The UK's 2022 National AI Strategy recognizes the potential of AI for both growing prosperity and human flourishing, but AI's impact is hindered by a core obstacle-skills shortages in end-to-end autonomous systems, the systems, like autonomous robots, required to integrate AI within real-world settings. The Autonomous Intelligent Machines and Systems (AIMS) Centre for Doctoral Training (CDT) aims to tackle this obstacle by training cohorts in theoretical and systems skills in autonomous systems, with industrial partnerships co-creating AIMS training and ensuring the delivery of Oxford's research to various UK sectors, including transport (partnering with Toyota, Oxa, Waymo), extreme environments (Satellite Catapult, Trillium, Marine AI) and life-critical decisions (Aioi Nissay Dowa Insurance, Mind Foundry).
AIMS is building on success in training future leaders in autonomous systems. Since its inception in 2014, AIMS has delivered high-quality research and impact, with students publishing 157 papers in high-impact venues such as Science, Nature Communications, including 43 papers at NeurIPS, arguably the premier venue in AI. AIMS students have won best paper awards from CVPR, outstanding reviewer awards from ICLR and NeurIPS, awards from Qualcomm, and fellowships from IBM. Two AIMS students published a sequence of papers on the effectiveness of interventions against Covid-19 that led to broad media and policy impact, along with an Impact Award from the MPLS division of the University of Oxford. AIMS graduates have secured posts in top universities, companies, and have founded their start-ups. Indicative of AIMS's success is that in its most recent five years, AIMS averaged 223 applications per year for only 12 places.
In the first year, our cohort-focussed programme trains students in 18 bespoke week-long graduate courses, centred in Machine Learning, with spokes in Robotics and Vision, Control and Verification, and Cyber-Physical Systems. Training also includes components devoted to transferable skills (e.g. entrepreneurship), responsible research and innovation and AI safety and governance. Subsequently, students complete two 10-12 week mini-projects, followed by a three year research project, most designed in partnership with industry.
AIMS is also building on success in engagement with industry, with partners having contributed £2.8 million of cash support in the last five years of AIMS and promising another £2.8 million in cash support to this proposal. In addition to this direct support, our partners have been generous with in-kind support-Nvidia, YouGov, Samsung, and Mathworks have successfully organized workshops that foster co-creation of research problems in the context of real-world applications and in training on specific technical tools (e.g. Nvidia's CUDA toolkit).
The renewal of our funding will permit AIMS to enhance a developing cluster addressing life-critical autonomous systems, linked to new partnerships in healthcare and insurance. AIMS also intends to expand into the related area of biotechnology, involving work on robotic bioreactors (see Steel's prize-winning Chi.Bio Bioreactor) and the automation of biological design. Finally, AIMS aims to explore AI applications in ecology and environment, aligning with existing projects like the Embodied Intelligence Programme Grant EP/V000748/1.
AIMS's chosen primary focus area is 'delivering an EPSRC research priority', and AIMS is aligned with EPSRC's mission-inspired research priority of 'artificial intelligence, digitalisation and data: driving value and security'.
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