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UCL Centre for Artificial Intelligence

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About the hub

Our aim is to make Generative AI models more customisable, reliable and trustworthy. We want to help to realise the huge benefits of these technologies for society, science and the economy.

Background

We are one of nine new research hubs located across the UK, which will deliver revolutionary AI technologies. The hubs, which are funded by EPSRC, will provide focused investment that will enable AI to evolve and tackle complex problems across applications from healthcare treatments, to power-efficient electronics.

Objectives

Our overarching goal is to create tools that UK industry, science and government can use to fine-tune generative models (GMs). We will do this by: 

  • Making these tools widely available, 
  • Enabling easier interaction with GMs

Other objectives include:

  1. Facilitating the formation of startup companies using GMs. Academics and researchers will have the opportunity and be encouraged to form startups /spinouts and contribute to open-source projects.
  2. Enabling academic researchers from a wider range of universities and backgrounds to collaborate with companies, large and small, on impactful research projects. By pooling research talent, compute and data resources we can work at a larger scale than any single university, creating a bigger impact.
  3. Developing a better understanding of AI’s impact on society, along with solutions to address common challenges for society, for example:
    • Creating open-source software to both train large GMs and fine-tune GMs on specialised data;
    • Making GMs more reliable and trustworthy by incorporating constraints and understanding the capabilities of language models’ reasoning abilities; 
    • Using GMs to preserve privacy and ensure fairness;
    • Understanding the legal rights regarding user data and responsibilities relating to malfunctioning generations from GMs

Our partners

We have brought together experts in Generative AI, enabling them to collaborate on impactful projects and enterprises in a way that no single university could on its own. Our university partners are:

Cardiff University

Imperial College London

University College London

University of Cambridge

University of Edinburgh

University of Manchester

University of Oxford

University of Surrey