Artificial Intelligence

(asked on 30th April 2019) - View Source

Question to the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy:

To ask Her Majesty's Government whether they have plans to invest in projects to improve the development of artificial intelligence in the UK.


Answered by
Lord Henley Portrait
Lord Henley
This question was answered on 14th May 2019

Artificial Intelligence is one of the global trends which will transform our future, changing jobs and businesses across the country, and we want people to be able to capitalise on these opportunities.

The AI Sector Deal, announced in April 2018, outlines up to £0.95bn package of support for the sector, which includes Government, industry and academic contributions.

Since the Sector Deal launch the Government has invested in a number of areas. For example:

  • Announcement of £20 million Industrial Strategy Challenge Fund (ISCF) support for Next Generation Services using artificial intelligence, and £210 million ISCF support for Data to early diagnostics and precision medicine which includes using AI to analyse medical images in digital pathology.
  • Funded up to £50m for five new centres of excellence for digital pathology and imaging, including radiology, using AI medical advances.
  • Funded £30m for the new Bayes Centre in Edinburgh, a world-leading centre of data science and AI in October 2018.
  • £3m for three new research projects to investigate how businesses can make best use of AI in insurance and law as well as analysing consumer attitudes to AI.
  • Announced up to £79 million of Government funding to study 5 million healthy people to develop new diagnostic tests using AI.
  • Announced up to £79 million for three new AI programmes to transform engineering, urban planning and healthcare.
  • Announced £600,000 funding for UK-Korea Health Sciences collaboration to focus on better diagnosis of dementia through the use of AI.
  • 40 artificial intelligence and data analytics projects, backed by £13 million in Government, announced to boost productivity and improve customer service.

Our ambition in AI and data will not stop at the Sector Deal. This is only the start of the UK’s plans to be recognised as a place where ingenuity and entrepreneurship can flourish, where technology follows the highest ethical standards and where the transformative potential of this technology is spread across the UK economy more widely and for the betterment of society.

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