The European Laboratory for Learning and Intelligent Systems (ELLIS) recently added The University of Manchester as a partner of its global members who strive towards a meaningful contribution to securing Europe’s sovereignty and leadership in the research field of modern artificial intelligence (AI).

Four new international units have been announced including; Manchester, Jena and Stuttgart in Germany and Milan in Italy. The new units join a network of world-class institutions across 14 European countries and Israel.

The University of Manchester has recently strengthened its position as a centre for research into AI fundamentals and impactful applications of AI to improve health, security and sustainability. Last year the University appointed AI Chairs in each of its faculties followed by several excellent machine learning faculty appointments in the department of Computer Science.

The University of Manchester has been a partner of the Alan Turing Institute since 2018 and is home to 33 Turing Fellows. It has a thriving community of data science and AI researchers, with over 900 researchers affiliated to its Institute for Data Science and AI (IDSAI). Manchester’s ELLIS unit brings together experts in AI fundamentals with experts in the application of AI in other fields, with particular strengths in health, and will connect with other leading experts in the ELLIS network across Europe.

Magnus Rattray (IDSAI Director and ELLIS Health Programme Fellow) said: “The University of Manchester continues to grow as a centre of excellence for AI research and the new ELLIS unit will further strengthen this activity. Our new Chair in AI, Samuel Kaski, was recently awarded a Turing AI World-leading Researcher Fellowship with an ambitious programme of research on human-AI teams with applications to drug design, synthetic biology and digital twins.

“Through the new ELLIS unit Manchester will be able to better link machine learning researchers across Europe with impactful applications across many disciplines.”

Manchester’s ELLIS unit brings together experts in AI fundamentals with experts in the application of AI in other fields. Their research focus will be probabilistic modelling and Bayesian inference, AI technologies that work better with people, ML for digital health and medicine, and privacy-preserving ML.

The University of Manchester has established a strategic partnership in a shared professorship with the director of the ELLIS unit Helsinki, Samuel Kaski from Aalto University, Finland. This Northern link will be used in the future to set up the ELLIS units in Manchester and Helsinki as a twin unit, with tight collaboration already under way through research collaboration and exchange, which will be opened up to the rest of the ELLIS network.