Alan Turing Institute up and running

The Alan Turing Institute has marked its first few days of operations with the announcement of its new director, the confirmation of £10 million of research funding from Lloyd’s Register Foundation, a research partnership with GCHQ, a collaboration with Cray Inc and EPSRC, and its first research activities.

The Institute will promote the development and use of advanced mathematics, computer science, algorithms and big data for human benefit. The University of Cambridge is one of the Institute’s founding partners, along with the universities of Edinburgh, Oxford, UCL, Warwick and the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC). As of 22 July, the Institute, which will be based at the British Library in London, is now fully constituted and has begun operations.

Jo Johnson, Minister for Universities and Science, said: “The Alan Turing Institute has set off on a speedy course to secure new lasting partnerships and bring together expertise from across the UK that will help secure our place as a world leader in areas like Big Data, computer science and advanced mathematics.”

The Institute has also announced that:

• Has appointed Professor Andrew Blake, who will join the Institute in October, as its first Director;
• Has accepted a formally approved offer of £10 million of research funding from the board of the Lloyd’s Register Foundation;
• Will work with GCHQ on open access and commercial data-analysis methods;
• Is to collaborate with Cray Inc. and EPSRC to exploit a next generation analytics capability on the UK’s Largest Supercomputer for scientific research, ARCHER;
• Is issuing its first call for expressions of interest from research fellows;
• Will commence research work this autumn with a series of data summits for commerce, industry and the physical and social sciences and scoping workshops for data and social scientists to inform and shape the Institute’s research agenda.

Andrew Blake is currently a Microsoft Distinguished Scientist and Laboratory Director of Microsoft Research UK. He is an Honorary Professor in Information Engineering at Cambridge, a Fellow of Clare Hall and a leading researcher in computer vision. He studied Mathematics and Electrical Sciences at Trinity College, and after a year as a Kennedy Scholar at MIT and time in the electronics industry, he completed a PhD in Artificial Intelligence at the University of Edinburgh in 1983.

“I am very excited to be chosen for this unique opportunity to lead The Alan Turing Institute,” said Blake. “The vision of bringing together the mathematical and computer scientists from the country’s top universities to develop the new discipline of data science, through an independent institute with strategic links to commerce and industry, is very compelling. The institute has a societally important mission and ambitious research goals. We will go all out to achieve them.” 

“The enthusiasm and commitment of the founding partners have enabled the Institute to make rapid progress,” said Howard Covington, chair of The Alan Turing Institute. “We will now turn to building the Institute’s research activities. We are delighted to welcome Andrew Blake as our new director and to begin strategic relationships with the Lloyd’s Register Foundation and GCHQ. Our cooperation with Cray Inc. is one of several relationships with major infrastructure and service providers that will be agreed over the coming months. We are also in discussions with a number of industrial and commercial firms who we expect to become strategic partners in due course and are highly encouraged by the breadth of interest in working with the Institute.”

Professor Philip Nelson, Chief Executive of the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) added: “I am delighted to see The Alan Turing Institute up and running. The teams from EPSRC and the founding universities have shown outstanding collaboration in bringing together five of our world-class academic institutions. We look forward to the Institute becoming an internationally leading player in data science.”

“Getting the most out of big data requires new methods to handle large quantities of information and the clever use of algorithms to distil meaningful knowledge out of such volumes,” said Professor John Aston of Cambridge’s Department of Pure Mathematics and Mathematical Statistics, who is the university's representative on the Alan Turing Institute Board of Directors. “Research in this area could revolutionise our ability to compare, cross-reference and analyse data in ways that have previously been beyond the bounds of human or computer analysis.

The Alan Turing Institute is a joint venture between the universities of Cambridge, Edinburgh, Oxford, Warwick, UCL and EPSRC – The Alan Turing Institute will attract the best data scientists and mathematicians from the UK and across the globe to break new boundaries in how we use big data in a fast moving, competitive world.

The Institute is being funded over five years with £42 million from the UK government. The university partners are contributing £5 million each, totalling £25 million. In addition, the Institute will seek to partner with other business and government bodies. The creation of the Institute has been coordinated by the EPSRC which invests in research and postgraduate training across the UK.