AI research in the UK becoming more concentrated

The UK may be riding the wave of the “AI revolution” but its distribution of research activity is becoming more focused on a small number of locations, according to the innovation charity Nesta.

Nesta’s analysis, published on 21 March, shows that London, Oxford, Cambridge, Edinburgh and Surrey accounted for 60 per cent of total deep learning research—a branch of machine learning—in the UK in 2018, up 20 percentage points on the figure for 2010. 

Activity was most concentrated in London and Oxford, with Oxford in particular showing a dramatic increase in the percentage of research that it is responsible for, according to the charity. Along with Cambridge, the two locations also fell within the top 20 global locations for highly cited papers.