Top Ten European AI Research Labs for 2022
Europe is looking to be the leader in artificial intelligence, and its institutes are busy making sure that becomes a reality. Whether it’s innovation labs or part of a university system, researchers are shaping the future of AI with cutting-edge research and discoveries. Here’s what’s happening in the world of data science in Europe’s AI research labs.
The University of Oxford, Centre for Statistics in Medicine
CSM is a healthcare and medicine-focused research center. Not only is it housed at the leading UK university for turning research into spinout startup companies, but it’s also deep into work on Covid-19. In 2020, it led a virtual study-athon to uncover more about the new epidemic and is supported by large infrastructure grants from the National Institute for Health Research. The group recently published a guidelines paper for evaluating decisions made by AI.
Bosch Center for AI
BCAI is located in Germany with branches around the world. It focuses on six key areas of AI — Environmental Understanding and Decision Making, Control Optimization through Reinforcement Learning, Dynamic Multi-Agent Planning, Large Scale AI and Deep Learning, Rich and Explainable Deep Learning, and AI-Based Dynamics Modeling. Every year, it hosts an AI conference and collaborates with other leading universities and organizations to build large-scale projects and innovation labs. It has already published 23 papers this year alone and recently debuted deep audio AI to detect asthma in children.
UCL Centre for Artificial Intelligence
The Centre runs innovation labs and graduate programs and leads AI research from around the world. It also focuses efforts on getting women into the field and recently ramped up efforts to provide academics and students the opportunity to discuss ideas regularly. Recently, its NLP arm released a collection of synthetically-generated adversarial QA pairs and related resources and is a significant proponent of using AI to function as coworkers in business settings.
European Laboratory for Learning and Intelligent Systems
ELLIS manages research, administers a Ph.D. and Post-doc program, and oversees innovation labs and sites in its efforts to build AI resources across Europe. In addition to a partnership with UCL above, ELLIS also participated in a global COVID CXR hackathon, received an endowment for its first AI Lighthouse, and launched the Center for Intelligent Systems. ELLIS also pioneered research “units,” or smaller cohorts based on proposal themes that allow researchers to work and learn in collaboration.
The Alan Turing Institute
The Alan Turing Institute, housed within the British Library, works to solve challenges in data science and artificial intelligence. Named in honor of the pioneering theoretical mathematician Alan Turing, the center started with five founding universities, including two on this list already: Cambridge, Edinburgh, Oxford, UCL, and Warwick. Recent projects include a new grant to expand Machines Reading Maps, work for the National AI Strategy, and participation in an independent review panel for AI in medical devices.
Department of Informatics, at King’s College London
In addition to granting undergraduate, graduate, and postdoc degrees and positions, the school also participates heavily in research. Thanks to five organizing hubs — health, security, urban living, finance, and trusted autonomous systems, the school offers covers a broad range of subdisciplines. Some of its latest breakthroughs include work on effective treatments for migraines, reengineering the UK education system for 21st-century digital skills, and work in the future of emotion in human-computer interaction.
Department of Computer Science, University of Liverpool, UK
Another university working to train the next generation of computer scientists, Liverpool also conducts research in fields such as artificial intelligence and algorithms and networks. It recently opened a digital innovation facility to expand research efforts further and regularly wins competitions and prizes in research from events and hackathons around the world.
The Institute for Ethical AI & Machine Learning
The Institute pushes the boundaries of research in ethical AI through a framework of eight principles: human augmentation, explainability, bias evaluation, reproducible operations, displacement strategy, practical accuracy, trust by privacy, and security risks. It offers open-source tools such as XAI Framework for other researchers and offers security checklists such as the AI-RFX procurement framework. In fact, it makes all its frameworks for responsible design open source to advance the principles of ethical AI development.
Max Planck Institute for Informatics
Part of the respected Max Planck scientific institutes, the Informatics branch works on algorithms with a broad share of applications. The institute is currently working on human motion from video and IMUs, making computers “know” their knowledge is limited, and distributed algorithms for fault-tolerant hardware.
University of Freiburg
A public research university located in Germany, Freiburg is also home to the Foundations of Artificial Intelligence. The group’s current research projects include hybrid reasoning for intelligent systems, qualitative spatial reasoning, and small-scale autonomous redundant intralogistics systems (KARIS). It recently opened a new research center, The Institute for Machine-Brain Interfacing Technology, and was part of a collaboration to create European Law Institute model rules on artificial intelligence.
Learn more about AI Research Labs and Data Science Research at ODSC Europe 2022
A number of these research labs will be well-represented at ODSC Europe 2022 coming up this June 15th-16th in London and virtually. Here are some related sessions:
- Ethnicity, Equity, and AI: Sara Khalid Senior | Research Associate in Biomedical Data Science and University Research Lecturer | University of Oxford
- Advanced NLP: Deep Learning and Transfer Learning for Natural Language Processing: Dipanjan (DJ) Sarkar | Lead Data Scientist / Google Developer Expert — ML | SIT Academy, Zurich
- Rule Induction and Reasoning in Knowledge Graphs: Daria Stepanova, PhD | Research Scientist | Bosch Center for AI
- Bayesian Modeling in Industry: Thomas Wiecki, PhD | Chief Executive Officer | PyMC Labs
- Healthcare Predictive Modeling with Graph Networks: Wade Schulz, MD, PhD | Assistant Professor; Director, Center for Computational Health | Yale University
- Evaluating Generalisation in Natural Language Processing Models: Dieuwke Hupkes, PhD Research Scientist, Scientific Manager of ELLIS Amsterdam | Facebook AI Research, European Lab for Learning an Intelligent Systems (ELLIS)
- Explainability by Design: a Methodology to Support Explanations in Decision-making Systems: Luc Moreau, PhD | Professor of Computer Science and Head of the Department of Informatics | King’s College
- Social Biases in Text Representations and their Mitigation: Danushka Bollegala, PhD | Professor in the Department of Computer Science | University of Liverpool
- Scientific Discovery and Unsupervised Disentanglement: Yair Weiss, PhD | Professor School of Computer Science and Engineering Hebrew | University of Jerusalem
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