Submitted by Rachel Gardner on Tue, 24/01/2023 - 14:57
Congratulations to Nic Lane, Professor of Machine Learning Systems here, who has won an ERC Proof of Concept grant 2022.
These grants – each worth €150,000 – help researchers to bridge the gap between the discoveries stemming from their frontier research and the practical application of the findings, including early phases of their commercialisation.
The funding is part of the EU's research and innovation programme, Horizon Europe.
According to Mariya Gabriel, European Commissioner for Innovation, Research, Culture, Education and Youth, "The ERC Proof of Concept Grants aim to enable innovations stemming from EU investments in frontier research, reach society and the market faster."
Researchers use this type of funding to verify the practical viability of scientific concepts, explore business opportunities or prepare patent applications.
Nic will be using his grant to explore the commercial proof-of-concept potential of an open source framework he has been involved with for several years, the 'federated learning' tool, Flower.
Federated Learning is a technique for training machine learning models across devices without sharing the raw data they hold. With concerns about data sharing and data privacy growing over the last few years, there has been increasing interest in it and it was recently added to the MPhil in Advanced Computer Science course here.
