The University of Edinburgh and AI
Over almost six decades, our groundbreaking research across all areas of AI has played a key role in growing the School of Informatics into one of the largest computing research clusters in Europe, where over 400 researchers and PhD students currently engage in AI research. Four out of the six research institutes in Informatics focus on AI:
- Artificial Intelligence and its Applications Institute
- Institute for Adaptive and Neural Computation
- Institute for Language, Cognition and Computation
- Institute for Perception, Action, and Behaviour
Our broad vision of Informatics as the study of information processing in natural and artificial systems – from a single cell to a computer programme and all the way to the human brain and society at large – has enabled us to engage in AI research across all disciplines, with researchers at the University publishing over a thousand research papers in the last three years alone.
This research covers the whole spectrum of topics – from foundational research into new computational and mathematical methods to the development of applications in the biomedical, natural, engineering and social sciences, and the study of the implications of AI for society and humanity.
As a founding member of The Alan Turing Institute, the UK’s national institute for data science and AI, and through our contribution to international networks such as ELLIS and CLAIRE, we help shape the national and international AI landscape. Through recent initiatives to establish an Edinburgh Laboratory for Integrated AI (ELIAI) and our work on Trustworthy Autonomous Systems Governance, Regulation, and Responsibility, we continue to advance our leadership in areas of enormous significance for the advancement of AI.
Major research centres across the University build on a long history of cross-disciplinary collaboration between AI researchers and experts in other fields, such as:
- Edinburgh Centre for Robotics
- Centre for Speech Technology Research
- Institute for Design Informatics
- Institute of Genetics and Cancer
- Centre for Data Culture, and Society
- Centre for Statistics
- Institute for the Study of Science, Technology, and Innovation
- Scottish Research Centre for IP and Technology Law
- Global Open Finance Centre of Excellence
- Advanced Care Research Centre
- Usher Institute
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