About AI4ER
The Cambridge UKRI Centre for Doctoral Training in the Application of Artificial Intelligence to the study of Environmental Risks (AI4ER)
Artifical Intelligence (AI) offers huge potential to transform our ability to understand, monitor and predict environmental risks, providing direct societal benefit as well as potential commercial opportunities. Realising this vision requires integrating domain-specific expertise with an understanding of the relevant computational methods. This can only be achieved by a specific programme to train a new generation of PhD students with dual capabilities. AI4ER will develop the essential cross-disciplinary collaborations, foster new research activities and maximise impact, by providing a set of transferable skills and wide know-how across the field of environmental risks, setting the research in a framework to consider the societal and ethical dimensions. This is not merely mathematics, engineering, and computer science serving the environmental science community, it is also about having real-world problems to drive further development of novel AI, statistical, and computational methodologies.
AI4ER will develop a new generation of leaders in the application of AI to the most pressing environmental risks facing societies globally, through a combination of scientific, technical and leadership training delivered within a diverse cohort environment. Cutting-edge science projects will have direct links to real-world problems, made tractable by innovative AI technology. AI4ER will bring together leaders from 13 departments of Cambridge University alongside the British Antarctic Survey (BAS), in partnership with UK and global industry and policymakers, to train a new generation of AI practitioners in Environmental Sciences and to address the environmental challenges with new scientific and technological approaches that AI enables.
AI4ER will offer around ten 4-year UKRI-funded PhD studentships to start each October. A wide range of projects will be available under the broad themes of:
- Built environment and energy
- Carbon capture and carbon credits
- Climate & air quality
- Ecology and biodiversity
- Geophysical and environmental modelling
- Natural resources and forests
- Space, oceans and polar science
Hosting partners in Cambridge are:
- British Antarctic Survey
- Cambridge Centre for Carbon Credits (4C)
- Cambridge Institute for Sustainability Leadership
- Department of Applied Maths and Theoretical Physics
- Department of Archaeology & Anthropology
- Department of Architecture
- Department of Chemistry
- Department of Computer Science and Technology
- Department of Earth Sciences
- Department of Engineering
- Department of Geography
- Department of Land Economy
- Department of Plant Science
- Department of Pure Mathematics and Mathematical Statistics
- Department of Zoology
- Institute of Computing for Climate Science (ICCS)
- Laboratory for Scientific Computing