Defence and security

Collaborating with the defence and security community to deliver an ambitious programme of data science and artificial intelligence research

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The defence and security (D&S) community – represented by the Ministry of Defence (Defence Science and Technology Laboratory [Dstl] and Joint Forces Command), GCHQ and MI5 – are collaborating with The Alan Turing Institute to deliver an ambitious programme of data science and artificial intelligence (AI) research to deliver impact in real world scenarios. 

Following the signing of a collaboration agreement and a year of knowledge exchange the D&S programme was launched in 2017. Since then, programme personnel has grown across research, leadership, and support. 

The programme’s vision is to undertake multidisciplinary data science and AI research to ensure a safe, secure, and prosperous society:

  • Safe – supporting defence and national security agencies to keep societies and citizens safe
  • Secure – protecting the privacy and security of citizens, institutions and industry 
  • Prosperous – contributing to global good by enabling societies around the world to derive benefit from strategy technological advances

The programme carries out this vision through traditional academic research, capability development and policy analysis.

Partnerships and research centres

Applied Research Centre (ARC)

ARC is a group of data scientists and data science software engineers who focus on the application of cutting-edge technology to problems within the defence and security sector. It works on applied problems, primarily in response to operational use cases or policy needs, with a rapid turnaround time. The emphasis is on delivering usable outputs – such as software code and demonstrators – aligned to practical and targeted research objectives.

For more information, please visit the centre’s webpage.

Point of contact: James Bishop

Defence Artificial Intelligence Research (DARe) 

DARe work on real world problems and have the mission to advance the state-of-the-art and publish cutting edge research in Artificial Intelligence (AI) and data science.

For more information, please visit the centre’s webpage.

Point of contact: Victoria Nockles

Centre for Emerging Technology and Security (CETaS)

CETaS is a research centre with the mission of informing UK security policy through evidence-based, interdisciplinary research on emerging technology issues. CETaS conducts policy-focused research and analysis on topics related to data science, artificial intelligence, cybersecurity and privacy technology, engaging with a diverse range of stakeholders across government, academia and the private sector.

For more information, please visit the centre’s webpage..

Point of contact: Sacha Babuta

AI Cyber Defence Research Centre (AICD)

AICD aims to ensure the security and privacy of computer networks and systems through fundamental and applied advances in autonomous decision making. The centre is seeking to fundamentally transform the way in which we secure digital systems through the development and application of cutting edge, deep-learning based approaches to intelligent agents focusing on: autonomous cyber operations and network defence; AI for systems security; adaptive fuzzing and state-machine learning; and cryptographic ciphers, protocols and their implementations.

For more information, please visit the centre’s webpage.

Point of contact: Chris Hicks, Vasilios Mavroudis

Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) Partnership

The Institute has launched a partnership with GCHQ and embarked on strategic relationships with the Ministry of Defence and two associated departments: the Defence Science and Technology Laboratory (Dstl) and Strategic Command. The defence and security programme, developed from this partnership, is interested in advancing data science methodologies and techniques and in directly applying data science to real-world scenarios.

Point of contact: George Balston
News: GCHQ & Ministry of Defence

DSO National Laboratories (Singapore) Partnership

Researchers from DSO, Singapore's largest national defence research and development organisation working in tandem with leading experts from Turing’s thriving Defence and Security Programme. Together, Turing and DSO explore new research methods designed to help understand complex datasets, covering different modalities such as image, text, and audio. Researchers work to develop novel methods to help with the analysis of these fascinating and complex data sets. 

Point of contact: Ana Basiri
News: The Alan Turing Institute and Singapore’s DSO National Laboratories sign new agreement

US Army Research Labs (ARL) Partnership 

The success of human-machine cooperation depends on the ability of autonomous agents to infer a human’s goals under uncertainty, consider which features a human is paying attention to, and predict the actions a human will take based on the perceived costs and benefits. Equally, the human needs to make appropriate inferences about the agent’s behaviour. Success depends on an ability to engage in dialogue to resolve uncertainty and correctly determine when to seek advice and when to act independently. This project, based within the AICD research centre, aims to understand and demonstrate the allocation of function in human-machine teams with a focus on cyber applications.

Point of contact: Chris Hicks, Vasilios Mavroudis, Victoria Nockles

Funders

Logos of GCHQ and MoD
MI5

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