Departmental news

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• WMG at the University of Warwick and leading self-driving technology developer Wayve have received £1.9 million in government funding to lead a research project on AI safety in self-driving vehicles
• This pioneering project, DriveSafeAI, aims to develop scalable methodologies and mechanisms to prove that the use of AI is safe for self-driving vehicles, which national and international self-driving vehicle developers can adapt the findings to their technology developments
• The project supports the UK government’s ambition to make the UK the leader in AI and its vision of deploying self-driving vehicles in 2025

WMG at the University of Warwick and leading self-driving vehicle technology developer Wayve have been awarded £1.9 million to undertake research to ensure the safe use of AI in self-driving vehicles.

This project, DriveSafeAI, is taking the initiative to research and develop scalable mechanisms and methodologies to prove that AI is safe to use in self-driving vehicles. WMG is a world-class research institution with internationally recognised research capabilities in safety assurance of self-driving technologies, combined with Wavye’s expertise in developing end-to-end machine learning for self-driving, a set of evidence- and data-based methods and tools will be developed and made available for global self-driving developers to test their technologies. The research result will help shape the UK's policy and regulatory framework for AI in the future.

Self-driving vehicles can potentially bring £42 billion in economic benefits to the UK. Proving the safety of AI is a crucial step to unlocking this huge market. However, currently, there is no internationally or nationally agreed methodology in place to prove AI is safe to use in self-driving technologies, which hinders the commercialisation of self-driving vehicles. Therefore, this project will create a solution for AI safety assurance and develop societal trust in AI and self-driving technology.

More information about the DriveSafeAI project and the funding

DriveSafeAI is part of CCAV’s Commercialising CAM Supply Chain Competition (CCAMSC).

The Commercialising CAM programme is funded by the Centre for Connected and Automated Vehicles, a joint unit between the Department for Business and Trade (DBT) and the Department for Transport (DfT) and delivered in partnership with Innovate UK and Zenzic.

The £18.5m CCAMSC competition was launched in October 2022 to support the deployment of self-driving vehicles, by strengthening the capabilities of the sovereign UK CAM supply chain and is part of the Government’s vision for self-driving vehicles. Connected and automated mobility 2025: realising the benefits of self-driving vehicles.

Alex Kendall, CEO and Co-founder of Wayve, said: "At Wayve we know that confidence in our technology is crucial to commercialisation and widespread adoption of self-driving vehicles. Leveraging AI, we have the chance to bring the benefits of self-driving vehicles to everyone’s door. But first, securing trust in AI is paramount.

"That’s why we’ve been working closely with government and academia to ensure the methodologies we use to evidence safety are clear and trustworthy. Today, we’re excited to announce a formal partnership with WMG, University of Warwick, global leaders in the safety of artificial intelligence and autonomous systems. DriveSafeAI will give the public and policymakers confidence in this technology, which has the potential to revolutionise transport."

Professor Siddartha Khastgir, Head of Verification & Validation at WMG, University of Warwick, said: "AI – and particularly embodied AI – like self-driving vehicles, is one of the biggest topics currently discussed in society. Deploying this technology safely is essential to realising the huge opportunity AI can offer society.”

“At WMG, through DriveSafeAI we are excited to be partnering with Wayve, a leader in self-driving vehicle technology, to help shape the safe AI landscape in the UK and globally.”

“We believe the safety of this technology needs to be proven collaboratively, in a scalable manner and that future policy should have strong research foundations."

Note to editors

About Wayve

Wayve is on a mission to reimagine autonomous mobility through embodied intelligence. Founded in 2017, Wayve is made up of a global team of experts in machine learning and robotics from top organisations around the world. We were the first to deploy autonomous vehicles on public roads with end-to-end deep learning, pioneering the AI software, lean hardware, and fleet learning platform for AV2.0: a next-generation autonomous driving system that can quickly and safely adapt to new driving domains anywhere in the world.

Wayve has raised over $258M and is backed by Eclipse Ventures, D1 Capital Partners, Baillie Gifford, Moore Strategic Ventures, Balderton Capital, Virgin, and Ocado Group. The team is based in London and California, with a fleet of vehicles testing in cities across the UK. Wayve aims to be the first to deploy autonomy in 100 cities. To learn more, visit www.wayve.ai.

Hosted by the ‘International Network of Women Engineers and Scientists’ (INWES), the award celebrates Professor Georgia Kremmyda’s achievements in global capacity building (developing and building knowledge and skills internationally) and commitments to the representation of women in STEM.

Dr Federico RossiLink opens in a new window, Associate Professor of Economics at the University of Warwick, is one of just 400 researchers across Europe to have been awarded an ERC Starting Grant, and the only successful applicant from the University of Warwick.

The grants are intended to support cutting-edge research in a wide range of fields, from medicine and physics to social sciences and humanities. The ERC say the funds are awarded to “help researchers at the beginning of their careers to launch their own projects, form their teams and pursue their best ideas.”

Dr Rossi has been awarded €1.45m for an ambitious five-year study, Human Capital, the Organisation of Production, and Economic Development – HUMANDEV for short.

He explains:

“The ERC grant will allow me to kick-start a new research agenda on the role of human skills for the past and the future of economic development.

“There is a general sense among economists and policy-makers that the accumulation of human capital is key ingredient of economic growth, but we don’t have yet a clear understanding of which specific skills are particularly important, why their accumulation varies so much across countries and over time, and how exactly these skills transform the process of production.

“My project, HUMANDEV, will leverage micro-level data from many countries and new theoretical frameworks to shed light on these issues.

“A key objective of this work will be to provide insights on how educational and training policies can facilitate the adaptation to some of the most pressing global challenges of our time, such as population ageing, climate change, and technological change.

“I am extremely grateful to the ERC for supporting this endeavour.”

Commenting on the awards programme as a whole, ERC President Professor Maria Leptin said:

“It is part of our mission to give early-career talent the independence to pursue ambitious curiosity-driven research that can shape our future. In this latest round of Starting Grants, we saw one of the highest shares of female grantees to date, which I hope will continue to rise. Congratulations to all winners and good luck on your path to discovery.”

This competition attracted over 2,696 proposals, which were reviewed by panels of renowned researchers from around the world. The overall success rate was 14.8%. The grants are expected to create more than 2,600 jobs for postdoctoral fellows, PhD students and other staff at the host institutions.

The European Research Council (ERC) is a public body for funding of scientific and technological research conducted within the European Union (EU).

Mustafa Yasir, a former Warwick Department of Computer Science student who graduated in Summer 2023, wrote up and presented an academic paper on the work carried out as part of his third year project. The paper was accepted to the 3rd Annual Workshop on Graph Learning Benchmarks at KDD 2023, and was presented in California by Mustafa.

Mustafa's third year project idea, supervised by Dr Long Tran-Thanh and titled 'Extending the Graph Generation Models of GraphWorld', started whilst he was interning at Google last summer. Mustafa contacted some researchers at the company working in the Graph ML space, to ask for any relevant project ideas. He bumped into a team who had just published GraphWorld: a tool to change the way Graph Neural Networks are benchmarked, by creating synthetic graph datasets through graph generation models – as opposed to using real-world datasets that are limited in their generalisability and present a major issue facing the field of Graph Learning.

However, since GraphWorld only used a single graph generation model in this process, Mustafa integrated two additional models with the system, ran large-scale GNN benchmarking experiments with these models and published his code to Google’s official GraphWorld repository. The project provides a significant advancement to researchers across the field looking to benchmark models and guide the development of new architectures.

Dr Long Tran-Thanh commented:

What Mustafa and the GraphWorld team has been working on is very important for the machine learning and AI research communities. In particular, there has been a vocal criticism against the whole field that most models are trained on the same public datasets (e.g., ImageNet, MNIST, etc), therefore are not diverse enough. One way to mitigate this issue is to generate realistically looking synthetic data. This need is especially of importance in within the graph learning community. GraphWorld’s aim is to address this exact problem by creating a powerful and convenient tool that can generate a diverse set of graphs, ranging from large social network-style graphs to molecule-inspired ones. Joining this project with the Google researchers is a huge opportunity for Warwick students to participate in a very impactful project.

Final year Physics Undergraduate project students and their project supervisor, Professor Sandra Chapman at the University of Warwick have collaborated with researchers at John Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory (USA) to develop a new ‘data change’ flag.

The University of Warwick and Monash University invite applications for the position of doctoral researcher (PhD candidate) within the field of Computational Mechanics. The selected candidate is expected to undertake innovative research in the areas of advanced computational solid/structural mechanics, particularly within the context of civil and/or mechanical engineering.

Over 70% of properties held via overseas shell companies (109,000 out of 152,000 properties) still do not publish information about who really owns them, despite government commitments to crack down on anonymous ownership of UK property.

A new report – released on the day Parliament returns to debate the Economic Crime Bill – finds that for 35% of properties owned via overseas shell companies (54,000 out of 152,000), even law enforcement agencies do not know the true identities of the properties’ beneficial owners. In 10% of cases (15,000 properties), the company is missing from the Register altogether, and in a further 25%, (39,000 properties) essential information has not been reported.

Catch me if you can: Gaps in the Register of Overseas EntitiesLink opens in a new window highlights that these gaps are overwhelmingly due to design flaws in the Register of Overseas Entities, which was introduced in response to the Russian invasion of Ukraine with a pledge to “require anonymous foreign owners of UK property to reveal their real identities to ensure criminals cannot hide behind secretive chains of shell companies”. It finds that:

• An overwhelming 87% of cases where the researchers found that beneficial ownership information was missing or inaccessible to the public, was due to deliberate choices by government to keep the information out of scope of the legislation, rather than rule-breaking by overseas companies.
• Rule-breaking accounts for only 6-9% of cases.
• Another 4-7% comes from out-of-date or poorly documented records.

On Monday 4th Sept, the House of Commons will consider Lords’ amendments to the Economic Crime Bill, aimed at closing some of these loopholes, but the government is currently opposing these.

The new analysis, by researchers from the London School of Economics (LSE), the University of Warwick, and the Centre for Public Data, combines data from Companies House and HM Land Registry to quantify the scale of the missing information, and the reasons behind it.

The biggest reason for missing or inaccessible information on beneficial owners is the use of trusts. These account for an astonishing 63% of all properties where beneficial owners are hidden from the public (69,000 out of 108,000). An amendment to the Economic Crime Bill proposed by Lord Agnew – who last year resigned from government over its failure to tackle corruption – would shut this loophole but is being opposed by the government.

The report also highlights that flaws in the register of owners of UK companies – known as the ‘PSC Register’ – could also be facilitating corruption. Currently, nominees and trustees owning shares are not required to tell Companies House who they are acting for. The government is opposing an amendment by Lord Vaux that would bring transparency to these arrangements.

The report makes ten recommendations that the government could adopt to close the gaps identified.

Read the full working paper

Catch me if you can: Gaps in the Register of Overseas EntitiesLink opens in a new window, by Arun AdvaniLink opens in a new window (Associate Professor, University of Warwick, CAGE), Cesar, Poux (LSE International Inequalities Institute), Anna Powell-Smith (Visiting Fellow, LSE, Director of Centre for Public Data) and Andy Summers (Associate Professor, LSE Law, CAGE Associate).

CAGELink opens in a new window is a research centre based in the Department of Economics at the University of Warwick, conducting independent-policy driven research informed by history, culture and behaviour.

Related articles

• Five ways kleptocrats can keep hold of their UK assetsLink opens in a new window, by Dr Arun Advani,The Guardian, 4 September 2023
• Owners of 100,000 properties held by foreign shell companies unknown despite new UK lawsLink opens in a new window, by Jasper Jolly in The Guardian, 3 September 2023
• Most offshore owners reman a mysteryLink opens in a new window, by Andrew Ellson in The Times (paywall), 4 September 2023

During National Organic Month, the University of Warwick's Crop Centre takes a pioneering stance in the realm of low-input farming, shedding light on the concept of 'organic farming.'

Press Release (1 September 2023)