Advanced Research + Invention Agency (ARIA)

We’re launching three climate programmes in early September. To support these programmes + advance knowledge in each of these fields, we’ll need new multidisciplinary teams to come together: + Share your expertise + capabilities you’re looking for + We’ll help you connect with potential team members Find out more about each of the programmes + register your interest in joining a team👇 ----------------------------------- 🌱 Synthetic Plants: Aims to develop the building blocks of plant synthetic genomes and unlock new plant capabilities to meet the future needs of humankind. Download the thesis: https://lnkd.in/e7a-7UUW Apply to join a team: https://lnkd.in/eDSZrxq4 ----------------------------------- 🛰️ Forecasting Tipping Points: Looks to create an early warning system that equips us with the time + information we need to prepare for, and mitigate against, climate tipping points. Download the thesis: https://lnkd.in/eH6eNXWb Apply to join a team: https://lnkd.in/eC2hhsB6 ----------------------------------- 🌍 Exploring Climate Cooling: Will support fundamental and transdisciplinary research on approaches that might one day be used to avert, or delay, dangerous climate tipping points. Download the thesis: https://lnkd.in/e6rN23Yj Apply to join a team: https://lnkd.in/ebyqXqh9

"If you march towards a vision and you're committed to it, new paths will emerge that can get you there that you never expected." Our CEO Ilan Gur spoke to Sifted’s Startup Europe podcast about the breakthroughs we’re pursuing and the parallels between our Programme Directors + entrepreneurs. 🔍 Read more from Sifted: https://lnkd.in/da4CW7_4 🎧 Listen to the podcast: https://lnkd.in/dka3wDdS ➡ Head to our website for more on our next round of PD recruitment – opening in September: https://lnkd.in/eKVa6vq6

Our Robot Dexterity programme is now accepting full proposals. Submit your application by Thursday 19 September [12:00 midday BST]: https://lnkd.in/eQAqJwDE

From programmable plants to mathematics for safe AI, we've launched our first seven opportunity spaces. These are the areas our first cohort of Programme Directors have defined as:  + Important if true (i.e. could lead to a significant new capability for society) + Under-explored relative to its potential impact + Ripe for new talent, perspectives, or resources to change what’s possible 🔍 Dive into what we’re working on and stay up to date with our progress: https://lnkd.in/eUfunmbM

Our Precision Neurotechnologies programme is now accepting full proposals. Submit your application by Monday 9 September [12:00 BST]: https://lnkd.in/etaxrfUc

Through our Safeguarded AI programme, we’re aiming to pioneer a new approach to AI safety, in order to reap benefits of this transformative technology. Today we mark two important developments on the journey there: 📣 Our second funding call - We’re launching our second funding call for Safeguarded AI – an initial £5.4M in funding for Technical Area 3 (TA3).  - TA3 seeks to demonstrate that our approach presents a viable pathway for improving the safety and performance of business-critical or safety-critical applications.  - To make this possible, we’re looking to fund individuals or organisations interested in using our gatekeeper AI to build safeguarded products for domain-specific applications, such as optimising energy networks, clinical trials, or telecommunications networks. Find out more and apply here: https://lnkd.in/e-nHj4a4 🤝 Professor Yoshua Bengio joins our team We’re excited to announce that Yoshua Bengio has joined us as Scientific Director. In this role, he will provide the Safeguarded AI team and our R&D Creators with scientific & strategic advice on Technical Area 2 and across the broader programme. Read more in our latest Substack: https://lnkd.in/grg8AWyc

🦾 We’re looking to fund bold ideas within our Smarter Robot Bodies opportunity space. Through opportunity seed funding of up to £500k each, we want to support projects seeking to exploit progress in AI, control, materials, and manufacturing to build robots that approach - or even exceed - the capabilities of living bodies. Find out more and apply by 27 August [12:00 BST]: https://lnkd.in/e5aMa2f2

Reminder: less than a month until applications open for our next cohort of Programme Directors! Register your interest below and we’ll update you when our recruitment process goes live 👇 https://lnkd.in/eKVa6vq6

ARIA’s job is ambitious but simple: support bold starts that will drive a step change in social and economic prosperity. In our first Corporate Plan we reflect on the progress we’ve made in our first year, dive into the opportunity spaces we've identified as ripe for breakthroughs, and look to the future as we focus on long-term transformation over easy wins 👇

We’re excited to announce our first R&D Creators – the recipients of opportunity seed funding in our Nature Computes Better opportunity space. Designed to open up new research paths, opportunity seeds are small but powerful ways we empower ambitious researchers to pursue research that might otherwise fall through the cracks. Meet the Creators: David Jordan – combining theory, experiments, and engineering to understand how cells use networks of macromolecules to learn, adapt, and improvise. Shannon Egan, Brock Doiron, and Ashraf Lotfi – investigating the controllability of stochastic switching in magnetic tunnel junctions, the team is developing protocols to drive these memory devices as ultra-high-speed, high-quality hardware-based true random number generators. Juliane Simmchen and Kimia Witte – looking to engineer miniature vehicles that respond to external stimuli, each exhibiting specific behaviours that correspond to symbolic representations. Kirsty Wan – unravelling the basis of natural computation in single-celled organisms by taking a radical interdisciplinary approach combining bioimaging, live-cell experiments, and modelling, to study how single cells compute using physical attributes of its body and the environment. Phillip Stanley-Marbell – investigating if architectures that can natively represent probability distributions could serve as radically more efficient computing substrates for AI workloads. Martin Booth – addressing the barriers to deploying glass as a substrate for next-generation optical computing paradigms: the ability to manufacture at scale. Based across the UK, this group is working on advanced R&D projects at the intersection of biology, computer science, electrical engineering and AI to improve the way computers process information by exploiting principles found in nature. Find out more: https://lnkd.in/e-7JT7cS