Exponential rise of the AI hub powered by mathematics
When the EPSRC announced £100 million in funding for nine new AI research hubs in 2024, the Erlangen AI Hub took its first steps from a lofty concept towards becoming one of the UK’s foremost research hubs, using mathematical principles to inform the next generation of AI. Now in its second year, as the hub’s rapid evolution continues, it is establishing itself at the front and centre of the UK’s AI landscape, defining the way we understand and use AI.
The Erlangen AI Hub draws inspiration from Felix Klein’s Erlangen Programme, which brought a revolutionary, unifying perspective to geometry and symmetry in the 19th and 20th Centuries. True to its namesake, the hub has been working to consolidate disparate elements of mathematics, algorithms, and computing, harnessing classical theories and encouraging new ones, and uniting the world of mathematics to define the future of AI.
Built on an active network established through previous influential EPSRC-funded projects, the hub was propelled by a foundation of collaborative research that had already positioned the UK as a world-leader in applied and computational topology. With a ‘dream team’ of experts spanning the UK’s leading academic institutions, the hub has forged close ties with major industry players, ensuring that its every step is defined by real world requirements.
Originally the brainchild of Professor Michael Bronstein at the University of Oxford, the hub’s management structure has been enhanced. Dr Anthea Monod of Imperial College London and Professor Jeffrey Giansiracusa of Durham University now sit alongside Bronstein as Co-Directors of the hub. The hub’s leadership team has collectively supervised more than 200 PhDs, received £117m in external funding, been awarded 4 Whitehead, 2 Adams, and 3 Leverhulme prizes, and created 17 tech spinout companies.
It is little wonder then that the hub’s first year alone has seen a raft of collaborative research both within and across the hub’s nodes, which span the length of the UK from Aberdeen to Southampton. The hub’s groundbreaking work has been presented at key forums and premier conferences in Machine Learning and AI, including the Neural Information Processing Systems conference (NeurIPS), the International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML), and the International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR). It has also witnessed key collaborations across industry, government and beyond.
With the hub already allied with key industry partners, from the BBC and Ofcom to Siemens and Wm Morrison Supermarkets, new collaborations have emerged over the course of the first year. These include a collaboration with Microsoft Research, where topology was used to study the shape of LLM activations under adversarial influences, and a partnership with Oxford Drug Design, to improve virtual ligand screening in the drug development pipeline by leveraging geometric data analysis.
The hub’s first year also established major inroads into government, notably a partnership led by Professor Tom Coates at Imperial. Coates developed a training course entitled AI Fundamentals, which his team continues to deliver to civil servants across government, with bespoke versions being offered to incoming civil servants with AI in their remits. The collaboration brings an additional £3.2 million in funding, with the creation of the new Policy Forum at Imperial led by Coates, and three new PDRA positions.
The growing ambition of the Erlangen AI Hub does not end there. A groundbreaking Taxonomy for AI Technologies, spearheaded by Professor Peter Grindrod at Oxford, is set to be rolled out. Built using simple language, the Taxonomy will act as a road map to help those in industry and beyond to better understand and incorporate AI technologies into their operations, and to help non-experts engage with the uses of AI in a more meaningful way.
“We believed it would only be a matter of time before the hub became a key player on the UK’s AI scene, but even so we are delighted by its impressive early impact. Mathematics is at the very core of AI, and AI is at the very heart of modern business and society. With our outstanding team, we are leveraging the power of mathematics to make a safer, more reliable AI future for us all.”
Hub Co-Director Professor Jeffery Giansiracusa
With the hub’s success predicated on the depth and breadth of its team, its early drive has been focused on growing its skills base. Overseen by academics from the University of Oxford, Durham University, Imperial College London, Queen Mary University of London, the University of Aberdeen, and the University of Southampton, the hub’s research is driven largely by its multi-talented Postdoctoral Research Associates (PDRAs) and PhD students.
In May, the hub gathered at the Maths Institute at Oxford to bring together its growing group of PDRAs and PhD students, to meet peers, share knowledge, and connect more closely with the mission of the hub. The event marked the conclusion of a highly formative first year for the hub and cemented its position as a growing, dynamic force, amassing some of the country’s finest minds working on cutting-edge research at the intersection of Maths and AI.
The hub’s ambitious research programme applies geometry and topology to questions that underlie AI systems, via four themes of Understanding Data, Understanding ML Models, Understanding Learning, and Understanding Decision-Making. In May, PDRAs presented research in areas spanning Learning with Symmetries and Robust Verification of Stochastic Systems, to Non-Archimedean Optimisation and Topological Data Analysis on DNNs.
“We are very proud of our highly talented hub team, whose cutting-edge research at the crossover of maths and AI is breaking important new ground. Where maths once represented modern science, we are now leveraging its firm foundations to answer questions posed by the modern world of AI. It has been hugely satisfying to see the hub take shape and we are excited to see where it goes from here.”
Hub Co-Director Dr Anthea Monod
Following closely on the heels of the Oxford meet was the hub’s first ‘public launch’: a major three-day conference at Queen Mary University of London, which raised the hub to a new level. Over 100 leading minds gathered from across the UK’s mathematical, algorithmic and computational communities. It represented a seminal moment, uniting disparate academic fields and commercial stakeholders to advance the application of pure mathematics in AI.
In terms of attendance and high-quality scientific content, the event surpassed expectations. However, its lasting impact was that of creating connections and forging a powerful coalition of like-minded experts. True to the hub’s ethos, the conference helped bring composite knowledge into a single domain, stimulating debate, and ensuring that the concept of mathematics as the key to AI’s future was accessible to the widest possible audience.
As the hub’s industry partners play a major role in the life of the hub, so too did they make up a key element of the conference. With talks from high profile speakers from across industry, including Google DeepMind and Apple, and one of the conference’s three days dedicated to industry, the hub ensured that its focus stayed rooted in real world use cases, and that its world-leading research continues to be defined by and relevant to business and society.
As the Erlangen AI Hub’s team, expertise and partnerships continue to grow, so too does its reach and influence, and it can now rightly count itself a key part of the nation’s AI conversation. With a new website and newsletter to cater for its growing network, its future seems full of promise. However, just as it follows in the footsteps of the original Erlangen Programme, its transformative work is likely to reverberate well beyond its own lifetime.
