About Us

Our major goal is to highlight the importance of AI in areas such as exploration/discovery, predictive modelling, creation, behaviour analysis, as well as consideration of AI theory development, ethics, interventions, and enabling technology. The group will act as a centre for collaboration between departments and disciplines, and will involve representatives from existing departmental centres, external stakeholders, businesses, and AI-focused research groups to facilitate inter-disciplinary connections. The group will also manage strategic planning for funding and policy opportunities, coordinate public and policy engagement, and build the critical mass of the AI community at Aberystwyth to increase outward facing reputation, branding and visibility. 

Objectives

• To showcase the wealth of AI knowledge held within Aberystwyth University through a variety of avenues including research, academic and business networks and cross-disciplinary work involving AI. 
• To support members in undertaking world-leading, interdisciplinary, and impactful research in AI, leading to lifechanging outcomes such as: a) the creation of new AI systems to transform society, b) the development of state-of-the-art AI techniques for real world applications, c) the study of human-AI interactions. 
• To facilitate the next generation of AI-enabled researchers by developing a collaborative AI research community at AU made up of early career researchers, research students (PhD and DProf), and early career researchers from a wide variety of disciplines.   
• To provide an interactive platform for AU collaboration with government, industry and other academic / scientific partners. This will facilitate knowledge exchange as well as innovation and will create a sustainable research base for future training and commercial exploitation of new techniques in the area.  
• To develop a fundamental mathematical underpinning of AI methods to aid explainability and the development of novel ground-breaking techniques. 
• To establish the required infrastructure (e.g. data sharing, storage and management) to facilitate inter-disciplinary research.  

Activities 

The development of the Our AI Enabled World Hub will concentrate on existing and novel research areas within Aberystwyth University. Initially, there are seven such themes within the Hub, which are described below. We will use (possibly funded) sandpit events, which will be open to all and might have funding associated with them, to grow the number of themes and participation in existing themes. 

We will run a yearly event to share the research developed within the hub, which is likely to take the form of a 3MT event, where researchers use 3 minutes and 1 slide to describe their research to a general audience. 

Initial Themes

Our AI Enabled Word group will focus on 7 key AI-related themes. These themes will draw on research expertise amongst AU staff involved in formulating the work of the group in its early stages (we welcome participation in these areas facilitated through an open call):  

• Exploration and Discovery 
• Ethics 
• Behaviour Analysis 
• Predictive Modelling 
• AI Theory & Development 
• Interventions 
• Creation