AI-deas: Do you have an idea for using AI to transform education and cultural heritage?

ai@cam is the University of Cambridge’s new flagship mission to create AI technologies that serve science, citizens, and society. You can find out more about our work at https://ai.cam.ac.uk

The Accelerate Programme for Scientific Discovery is an initiative funded by Schmidt Sciences to advance the use of AI for scientific discovery at the University of Cambridge. By combining research, training, and engagement activities, the Accelerate Programme aims to drive a step change in the use of AI for science across the University of Cambridge. You can find out more at https://science.ai.cam.ac.uk/

Last year, we launched our AI-deas initiative as an incubator for interdisciplinary research. This awarded funding to five challenge-led research programmes. Working with the Accelerate Programme for Scientific Discovery, we are now able to fund a further programme in the education and cultural heritage sectors.

This call is open to staff at the University of Cambridge, working in any discipline, including natural, physical, biological, social, medical, and computer sciences, arts, humanities, and engineering, and the University’s collections community. PhD students can submit ideas, but please get permission from your supervisor first.

Today, we’re launching the first of a two-step process. We’re inviting expressions of interest with ideas for research that can addresses issues in educational and cultural heritage, and that helps advance ai@cam’s mission to create AI that serves science, citizens, and society. We are also seeking your input on how we can best support research through this call.

The second step of this process will convene the community of researchers with shared interests in education and cultural heritage to help develop these ideas. The reason for working in two phases like this is to encourage collaboration: we know there is interest in AI from across the University, and world-leading expertise across departments, but it isn’t always easy to find collaborators, and we hope to facilitate this process.

Full proposals will be invited following the workshop and we aim to announce successful projects in December 2024. The timeline for grants funded through this call will be confirmed, with all grants ending by 30 April 2026.

While this first stage of expressions of interest is focused on the research community within the University (including its museums and collections), we hope the resulting challenges will engage with external partners both in the UK and beyond. We’re particularly interested in engaging with communities affected by the development of AI and user groups with an interest in the design of AI systems.

We have £150k to allocate to this call. Before deciding how to package these funds – for example, as small grants or a single challenge – we want to better understand the interests and needs of the Cambridge community. The application form seeks your view on this. We will provide further information to those who have expressed interest in the scheme in the autumn including details of a workshop to support teams in sharing their ideas and developing collaborations.

Funding will be deployable flexibly depending on the needs of the project. The amount of funding support available for projects will be confirmed at full proposal stage based on input from this EOI.

We will ask funding recipients to work with members of the ai@cam team to develop their projects, with a tailored support package from our interdisciplinary research incubator programme. We anticipate working with challenges developed in this round up to 30 April 2026, and for funds to be deployed over this period. There may also be times where we ask funding recipients to contribute to ai@cam and Accelerate Programme events and comms activities.

Please fill in the application form by 17:00, 7 October 2024. You will need to be logged in to your @cam.ac.uk account to access the form.

At this stage, we are looking for some details on your idea for using AI in the education and cultural heritage sectors, alongside some details about you. We are also asking for your views on how we can best support research through this call in terms of project scale and training and resources from our research incubator.

For further questions please contact accelerate-science@cst.cam.ac.uk. We will be holding an information and Q & A session on 19 September from 14:00 - 15:00, please sign up here for the Zoom link.

The form requests information about:

• You: Name, Department, Position * Your project: What is the problem you hope to address? What is your proposed solution? How would you approach delivering it? What type of support would help bring your AI-dea to life?