Turing@Birmingham

The University of Birmingham is one of thirteen university partners of the Alan Turing Institute, the UK’s national institute for data science and AI. 

The Institute, established in 2015, is named in honour of Alan Turing, the distinguished mathematician and computer scientist whose seminal work in the 1950s laid the theoretical and philosophical foundations of AI. Based at the British Library in London, “The Turing” is a hub for collaboration between universities, business, and public/third sector organisations in eight key challenge areas that will have major impacts for UK science, our economy, and our society.

Our researchers are collaborating with and contributing to the Turing activities across its programme areas on projects ranging from fundamental theory through to applications in materials science and healthcare. We are collaborating across disciplines and institutions to advance data science and AI technologies. Projects include:

• Baskerville, a state-of-the-art high performance computing resource for modelling and data analysis funded by EPSRC and delivered by the University of Birmingham in collaboration with the Turing, the Rosalind Franklin Institute and Diamond Light Source.
• HDRUK-Turing Wellcome PhD Programme, a unique programme that is training skilled mathematical and computational scientists to work in health data science research, delivered by HDRUK and the Turing in collaboration with the University of Birmingham and six other university partners.

Our Turing Team

Professor Iain Styles – Turing University Lead

Iain is Birmingham’s academic lead for the partnership with the Turing, working across the two organisations to help form new scientific partnerships and to develop the strategic partnership. At Turing, he represents Birmingham at the Turing University Leads meeting and the Research and Innovation Advisory Committee. As a Turing Fellow, he also sits on the Equality, Diversity and Inclusivity Committee and co-chairs the Training Steering Group.

Nathaniel Byrne – University Liaison Manager

Nate is the administrative lead for the Turing partnership working across the University and the Turing to help deliver the scientific strategy. Nate is responsible for the financial and contractual aspects of the partnership and manages the communications to ensure that Birmingham researchers are properly connected to and informed about the Turing’s activities.

Turing Researchers

Fifteen Birmingham academics are working with the Turing on projects that are closely aligned with the Turing’s research programmes:

• Professor Andrew Beggs (Turing Fellow) Machine Learning for Cancer Research
• Dr Biao Cai (Turing Fellow) Data-driven materials science
• Professor Jean-Baptiste Cazier (Turing Fellow) Population Diversity at varying scales
• Professor Sylvie Delacroix (Turing Fellow) Data Trusts Initiative
• Professor Georgios Gkoutos (Turing Fellow) Data Intensive Life Sciences
• Dr Samuel Johnson (Turing Fellow) Nature inspired routing for resilient networked systems
• Professor Ata Kaban (Turing Fellow) High-dimensional data analytics
• Dr Per Kristian Lehre (UKRI Turing AI Fellow)
• Professor Aleš Leonardis (Turing Fellow) Tracking membrane receptor interactions via data-driven machine learning
• Dr Luisa Orsini (Turing Fellow) Environment and Human Health: Monitoring and Prevention Using AI
• Professor Ganna Pogrebna (Turing Fellow) Social and Behavioural Data Science
• Professor Jon Rowe (Turing Fellow) Programme Director, Data Science for Science
• Professor Iain Styles (Turing Fellow) Topological hierarchies in complex image data
• Professor Peter Tino (Turing Fellow) Machine Learning in the Space of Inferential Models
• Dominic Danks (Turing Doctoral Student) Stochastic disease modelling