Deadline: 10-Oct-22
The Alan Turing Institute and DSO National Laboratories in Singapore Partnership are seeking to fund several projects to develop novel methods in AI and Data Science methods applicable to the three themes of misinformation and disinformation, humanitarian aid and disaster Relief, and counter terrorism.
The partnership between DSO National Laboratories, Singapore’s largest national defence research and development organisation and The Alan Turing Institute is within Defence and Security Programme. Together, the Turing and DSO will explore new research methods designed to help understand complex datasets, covering different modalities such as image, text, and audio. Researchers will work to develop novel methods to help with the analysis of these fascinating and complex data sets.
Themes
- Misinformation and disinformation
- New techniques in analysing social media content will enable the identification of harmful online material such as malign influence, extremist rhetoric, and the encouragement of serious violence, whether it is spread as text, image, or video. This will help to curb the speed at which such material can be shared and ensure that citizens continue to benefit from safe and trusted online spaces.
- Humanitarian aid and disaster relief
- In a period of unprecedented global disasters fuelled by a changing climate, the ability to effectively provide responses to these disasters becomes more important than ever. A growing ability to collect data about such disasters, driven by both more prolific sensors and autonomous vehicles, provide a significant opportunity to first responders in tackling these disasters. AI techniques can help in areas such as analysing imagery, locating survivors, and providing important cultural, contextual, and linguistic support to first responders, especially in typically low-resource languages. Such techniques are of much importance in multilateral humanitarian relief efforts.
- Counter terrorism
- Data analysis plays a large and substantial part in countering extremism. Analysts have to sift through large amounts of data to find threats, looking for the needle in the haystack that could result in a foiled extremist plot. Novel AI techniques can help analysts undertake this in a more efficient and expedient way.
Research Priorities
Submissions are expected to make contributions to the foundational research in AI and methodological areas of priority while fitting within one of the three themes. The methodological priorities include (but are not necessarily limited to):
- Artificial Intelligent (AI) technologies such as self-supervised learning, meta-learning, data augmentation, continual learning, contextual reasoning, or active learning to overcome the lack of labelled data.
- Deep Learning and research into the multi-modal representation of videos.
- Deep Learning and Computational Linguistic for NLP
- Machine reasoning (symbolic AI), graph neural network, inferencing
- Research into NLP technologies for few-shot topic filtering, opinion summarization, dialogue analysis, and multi-lingual learning.
- Explainable AI on disentangling causal from correlation in the data for the outputs of machine learning to be explainable.
- Develop measures and metrics for mis/dis-information campaigns and hate speech
- Probabilistic programming
- Computational game theory
Funding Information
- The typical funding for projects on this programme is around 250K for an 18-month project. Shorter projects are welcome, but each proposal will be assessed on his own merits, the assessment criteria and in relation to the whole suite of projects across themes.
- Duration: The project length cannot exceed 24 months and must finish by August 2024.
Eligibility Criteria
- They invite researchers from any UK-based universities and research institutes to submit an application (please note non-Turing university partners researchers are eligible to apply too).
- The lead applicant must be based in a UK University or research institute.
For more information, visit https://www.turing.ac.uk/work-turing/call-proposals-2022-dso-labs-singapore-collaboration