The Heart of the South West Local Enterprise Partnership (LEP) has announced £118,000 of funding for a new state-of-the-art artificial intelligence (AI) engineering lab in Exeter.
The ACE-Lab (AI-enabled Co-design in Engineering Laboratory) will be managed by the University of Exeter’s Centre for Future Clean Mobility at Exeter Science Park. The project will offer a mix of human-AI interaction for designing novel products, systems and services.
ACE-Lab will engage in collaborations with small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in the region, the LEP said.
Karl Tucker, chair of the Heart of the South West LEP, said: “This funding extension is a significant step toward advancing scientific excellence in the South West. Projects like ACE-Lab underpin our region’s technological capabilities, ultimately driving economic growth, jobs and innovation.
The University of Exeter is a leader in AI-enabled human-in-the-loop machine learning, with the new facility offering powerful computers and visualisation equipment, industrial engineering hardware system and access to industry engineering experts to help train the AI systems.
The director of the Centre for Future Clean Mobility, professor Christopher Smith, said: “The ACE-Lab will enable us to achieve a much greater level of digital activity in the modelling, simulation and optimisation of clean mobility solutions for individual transport assets (vessels, vehicles and fleets).
“The new lab will combine state-of-the-art computation for AI and machine learning, virtual reality, augmented reality, 3D sensing and printing capability with our expertise in world-leading optimisation and machine learning research, to transform the capability of clean mobility for businesses in the South West.”
The Heart of the South West LEP is being wound up in April as part of government plans, announced last year, to give control of funding to local authorities.
