Unveiling a Game-Changing UK Agency: Boldly Investing in Revolutionary Tech!

Receive free science updates

We will send you a myFT Daily Summary email summarizing the latest Science news every morning.

A new UK government agency set up to transform science by supporting high-risk, high-reward research is coming out of stealth mode in a bid to have a “global change impact”, according to its chief executive.

Ilan Gur outlined ambitious plans for the UK’s £800million Advanced Research and Invention Agency (Aria), which is looking to invest in cutting-edge technologies in areas such as artificial intelligence and computer science to neuroscience and materials science.

In the first interview since being appointed to Aria, Gur told the Financial Times that much of the agency’s success or failure will depend on its eight newly appointed program directors who will select and fund projects. They will each have a budget of around £50million.

Aria plans to reveal the identities of the directors next month and Gur said: “They are empowered to take bold and unsafe bets. Here we have the opportunity to create something that could have a transformative impact on the world for future generations.

The creation of Aria was inspired by American organizations: the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (Darpa) and the Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (Arpa-E).

Darpa’s inventions include the key technologies behind the internet, satellite navigation and voice recognition. Arpa-E’s achievements range from sophisticated batteries to materials for nuclear fusion reactors.

These US agencies have program managers who make decisions about the selection and funding of projects similar to the roles envisioned at Aria – there are no jobs in existing UK public research organizations with this level of freedom and flexibility.

“I was impressed by the quality of people who responded to our call for applications,” said Gur, who joined Aria a year ago after a career in the US in start-ups and a stint at Arpa-E. “We have an incredible group that comes from very different disciplines. »

The projects for which Aria provides funding will cover the fields of science, technology and engineering. They will involve scientists and engineers from across the UK research landscape – universities and public laboratories, start-ups and large companies – and some are expected to include collaborative funding with other agencies.

Gur and his Aria colleagues debate how they should approach AI. One idea is to find an alternative computer technology to achieve AI, instead of the silicon semiconductors used exclusively today and which are expensive in terms of energy consumption and impact on climate change.

“Silicon isn’t the only way to do computation,” Gur said. “It happens in nature tens of thousands of times faster, for example in the brain.”

The Aria team is thinking about the possibility of creating an entirely new computing method specifically for AI rather than general purpose computing. “We are exploring this area but we don’t know exactly what program will come out of it,” he added.

Although Dominic Cummings, who served as a senior adviser to former Prime Minister Boris Johnson, is widely believed to be the person who pushed the government to create Aria, Gur didn’t know much about him before taking the job.

“Since I came here [Cummings] has been mentioned often,” he said. “What’s great for me is that almost everyone I’ve spoken to, in different parts of the research community and across the political spectrum, seems to not only be excited about Aria, but also understand why it is important and why it is structured that way. it is.” Cummings has not been in contact with him, Gur added.

The government and the founding team of Aria have faces criticism for not making the agency work faster.

Plans to set up Aria were announced in 2019, the initial four-year budget of £800m was set in 2020, legislation to set up the agency received royal assent in 2022 and Gur was appointed last year. Aria was then officially established as an independent research organization in January.

But Gur said taking the time to properly prepare Aria was key. The US model could not be transplanted directly to the UK without modification and the right foundations had to be built – not only program managers and other core staff, but also Aria’s governance structure.

The nine-person board is chaired by Matt Clifford, chief executive of Entrepreneur First, a company that helps people build new businesses. Among the directors of Aria is also the venture capitalist Kate Binghamformer head of the UK Vaccine Task Force, and Patrick Vallance, the UK’s former chief scientific adviser. Aria is based at the Alan Turing Institute, the national center for AI research, at the British Library.

Aria’s initial budget of £200m a year looks small, both in proportion to public research spending, which is expected to reach £20bn a year by 2024, and in comparison to its American counterparts. Arpa-E received $470 million this year for advanced energy research, while Darpa spends $4 billion annually on groundbreaking national security projects.

But Gur was convinced that “as a catalyst” Aria would have enough money to work wonders.

“Our programs will magnify and amplify the UK’s existing excellent assets. science and engineering assets as a sort of force multiplier,” he said. “Aria is meant to work on a decadal timescale and our budget allocation of four or five years is enough to get started and get some early evidence that Aria works.”

Gur did not take up the government’s ambitions to make the UK a country “scientific superpowerbut he acknowledged that part of Aria’s mission was to benefit the UK.

“I have an eight-year-old and a 10-year-old,” he said. “The success for me will be that when they grow up they can look around the UK and see something really powerful – maybe a new industry that has taken hold – that has been made possible by technology catalyzed by Aria.”