the University of York established the AAIP in 2018, working together to ensure the safe adoption of autonomy. Since launching, the team has identified the need for educating a pipeline of PhD graduates to advance the safety assurance of AI. This builds on the AAIP's ground-breaking work on methodologies like AMLAS and SACE with graduates being given the skills to work with industry, regulators and policy-makers to make a real-world impact.
We are pleased to further our collaboration with the AAIP through SAINTS, including through engagement of students with global experts and secondments to regulatory or policymaking organisations.
For more information on the Doctoral Training Centre visit: https://www.york.ac.uk/news-and-events/news/2023/quality/doctoral-training-centre-ai-safety/
Find out more about our work with the Assuring Autonomy International Programme.