Alan Turing Institute Probabilistic Programming Open Call

Support for UK researchers to join the Turing Institute as secondees to promote the development, adoption and awareness of probabilistic programming within the UK.

Founded in 2015 as a registered charity, the Alan Turing Institute is the national institute for data science and artificial intelligence (AI), and has its headquarters at the British Library in London.

The Institute’s Probabilistic Programming Open Call seeks to fund projects around the theme of probabilistic programming as part of its portfolio of research supporting emerging fundamental AI. Probabilistic programming is an emerging research area that has attracted interest from the AI and machine learning (ML) communities, as well as statistics and theoretical computer science/semantics. The basic concept of probabilistic programming is to use ideas from programming languages to structure complex statistical models. Probabilistic programming has found applications in a range of settings (eg pandemic modelling).

Applications are sought for project proposals that promote the development, adoption and awareness of probabilistic programming within the UK. A portfolio of projects will be funded with a particular emphasis on the following themes:

• Compositionality of probabilistic programs.
• Parallelisation of probabilistic programs.
• Programmable inference.
• Semantics of probabilistic programs.
• Verification of probabilistic programs.
• Probabilistic programs and neural nets.
• Flagship applications of probabilistic programming.
• Community projects to support dissemination/adoption of probabilistic programming technologies.

This list is not exclusive and applicants are encouraged to think creatively about how they might address the requirements of this call. This call is aimed at developing areas of work that are formative (ie pre-large scale funding stages), which do not fit standard funding calls or which would benefit from the Turing Institute being a national institute.

Collaboration with the Turing community is required throughout the project lifecycle. All project teams will be expected to engage with one another and with Turing Institute researchers and staff to actively collaborate and help develop the probabilistic programming research theme within the Turing Institute and expand a UK community.

It is expected that projects will be delivered within the Turing Institute and therefore successful applicants and their teams (as applicable) will be onboarded into the Turing Institute. Researchers will be engaged via a secondment agreement. Project teams will have access to Turing Institute resources and platforms, and will be supported by the Turing Institute operational and business teams. If new full-time employees are required for a project (eg postdoctoral research associates) they will be recruited and employed by the Turing Institute.