“The problems are deep-seated going back to the foundation,” Neil Lawrence, professor of machine learning at Cambridge University, told the Times, “if you create an institute that has a lot of money and spends that money on itself and a club of universities, you create a lot of politics.”
Whistleblowers told the BBC that the management’s response to problems is “performative” – just talk, no action, nothing has changed.”
The Institute was originally founded by five universities: Cambridge, Edinburgh, Oxford, UCL, and Warwick. In 2018, eight additional universities joined: Queen Mary University of London, Leeds, Manchester, Newcastle, Southampton, Birmingham, Exeter and Bristol.
The Institute coordinates the “Turing University Network,” which includes a broader group of 65 UK universities engaged in data science and AI research and collaboration.
Professor Lawrence said that said that the experience of the Turing should be a lesson in how not to collaborate with academia – shaped by “the political need to found an institution and claim we’re internationally leading” when it would have been better to support existing academics in their own universities.
“The culture appears to be a real problem,” another source told the Times, “there isn’t a lot of direction and it’s a hotbed of senior academics doing what senior academics do and fighting for power, with absolutely no focus on or incentives around delivering outcomes for the public.”
Peter Kyle, the science and technology secretary, has called for the institute to refocus solely on defence which is reported to be one of the areas where the Institute has been effective.
