UK – Serious about AI

News reports in the last few days have shown that the UK is serious about Artificial Intelligence (AI).  The UK Prime Minister Theresa May has announced an industrial strategy that pledges millions to AI research to assist with the early diagnosis of cancer. 

In the UK, the National Health Service (NHS) offers a cradle-to-grave service and consequently has vast amounts of recent and historic data.  This data will be invaluable when analyzed and used in the creation of algorithms to support early diagnosis in the future.  However, this does raise some concerns as it would necessitate commercial companies having access to patient data.

The Cancer Research UK charity says if this infrastructure could cut the number of late diagnosis by half in the next 15 years, then for just the four major cancer types – lung, bowel, prostate and ovary – an additional 22,000 people would survive each year, beyond the first five years after diagnosis.

Initiatives by companies

In addition, Samsung Research (the advanced R&D hub of Samsung Electronics) has announced plans to establish three AI centers, one in Cambridge, UK with the other two in Canada and Russia.  These new centers add to the existing ones in Seoul and Silicon Valley.

The Cambridge AI Centre will be led by Andrew Blake, previously Director of Microsoft’s Cambridge Laboratory.  He is a pioneer in the development of e.g. algorithms that make it possible for computers to behave as seeing machines.

Samsung’s vision for AI has 5 core aspects:

• User-centric
• Always learning
• Always there
• Always helpful

The aim is to build an AI platform under a common architecture that can be quickly scaled and provides deep understanding of usage context and behaviors, making it more relevant and useful.

As a UK resident myself, I am very pleased to hear that we are embracing this technology as its uses will only increase as more IoT devices are embedded with AI in the future.