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A St Anne’s College Fellow has been chosen to lead a major new government-backed UK AI Research Lab as part of a £60 million national investment in the future of artificial intelligence.
Associate Professor Jakob Foerster, Fellow of St Anne’s College and Associate Professor in Oxford’s Department of Engineering Science, will lead the new British Open-ended Learning and Discovery Lab (BOLD). Hosted by the University of Oxford and funded by UK Research and Innovation’s Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC), BOLD will receive support over the next six years to develop a new generation of open, human-centred and resource-efficient AI systems.
Bringing together researchers from Oxford, UCL and Imperial College London, alongside industry and technology partners, BOLD will explore fundamentally new approaches to AI that can operate safely and effectively in the real world. The research aims to support applications across areas including education, transport, healthcare and scientific discovery, helping translate cutting-edge research into tools that can benefit society.
The appointment highlights both Professor Foerster’s international standing in AI research and St Anne’s growing contribution to one of the most important scientific and technological fields of the coming decades.
Rather than relying solely on ever-larger models trained on vast datasets, BOLD will investigate new AI paradigms that are more efficient, adaptable and aligned with human needs. The goal is to develop technologies that can strengthen the UK’s long-term capability in AI while widening access to the benefits of advanced systems.
Professor Foerster said:
“The UK cannot win the global AI race simply by trying to outspend the largest technology companies on data and compute. BOLD is about a different route: discovering fundamentally new ways to build AI that are more efficient, more open and better aligned with human needs. “By focusing on new paradigms for learning, rather than only scaling existing methods, we aim to help secure the UK’s sovereign capability in AI and ensure that academic research can shape the future of the field.”
“The UK cannot win the global AI race simply by trying to outspend the largest technology companies on data and compute. BOLD is about a different route: discovering fundamentally new ways to build AI that are more efficient, more open and better aligned with human needs.
“By focusing on new paradigms for learning, rather than only scaling existing methods, we aim to help secure the UK’s sovereign capability in AI and ensure that academic research can shape the future of the field.”
The new lab will be built around three core research themes: developing alternatives to conventional AI training methods; creating AI systems that learn and discover alongside people; and enabling robots and other physical systems to learn effectively in real-world environments with limited data and computing resources.
As the host institution, the University of Oxford will provide the framework for collaboration across the partner universities and the wider UK AI ecosystem. The project will also benefit from AI@Oxford, which coordinates AI research and engagement across the University.
Alongside its research ambitions, BOLD will become a major training environment for future AI researchers. The programme includes £2 million dedicated to doctoral recruitment, with plans to appoint an initial cohort of fellows and PhD students across the collaborating institutions.
Open science will be central to the lab’s approach, with plans to release open-source software, benchmarks and evaluation tools, helping broaden participation in frontier AI research and accelerate innovation across the sector.