“RAI UK Awards £200,000 Collaboration Grants to support the UK’s Mission for Advanced Research in Responsible AI”
Responsible AI UK (RAI UK) has funded 11 new research projects through its Collaboration Grant, investing close to £200,000 to support collaborative research that helps ensure artificial intelligence is deployed safely, fairly, and effectively, and used in ways that benefit people, communities and the economy. The funded projects bring together universities, NHS Trusts, civil society organisations and industry partners, directly supporting the UK Government’s AI mission to harness benefits of AI, whilst managing its risks.
The grants focus on four priority areas that reflect national needs and the UK Government’s AI mission:
- AI sustainability,
- AI deployment costs and benefits,
- AI skills,
- AI engineering.
Projects span sectors including healthcare, education, justice, public services, creative and digital industries, geospatial data, and online safety. Projects range from evaluating AI-powered voice technologies in NHS hospitals to teaching schoolchildren about ethical AI use, and from measuring AI’s impact on the gender pay gap to developing privacy-preserving methods for legal AI systems.
Speaking on the announcement, Professor Gopal Ramchurn, RAI UK CEO said,
“This collaboration grant is about building national capacity. By supporting short, focused projects that bring researchers together with practitioners and policymakers, we are helping ensure the UK’s AI ambitions are matched by strong evidence, practical tools and real-world understanding.”
Professor Bashar Nuseibeh, Chair RAI UK Research Pillar, said,
“These 11 projects demonstrate how the UK research community is building complementary collaboration partnerships within the UK and across the globe. The collaborations will address some key responsible AI research challenges, recognising that these challenges will require multi-disciplinary expertise that is geographically distributed. From protecting citizens from AI-driven harms to ensuring our NHS can adopt new technologies safely, and from teaching the next generation to think critically about AI to measuring its real-world impact on equality, these projects tackle the questions that matter most to communities, public services, and our national competitiveness.”
The projects bring together expertise with collaborations spanning institutions from the UK and international partners in Australia, Canada, Estonia, Finland, Italy, Japan, Singapore and the United States. Some of the key industry partners include Ordnance Survey, Nokia Bell Labs, and organisations working across the justice, technology, and third sectors.
Spotlight: AI and the Gender Pay Gap
One of the funded projects is led by Professor Miriam Fernandez from The Open University, focusing on how AI innovations may influence the gender pay gap. The project brings together the Centre for Protecting Women Online, Fawcett Society, Politecnico di Torino, and Nokia Bell Labs.
Commenting on the importance of the work, Professor Fernandez said,
“Pay inequality remains one of the most persistent forms of gender discrimination, shaping women’s lifetime earnings and economic security,” she said. “As AI transforms organisational practices, there is a real risk that existing disparities may be unintentionally amplified. It is therefore vital that AI is developed and deployed in ways that reduce, rather than exacerbate, this longstanding problem.”
The project will investigate how AI-driven changes, such as task automation, unequal access to upskilling, and algorithmic bias, may affect pay equality. Its outputs will include:
- An integrated dataset combining AI patent data, occupational data, and gender-disaggregated income data
- A scientific publication or technical report detailing the methodology and results of the analysis (US data)
- A feasibility study assessing whether the same methods can be applied to UK labour-market and wage-gap data
- An open-access policy briefing offering evidence-based recommendations
Advancing Responsible Innovation
The funded projects align closely with the Government’s AI Opportunities Action Plan, and support the Science Secretary’s commitment to making UK a science and technology superpower through responsible innovation.
For more information about the RAI Collaboration Grant and the funded projects, visit: https://rai.ac.uk/all-projects/
