Royal Holloway academic awarded £1million to pioneer AI methods for scientific discovery

Dr Alessio Spurio Mancini, from the Department of Physics, has been awarded a Leverhulme Research Leadership Award to develop a new Artificial Intelligence (AI) hub for scientific discovery.

The funding for the University's Environment for Computational Learning, Interdisciplinary Physics and Scientific Excellence (ECLIPSE) will go towards employing multiple postdoctoral researchers and PhD students over five years to build a cross-disciplinary team spanning AI, physics, statistics and geoscience.

ECLIPSE will look at making AI-driven discoveries that people can trust across fields ranging from cosmology to earthquake science with higher accuracy. It will also tackle a key limitation of many current AI approaches in science: producing answers without fully capturing any uncertainty or impact of modelling assumptions.

The team will develop methods that make predictions and conclusions that are not just faster, but more reliable.

Dr Alessio Spurio Mancini from Royal Holloway and leading on the project, said: "This incredible award will allow me to build a team dedicated to tackling one of the most important challenges in modern science: making AI-driven discoveries that we can truly trust.

"In fields from cosmology to earthquake science, we need methods that tell us, not just what the answer might be, but how confident we can be in it.

"ECLIPSE will develop these uncertainty-aware approaches and apply them to some of the most profound questions about our Universe and our planet. I am deeply grateful to the Leverhulme Trust for their visionary support."

Opportunities for researchers and PHDs to be part of this can be found here.