Professor Anisoara Calinescu and Professor Shimon Whiteson join new UK AI research lab

Professor Anisoara Calinescu and Professor Shimon Whiteson will join a new cross-university AI Research Lab, part of a £60 million investment by the UKRI’s Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC).

The British Open-ended Learning and Discovery Lab (BOLD) will bring together researchers from host institution Oxford, UCL and Imperial College London as well as industry and technology partners to develop open, human-centred, resource-efficient AI systems that can operate safely and effectively in the real world. This will ultimately help turn research into tools that can be used in workplaces, infrastructure and public services - supporting wider adoption across the economy.

The UK cannot win the global AI race simply by trying to outspend the largest technology companies on data and compute. BOLD is about a different route: discovering fundamentally new ways to build AI that are more efficient, more open and better aligned with human needs. By focusing on new paradigms for learning, rather than only scaling existing methods, we aim to help secure the UK’s sovereign capability in AI and ensure that academic research can shape the future of the field. Associate Professor Jakob Foerster, Department of Engineering, who will lead the BOLD lab.

Professor Calinescu and Professor Whiteson will be part of the interdisciplinary team working to advance fundamental AI research and help establish the UK as a global leader in the field.

The research programme will be built around three pillars:

• Beyond backpropagation will explore new ways to train AI that could require less computing power, memory and energy, while making systems more stable and adaptable.
• Human-centric learning and discovery will train AI systems to work with people, including as ‘co-scientists’ that can help research teams generate ideas, test hypotheses and accelerate discovery.
• Embodied learning will enable robots and other physical systems to learn and adapt under real-world constraints, with limited data and onboard computing power.

The project will also create a major training environment for the UK’s next generation of AI researchers, with £2 million dedicated for hiring doctoral students. In its first phase, BOLD plans to recruit an initial cohort of 12 BOLD fellows and 18 PhD students, while building a collaborative environment for doctoral students, interns and fellows across Oxford, UCL and Imperial.

The lab will also benefit from Oxford's AI@Oxford initiative, which helps coordinate AI research, engagement and collaboration across the University, connecting expertise from multiple disciplines and fostering links with external partners.

Oxford has remarkable strength across the full spectrum of AI research, our involvement in the newly announced labs demonstrates how we can connect that expertise, helping colleagues across the University to coordinate, amplify and communicate our collective ambition. Professor Sir Nigel Shadbolt, Chair of AI@Oxford Research

Further information about the new AI labs can be found on the UKRI website.