About the Hub

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Capacity, capability and community

The AI4CI Hub is a UKRI National AI Research Hub involving universities from each of the UK’s four constituent nations and over forty initial stakeholder partners from across academia, government, charities and industry. The Hub pursues applied research at the interface between the fields of AI and Collective Intelligence, and works to build capacity, capability and community in this area of research across the UK and beyond.

To address society’s most pressing challenges we must be able to reliably engineer important new kinds of Collective Intelligence:

Connected communities of people, devices, data and software collaboratively sensing and interacting in real-time to achieve positive outcomes at multiple scales

The AI4CI Loop

Realising our goals necessarily involve addressing both halves of what we characterise as the AI4CI Loop:

  1. Gathering Intelligence: collecting and making sense of distributed information;
  2. Inform Behaviour: acting on that intelligence to effectively support decision making at multiple levels.
The AI4CI Loop starts with Gather Intelligence, moving clockwise to Machine Learning Analytics, Collective Intelligence Policies, Smart Agents, Inform  Behaviour and finally Real World Collective System before looping round to start the process again.

Unlocking new possibilities with AI

New AI methods are driving progress across the AI4CI Loop.

  1. The first half is being revolutionised through mobile devices, instrumented environments, data science, machine learning analytics, and real-time visualisation.
  2. The second half is transformed by decentralised smart agents that interact directly with users.

Linking both halves requires  new human-centred design principles, new governance practices and new infrastructure appropriate for systems that deploy AI for collective intelligence at scale.

The AI for Collective Intelligence Hub addresses both halves of the AI4CI Loop through five key application areas (healthcare, finance, the environment, pandemics, and cities) and two cross-cutting themes (human-centered design and governance infrastructure).

The Hub connects AI and machine learning researchers with domain-specific academics and stakeholder partners. Together, they co-create pioneering case studies and build capacity, capability, and community to advance AI for Collective Intelligence in real-world settings.