A Look at Data Science Research Institutes in Europe

Artificial intelligence and machine learning are fields of increasingly growing interest by the private sector, yet they’re still led by academia. Maybe not surprisingly, research institutes in Europe and big tech companies are also rapidly developing the field.

In this article, we intend to mention some of the research centres and institutions around data science, machine learning, and artificial intelligence in Europe. This is not a complete list and of course, it won’t be feasible to include all the centres, but we will give you a starting point to know more about the research in Europe.

Research Institutions in Europe

The Alan Turing Institute is the national institute for data science and artificial intelligence in the UK, and is a leading organization applying research with multiple projects and programmes. The Turing Institute formed in 2015/16 by five founding Universities in 2015: Cambridge, Edinburgh, Oxford, UCL, and Warwick, and now has 13 universities and partners. The universities of Leeds, Manchester, Newcastle, Queen Mary University of London, Birmingham, Exeter, Bristol, and Southampton joined the institute in 2018.

From UCL we can mention the Gatsby Computational Neuroscience Unit. Their objectives are to study neural computational theories of perception and action in neural and machine systems, with an emphasis on learning.

The University of Oxford has the research lab around ethics called Digital Ethics Lab which launched in 2017, to tackle the ethical challenges posed by digital innovation.

The Bayes Centre, part of the University of Edinburgh, is using data science and AI to shape a better future. It’s located beside the Informatics Forum in Edinburgh, a center for innovation and the use of data science for real-world problems.

The Fraunhofer Institute for Intelligent Analysis and Information Systems (IAIS) in Germany. You can find here a list of their publications since 2006.

The Max Planck Institute in Germany, number 83 in total. Here you can see the research in machine learning at the Computer Science institutes. The publications come from the Intelligent Systems Institute in Stuttgart.

In Switzerland, you can find the ETH Zurich University with Institute for Machine Learning. The Institute for ML administers the Max Planck ETH Center for Learning Systems, a joint initiative with the Max Planck Society, you can find its latest publications in this link.

The Swiss Data Science Center formed by EPFL and ETH Zurich. And they are behind the Renku platform for reproducible and collaborative data science. This idea has a tremendous future, we look forward when it’s fully developed.

TuDelft University in the Netherlands with its Artificial Intelligence Designed for Values devoted their focus on responsible AI. The idea of designing AI with human values incorporated from the beginning seems the only way to assure a responsible future.

We can mention some institutions doing applied research in Europe. For example, Deepmind, the creators of AlphaGo, a Google company in London presents open research with more than 200 publications.

Amazon Cambridge Development Centre, UK works in ML technologies developing products such as Alexa and Air Prime. Their director is Neil Lawrence who was a key speaker at ODSC London in 2017.

Facebook Research has many locations in Europe. Here you can check their publications in data science and machine learning.

The Microsoft Research Lab in Cambridge, UK, focuses on AI and publishes frequently here.

Conclusion

It’s exciting to see the ecosystem of research in European institutions develop within a wide range of subjects. Of special interest are those around ethical AI because as these institutions are fundamentally exploring fairness in a field where big tech companies are leading without any impositions, but the auto imposed ones and regulations around the use of data, mainly used as training data.