IIDSAI Pump Prime Funding 2024-5

Funding Call Open: 20 September 2024

Application Period:

• End date: 1 November 2024
• Duration: 6 weeks

Review Process:

• Start date:  4 November 2024
• End date: 29 November 2024
• Duration: 3-4 weeks
• Activity: Review by an interdisciplinary panel and operational/technical feasibility checks.

Award Announcement:

• Date:  2 December 2024
• Activity: Notification of successful applicants and publication on the Institute website.

Projects Start:

• Date: December 2024 (after announcements)
• Activity: Setup of projects, including meetings with the Institute Operations Team and relevant parties.

Before applying, please refer to the call particulars for full details and information:

• IIDSAI Pump Prime Funding Call Particulars (Microsoft Word, 53KB)

To apply, please submit an application via the following Microsoft Form:

• Application form for Pump Prime Funding 2024-5

Accessible Word format of the application questions (For reference only, applications should be submitted via the form.):

• Reference only Microsoft Word Document application questions (33KB)

Funding can be used for Research Data Scientist, or Advanced Research Computing Research Software Engineer’s time. If you intend to include Research Data Scientist support in your application, you must have spoken to the team prior to submitting your application.

Their expertise could be used for:

• Advanced Analytics: statistical analysis, machine learning, and deep learning. Developing predictive models, clustering, dimensionality reduction, and the implementation of neural networks.  Developing predictive models, clustering, dimensionality reduction, and the implementation of neural networks. 

• Textual Analysis: natural language processing. 

• Image Analysis: covering a range of applications, including medical images such as microscopy, MEG and fMRI data.

• Data Visualization: including interactive dashboards to facilitate a deeper understanding of your data. 

• Data Collection and Extraction: data extraction and scraping from diverse sources, including documents, APIs, and web pages.

• Data Preparation: cleaning and transforming raw data into analysis-ready datasets. 

Hear from some of our first cohort of project teams about what they were able to accomplish with their funding:

From initial ideas to a developed project exploring the intersection of the human brain and artificial neural networks

The Pump Prime Funding provided a valuable opportunity for our team to advance a preliminary idea into a more developed project. We are deeply grateful for this support, without which continuing and completing our research would have been impossible. The funding allowed us to engage a data scientist, whose contributions were critical to the project’s success. It also facilitated the formation of an interdisciplinary team of computer scientists and neuroscientists, enabling us to explore interesting and challenging problems at the intersection of the human brain and artificial neural networks. This collaboration has prepared us for a larger interdisciplinary grant application and paper submission.

Recruiting a research associate for a framework and going on to publish

“This opportunity allowed us to recruit a research associate for the duration of the project to better formalise and deploy a novel framework for process parameter optimisation in additive manufacturing based on physics-informed reinforcement learning. This collaboration has led to the work being published in Scripta Materialia, one of the top journals in materials science.”

Read the article online

Biodiversity research, EU grant applications and dedicated collaboration

“The pump prime funding enabled us to explore novel approaches to biodiversity forecasting, paving the way to EU grant applications. Collaborating with the research fellows at the Institute was a great opportunity, they are competent and dedicated to the projects.”

An interdisciplinary team, further grant applications and research for improving rates of early diagnosis of lung cancer

“The pump prime funding has enabled us to launch a wide repertoire of research seeking to improve rates of early diagnosis of lung cancer; including qualitative, systematic review, and natural language processing strands. The funding has fostered development of an interdisciplinary team of clinicians, qualitative researchers, and data scientists, and has led to the opportunity to apply for a wider programme grant focused on designing and evaluating an intervention to improve early diagnosis of incidentally identifiable cancers in the UK more widely.”

Securing data and setting up a public database

“Using these funds, we were able to set up a public-database of single molecule tracking microscopy data. This allows users to store and share their data as well as compare the similarity of molecular diffusion behaviour in cells between conditions e.g. molecule type, cell type or species. We were also able to acquire experimental single-molecule microscopy data to begin to populate the database.”

• Research Data Scientist Service

• 1 October 12-13:00, Elm House

Find information for Elm House. Further dates to be announced in due course.