Innovate UK

Frontier AI Benchmarking Datasets in Lancashire

Innovate UK

Business

Expires:

Total: 4500000

Individual: 750000

Minimum company size: 1

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Innovate UK, part of UK Research and Innovation (UKRI), will invest a minimum of £4.5 million on Frontier AI Benchmarking Datasets. This funding is from Innovate UK, part of UK Research and Innovation and is subject to a sufficient number of high quality applications being received.
The aim of this competition is to support projects that create high-quality benchmarks based on representative dataset slices to enable the evaluation of new AI models, while also developing larger, AI-ready annotated and curated datasets.

The full dataset should be accompanied with clear plans for further utilisation, including commercial exploitation through licensing or intellectual property, and clear routes for industry access and use, aligned with the following thematic priorities:

The Frontier AI Benchmarking Datasets solutions must align with one or more of the two missions:

  1. AI-Enabled Health and Life Sciences: Making the UK the best place to develop and deploy AI across medicines discovery, development and manufacturing, predictive healthcare applications, and clinical trials.
  2. Advanced Materials with AI: Building a world leading AI-first materials R&D capability spanning aerospace, net zero technologies, defence materials, semiconductors.

These will be to create benchmark datasets and evaluation harnesses to enable robust, comparable evaluation of AI models in priority thematic areas and further support training of new AI models.

We encourage applications from consortia that bring together data-owning organisations and partners with expertise in data engineering, annotation and benchmarking. Strong applications will clearly demonstrate the value add the benchmarking and datasets will bring to the development and validation of AI and ML models over existing benchmarks and datasets available.

Your proposal must deliver all of the following:
  • an open benchmark package including benchmark task definition and evaluation protocol; an openly accessible benchmark dataset; complete evaluation harness usable by third parties; documentation and metadata
  • a fully curated and annotated full dataset
  • details on the Intellectual Property (IP) licence and access route governing the full dataset slice

Applications involving data from Theme 1, must demonstrate appropriate data governance and privacy protections. Any released data must be anonymised or de-identified.

In applying to this competition, you are entering into a competitive process. This competition has a funding limit, so we may not be able to fund all the proposed projects. It may be the case that your project scores highly but we are still unable to fund it.

Our experience from similar competitions suggests that you could have 10% chance of success.

We consider a range of factors when determining whether to provide funding to applicants. This includes an assessment of prior conduct, such as any outstanding payments owed to Innovate UK or UKRI. Such factors may influence the funding decision, potentially resulting in a refusal of funding or an award subject to additional scrutiny.

We also reserve the right to adjust funding allocations for any of our competitions. This may be in response to changes in policy, portfolio funding considerations or broader government funding decisions.

This competition closes at 11am UK time on the deadline stated in this Innovate UK competition brief. We cannot guarantee other government or third party sites will always show the correct competition information.
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