London start-ups are being technical support to develop and scale their artificial intelligence (AI) projects.
The Alan Turing Institute, the UK’s centre for data science and AI, will host a series of five-day ‘hackathons’ to help UK innovators, based in the capital, to nail down their technical solutions.
Partnering with Digital Catapult, the UK government’s start-up accelerator, the Alan Turing Institute will open its doors for nine different ‘start-ups or scale-ups’ to lead its week-long ‘data study groups’ to tackle data engineering challenges associated with their projects.
The study groups operate as ‘collaborative hackathons’, pulling together researchers from across the UK. They afford new businesses access to technical expertise, computation power, knowledge and innovation.
The sessions will be held between December 2018 and March 2020.
This initiative is part of Digital Catapult’s ‘machine intelligence garage’ programme, commissioned as part of CAP-AI project, part-funded by the European Regional Development Fund.
Sebastian Vollmer, director of data study groups at the Turing Institute said: “A data study group is a wholly unique experience, in which a collaborative community of motivated data science experts team up to jointly create a seed for follow-up research and translational activities.
“Researchers that bring their talent to attack these data problems are true innovators, ranging from PhD students to early career researchers to leading academics in their field.”
He added: “Each group comprises a diverse mix of organisations at different stages of development, all interacting to find solutions to thorny problems. Start-ups and scale-ups will come away from this experience with a fresh perspective, having had the opportunity to trial new cutting-edge research methods.”
Jeremy Silver, chief executive at Digital Catapult, said: “The UK has the right ingredients to become a global leader in the development of AI and machine learning and this partnership is a brilliant way of demonstrating how start-ups and scale-ups can apply their ideas to real-world problems.”
The sessions are open to applications here.
