Alan Turing Institute launches new mission to defend UK from cyber-attacks
The Alan Turing Institute has announced a new programme to help address the UK’s defence and national security challenges while ensuring the country benefits from advances in AI.
The institute has been significantly transformed, with its new missions addressing major challenges faced by UK society, from protecting critical national infrastructure against cyber-attacks to developing advanced weather forecasting systems for emergency planning.
This transformation is a response to the UK government calling for the institute to meet the country’s evolving needs.
As part of this evolution, the Alan Turing Institute has commissioned former RAF Air Commodore Blythe Crawford to work alongside its experts and determine how it can support the government’s AI ambitions in defence, national security, and intelligence.
The new programme the institute has embarked upon will see it develop cyber defence tools for UK national infrastructure, alongside working more closely with national security and defence programmes to build AI security and strategic threat assessment systems.
Another part of the Alan Turing Institute’s evolution is its renewed focus on mitigating the effects of climate change.
This includes developing more accurate, faster predictions of weather systems, which will help inform government and industry responses in emergency planning.
The institute said as part of this work, it has already delivered accurate forecast systems that are ten-times quicker and use thousands of times less computing power than current AI- and physics-based forecasting systems.
The Alan Turing Institute will also leverage its AI research and development to improve the resilience and outcomes of the NHS.
It announced a new mission to pioneer the use of digital twins of individual human hearts, which it said will improve outcomes for critically ill cardiac patients and save both money and lives within the NHS framework.
“Digital, Data, and AI technologies have huge transformative potential and as the national institute our purpose is to ensure they are adopted in ways that change our country for the better; in the hands of our public servants and critical industries, shaping better decisions, boosting productivity and growing our economy,” said Chief Scientist at the Alan Turing Institute chief scientist Professor Mark Girolami.
“Our programme of science and innovation is designed to play to the UK’s strengths, developing specialist capabilities that make our society more secure, healthy and resilient.”
