education

Updated: Feb 21, 2019 12:16 IST

Indian students and experts will be able to apply for fellowships and places on post-graduate courses in Artificial Intelligence from later this year as part of a major government-industry package to meet skills gaps in this growing sector.

Official sources said on Wednesday that the £110 million-government funded package includes 200 new places at the postgraduate level in universities funded by companies such as Deepmind, QuantumBlack, Cisco, BAESystems and Indian IT major Infosys, in collaboration with the Industry of Coding and British Computer Society.

A spokesperson of the department for digital, media, culture and sport confirmed that the fellowships and places under the package announced by digital secretary Jeremy Wright and business secretary Greg Clark will be open to students and experts from India and other non-EU countries.

Nearly 1,000 students will be able to enrol for PhDs at 16 dedicated UK Research and Innovation AI Centres for Doctoral Training across the UK. Five fellowships have also been created in collaboration with the Alan Turing Institute to attract and retain the best research talent from around the world, the sources said.

The first wave of scholarships will enable mid-career and senior AI researchers to develop a transformative programme over five years, covering a range of AI applications across mathematical sciences, statistical sciences, computational sciences and engineering, the sources added.

Examples of research areas of particular interest are: AI ethics (including fairness, interpretability, privacy); AI safety (including robustness, adversarial learning, security, control); robotics, vision, sensing, and visualization; reasoning and autonomous decision making with uncertainty.

The area also include multi-agent systems and agent-based modeling; machine learning; language (including Natural Language Processing); applications of AI across a range of disciplines e.g. engineering, finance/economics, manufacturing, medicine, science, the environment and transport.

Wright said: “The UK is not only the birthplace to the father of artificial intelligence, Alan Turing, but we are leading the way on work to ensure AI innovation has ethics at its core. We want to keep up this momentum and cement our reputation as pioneers in AI”.

Clark added: “Artificial intelligence has great potential to drive up productivity and enhance every industry throughout our economy, from more effective disease diagnosis to building smart homes.

“As companies throughout the UK increasingly use AI in processes from manufacturing to fashion and construction to medical imaging, upskilling people to develop and maintain the new technology is crucial to its success in boosting productivity”.