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- Ten UK-Canada projects are to support the responsible development of artificial intelligence (AI), including ensuring all members of society trust AI and benefit from it
- Topics include creating technology to better detect and monitor global disease outbreaks, countering abusive online language, and improving labour market equality
- Three Canadian federal research funding agencies have contributed CA$5 million, while the AHRC, EPSRC, ESRC and MRC have contributed £5 million through UK Research and Innovation’s (UKRI) Fund for International Collaboration (FIC)
You may think it doesn’t affect you, but AI, machine learning and automation are already a big part of all of our daily lives. When you open your phone using your face as your ID, that relies on AI. When you use Facebook, Twitter or Instagram, AI personalises what you see on your feeds based on past history. Google relies on AI to scan the internet, and Google maps and other travel apps like Waze use AI to give you real-time traffic and suggest ways to avoid gridlock.
At a broader level, AI is used in the development of autonomous vehicles, biometrics, cybersecurity, healthcare, and in so-called smart cities.
But if AI is to be deployed even more widely, how can we be sure it is developed and used responsibly, that it doesn’t have a disruptive effect on the economy and society, and that all members of society both trust and benefit from it?
To find out, UK and Canadian researchers have joined forces for the first time, leading on ten interdisciplinary projects, worth £8.2 million, focused on a range of topics aimed at answering these questions. These include creating technology to better detect and monitor global disease outbreaks, helping neurosurgeons perform surgery, informing the development of AI transportation systems for an ageing population, countering abusive online language, and improving labour market equality.
The Honourable Navdeep Bains, Minister of Science, Innovation and Industry in Canada, said:
“Artificial intelligence is transforming all industries and sectors, opening up more opportunities for Canadians.
“Today, we take one step further toward ensuring that AI innovation and growth builds competitive and resilient economies, and maximize the social and health benefits in both Canada and in the UK.”
ESRC’s Executive Chair, Professor Jennifer Rubin, said:
“The increasing prevalence of artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning and automation in our lives is generating a range of challenges and opportunities that demand better understandings and sophisticated solutions. This raises social, technical, and cultural questions that the social sciences in collaboration with other disciplines can help address.
“Recent work has revealed that there is not enough interdisciplinary collaboration in AI research, and that building bridges between the mathematical and computational sciences and other disciplines will enrich the field.
“Collaborating with Canadian funding agencies (CIHR, NSERC and SSHRC) and other UKRI research councils (AHRC, EPSRC and MRC) on these projects using an interdisciplinary approach will contribute to the inclusive, responsible and impactful development of AI technologies, and address important economic, societal, health and global challenges.”
The projects will encourage new, interdisciplinary and international partnerships in responsible AI research, and promote enhanced infrastructure and training for researchers in Canada and the UK. They will each run for three years and started on 1 February 2020.
ENDS
Contact
For UKRI media enquiries, contact press@ukri.org or Tamera Jones on 0734 202 5443 or tamera.jones@ukri.org
For Canadian media enquiries, contact Michelle Paradis, Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC), Tel: 343-549-6141, Michelle.Paradis@sshrc-crsh.gc.ca
Notes for editors
- Project summaries
- BIAS – Responsible AI for Labour Market Equality – Professor Monideepa Tarafdar of the Lancaster University and Dr Linglong Kong of the University of Alberta: this project will look at how AI can both lead to and lessen unintentional bias in job advertising, hiring and professional networking processes, which are increasingly digitalised. The researchers will work with industrial partners to understand and mitigate gender and ethnic bias within HR processes, such as hiring and professional networking.
- Responsible AI for Inclusive, Democratic Societies: A cross-disciplinary approach to detecting and countering abusive language online - Dr Kalina Bontcheva of the University of Sheffield and Wendy Hui Kyong Chun of Simon Fraser University: Recently the UK government has started considering regulatory measures requiring social media platforms to address abusive language and hate speech through content moderation. This project aims to develop shared knowledge on responsible AI methods to detect automatically and counter abuse and hate speech online
- Responsible Automation for Inclusive Mobility (RAIM) – Professor Ed Manley of the University of Leeds and Dr Babak Mehran of the University of Manitoba: The RAIM project will develop new models of autonomous transport for enhancing mobility in ageing populations. The research will build a better understanding of the opportunities and challenges facing autonomous transport, and build these into AI methods for estimating future demand and optimising new services.
- Self-guided Microrobotics for Automated Brain Dissection – Professor Danail Stoyanov of University College London and Aaron Wheeler of the University of Toronto: This project will develop a powerful new tool for microsurgery using artificial intelligence-driven micro-robotic systems to identify and collect targets from within complex biological tissues. The system will be used to harvest rare neural stem cells which hold great promise in treating neurodegenerative diseases and traumatic brain injuries.
- EPI-AI: Automated Understanding and Alerting of Disease Outbreaks from Global News Media – Dr Nigel University of the University of Cambridge and David Buckeridge of McGill University: The EPI-AI project aims to achieve a step-change in automated global epidemic alerting using news media monitoring. Teams at Cambridge and McGill universities collaborating with national and international public health agencies will adopt an interdisciplinary approach that combines Natural Language Processing, Epidemiology, Biomedical Informatics and Bioethics to this complex task.
- Using AI-Enhanced Social Robots to Improve Children's Healthcare Experiences – Dr Mary Ellen Foster of the University of Glasgow and Dr Samina Ali of the University of Alberta: Children experience pain and distress in clinical settings daily, with negative short-term and long-term consequences. Working with stakeholders, we will develop a robust, adaptive, socially intelligent robot designed to distract children during painful clinical procedures, thereby reducing pain and distress. The robot's effectiveness will be evaluated through a clinical trial.
- AI-driven biomaterial screening to accelerate medical device development – Dr Adam Celiz of Imperial College London and Dr Nicole Li-Jessen of McGill University: Conventional R & D for biomaterials in healthcare is expensive and laborious that heavily relies on in vitro and in vivo models. The overarching goal of this project is to integrate artificial intelligence (AI) into the development pipeline to reduce cost and accelerate the discovery of new biomaterials for medicine.
- Artificial intelligence to create equitable multi-ethnic polygenic risk scores that improve clinical care - Dr Michael Inouye of the University of Cambridge and Dr Brent Richards of Jewish General Hospital: Recent breakthroughs in genomics and machine learning have generated genetic risk scores with the potential to improve patient care and health maintenance; however, these tools work better for individuals of European ancestries than other ancestries. We will develop state-of-the-art artificial intelligence to address these inequities and improve health for all.
- Leveraging the impact of diversity in neurodevelopmental disability (NDD) by integrating machine learning in personalized interventions – Dr Ian Dunham of the European Bioinformatics Institute and Dr Francois Bolduc of the University of Alberta: NDD includes disorders of cognitive, emotional and social development, affecting 13% of the population. While our understanding of genes involved in NDD has exploded, interventions are still relatively generic. We will use machine learning to better understand how diversity between individuals with NDD could guide more personalized interventions.
- The self as agent-environment nexus: crossing disciplinary boundaries to help human selves and anticipate artificial selves – Professor Karl Friston of University College London and Professor Georg Northoff of the University of Ottawa: This project aims to help people suffering from abnormal changes in their perception and self, as in psychiatric conditions like schizophrenia. This not only carries major ethical implications for understanding of ourselves, but will also inform the second aim of this project paving the way for an understanding and mathematical theory of artificial selves.
- Canada-UK Artificial Intelligence (AI) Initiative: building competitive and resilient economies and societies through responsible AI Call specification - https://esrc.ukri.org/files/funding/funding-opportunities/canada-uk-ai-call-specification/
- The Canada-UK Artificial Intelligence Initiative is a collaboration between Canada’s three federal research funding agencies—the Canadian Institutes for Health Research (CIHR), the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council (NSERC) and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) – and four UK research councils: the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC); the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC); the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC); and the Medical Research Council (MRC).
ESRC is the coordinating agency for the initiative overall and SSHRC is coordinating the participation of the three Canadian research funding agencies.
- UK Research and Innovation works in partnership with universities, research organisations, businesses, charities, and government to create the best possible environment for research and innovation to flourish. We aim to maximise the contribution of each of our component parts, working individually and collectively. We work with our many partners to benefit everyone through knowledge, talent and ideas.
Operating across the whole of the UK with a combined budget of more than £7 billion, UK Research and Innovation brings together the seven research councils, Innovate UK and Research England.
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