News and Announcements

Welcome to the October edition of the DSAIL newsletter, and a warm welcome to all colleagues, both new and returning, at the start of the 2026/27 academic year. We look forward to another busy and productive year for data science and AI at Lancaster.

Many thanks to everyone who joined us for the DSAIL Showcase on Monday 28th September. With over 120 participants, including attendees from outside the University, a keynote from Professor Claire Hardaker and sessions across all five of our research themes, it was a fantastic start to the year – you can read more below.

We are also delighted to announce two DSAIL funding opportunities this month. Our Workshop Call 2026/27 offers up to £5,000 to support interdisciplinary research workshops, with proposals due by Friday 30th October. Nominations are also now open for the DSAIL Prizes 2026, which recognise early career researchers, champions of diversity in data science and AI, and outstanding contributions to the data science and AI community at Lancaster. The deadline for nominations is Friday 27th November, and the winners will be announced at our Pies and Prizes event on Monday 14th December. Full details of both can be found in the Funding section.

Elsewhere in this issue you will find news from across the University, details of the Health@Lancaster Collaboration Café on Wednesday 14th October, the latest from the Turing, and reminders of upcoming funding deadlines. As ever, please do share your news with us at dsail@lancaster.ac.uk.

DSAIL Showcase 2026 – Exploring Data. Shaping AI. Driving Impact.

Thank you to everyone who joined us at Lancaster House Hotel on Monday 28th September for the DSAIL Showcase. With over 120 participants, including researchers, businesses and partners from outside the University, the day explored how data science and AI are reshaping research, industry and society, and the responsibilities that come with this.

Opening the day, DSAIL Co-Directors Professor Chris Nemeth and Professor Nigel Davies reflected on the Institute’s growth into a community of 461 members, and on a record year in 2025/26, in which colleagues secured £16.9m across 31 grants and our 35 events attracted more than 900 attendees.

The keynote, “Trust in the VoIDs: following the trail of £580,000 of public funds”, was given by Professor Claire Hardaker, Professor of Linguistics and DSAIL Integrity Theme Lead. Claire explored what happens to trust and accountability when generative AI tools help decide who receives public funding. Drawing on her own bid for research on AI-generated voices, which was screened out at an AI assessment stage before reaching a human reviewer, she asked whether large language models can be relied on as reviewers. Claire’s experience has since been covered in Science, and you can read the article here.

Sessions on each of DSAIL’s five research themes showcased the breadth of our interdisciplinary community: the latest health research from Lancaster and external speakers; Environment talks from Lancaster and UKCEH researchers alongside the Joint Nature Conservation Committee, Natural England and the Royal Society of Wildlife Trusts; a showcase of Foundations research; an Integrity “data deli” sharing ideas and seeding new collaborations; and a Creativity session, with live demonstrations from artists, designers and researchers, on what AI means for authorship and originality. A session on diversity in DSAIL also introduced the Institute’s diversity working group.

A panel discussion on “The Role of Universities in the World of AI”, chaired by Chris Nemeth, brought together speakers from the Joint Nature Conservation Committee, NHS Lancashire and South Cumbria, University of the Arts London and Lancaster University. Panellists discussed how universities can bring a critical lens to AI development, work more closely with industry, and help students and staff use AI responsibly and productively, as well as the environmental impact of AI and how governments might invest wisely in such a fast-moving field.

Many thanks to all our speakers, panellists and attendees for making the day such a success. A full write-up of the Showcase can be found on the DSAIL website.

here

Why most emergency headache patients disappear into the data

Read the full story here

Researchers from Lancaster Medical School and Lancashire Teaching Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust conducted an evaluation of routinely collected NHS data at the Trust, analysing 3,819 emergency department attendances for headache between 2021 and 2023.

Professor of Clinical Neuroscience and Consultant Neurologist Hedley Emsley said: “We expected to find a wide range of headache diagnoses. Instead, almost all patients were assigned one of just four diagnostic labels. When we looked at how these visits were recorded in hospital data, we found that most of the diagnostic detail had effectively vanished.”

Lancaster University shortlisted for two Times Higher Education Awards 2026

Read the full story here

Lancaster has been shortlisted for the Digital Innovation of the Year category in recognition of Smart Scenarios, a project designed to address challenges in language learning. Project members wanted to find a digital solution that could both help students learn effectively, while alleviating both speaking anxiety and the workload of staff.

The Smart Scenarios team developed curriculum-aligned virtual reality scenarios that students could experience in the University’s Data Immersion Suite. By combining universal speech recognition technology with an artificial intelligence (AI) system that would respond intelligently to the user, students can experience immersive and structured social learning in a virtual environment that alleviates anxiety.

New Research Group: Future Environments Lab

We design serious games that connect spatial planning, environmental modelling, engineering, and computing to tackle urgent public challenges. Our lab delivers highly technical work, with novel methods coupled with co-design approaches and futures thinking.

This includes, but is not limited to, drone-based sensing, remote sensing, computer vision, numerical modelling, prototype interfaces, visualizations and pipelines. The lab also utilises a range of participatory co-design practices and analytical tools to engage audiences and stakeholders.

Find out more here: https://futureenvironmentslab.co.uk/

Opportunity: Join the AIBIO-UK Management Group

Are you working at the interface of AI and bioscience and passionate about shaping the future of this growing research community? We are seeking to appoint one new member to the AIBIO-UK Management Group for a two-year term. This is an exciting opportunity to help guide the strategic direction of the network, strengthen collaborations across the AI and bioscience communities, and play an active role in delivering AIBIO-UK activities.

We are particularly keen to hear from applicants who are:

• Working at the interface of AI and Bioscience.
• Eligible to be a CoI on a UKRI project.
• Willing to be involved in hands-on organisation and participation of AIBIO-UK events, particularly covering Scotland and the north of England.
• Willing to help grow and foster the wider AIBIO-UK community.
• Able to build our engagement with industry within the network.
• Able to devote 10% FTE to the project. This will be funded from the core AIBIO-UK UKRI project.

The position being replaced reflected computational (specifically computer vision) expertise on the management team. Whilst this is our preferred background, the panel will also consider any other relevant research area.

Apply via theExpression of Interest form by Friday 23rd October 2026 at 11:30pm.

For an informal discussion or any questions, please contact info@aibio.ac.uk.

DSAIL Membership

New Members

James Faulconbridge (Organisation, Work and Technology), David Kang (Economics), David Cheneler (Engineering), Matt Pawelski (RES), Sarah Powell (Lancaster Medical School), Laura Baracaldo Lancheros (Mathematical Sciences) and John Alasdair Warwicker (Computer Science, Leipzig).

Current DSAIL members are warmly encouraged to invite new Lancaster colleagues and students to join the Data Science and AI Institute. Interested candidates can reach out via dsail@lancaster.ac.uk or sign up here.

Events

Health@Lancaster Collaboration Café – Voices with Impact: Lived Experience in Mental Health Research

Wednesday 14th October 2026. Registration not required – just turn up.

Farah Lunat of Lancashire and South Cumbria Foundation Trust with Zindzi Cresswell of the Mental Health Research Group will discuss the work of the Voices with Impact Project to increase participation from lesser heard voices in mental health research.

The weekly Collaboration Cafés give colleagues the chance to meet up over their morning coffee and discuss a different topic each week. The format sees a chosen speaker deliver a short provocation before the floor is opened to colleagues.

There are opportunities to meet people from across campus who are interested in health research and knowledge exchange – with relevant external stakeholders often invited to take part in the discussion.

Refreshments are provided and the event closes at 9:45am to allow for colleagues with other commitments to return to main campus for 10am.

For more information on this and other events at Health Innovation One, please visit our events page here.

Turing News and Events

New AI system can monitor satellite behaviour to boost space safety

A new AI model can monitor satellites and spot anomalies in their behaviour, reducing the risk of in-orbit collisions, according to new research published in the journal Expert Systems.

Read more here.

The UK must exploit a narrowing window of opportunity to build a resilient AI future

The UK faces a narrowing window of opportunity to strengthen its AI future unless it acts to secure the systems, infrastructure and expertise most critical to national resilience, according to a new policy briefing published by the Centre for Emerging Technology and Security at the Alan Turing Institute.

Read more here.

Funding call: Monitoring and Responding to AI-Cybersecurity Developments (Cyber AI)

The Turing's Centre for Emerging Technology and Security (CETaS) is seeking to commission a supplier for a research project titled ‘Monitoring and Responding to AI-Cybersecurity Developments’. The project will focus on the following themes:

• How UK Government should track developments in AI-enabled cyber capabilities, activity and impact, including changes in the sophistication, accessibility, scale or speed of cyber threats.
• This could include options for monitoring technical capability indicators, patterns of use and real-world cyber incidents to identify emerging developments before they become widely deployed.
• How UK Government should respond to AI x cyber developments. This could include:
• The opportunities and limitations of threshold-based intervention compared with continuous government engagement.
• Potential indicators or thresholds that could justify a greater government response and the limitations of using fixed trigger points.
• How an effective UK monitoring and response framework should be structured.

Application is via FlexiGrant. The deadline for submissions is 21^st October 2026, 23:59.

Find out more and apply here.

Funding

DSAIL Workshop Call 2026/27

DSAIL is offering funding of up to £5,000 per workshop for interdisciplinary research workshops to be held at Lancaster before the end of the 2026/27 academic year. The purpose of this funding is to seed new collaborations across disciplines, build communities around emerging areas of data science and AI, and lay the groundwork for future joint research projects and funding bids. Our only stipulation is that workshops must demonstrate collaboration beyond a single discipline.

Please note that £5,000 is an upper limit, and we encourage applicants to think carefully about their budget requests so that as many workshops as possible can be supported. DSAIL funds can be combined with other sources of funding to expand the scope and reach of a workshop, and preference will be given to proposals from early career staff.

Deadline: Friday 30th October 2026. Proposals (max. two sides of A4) should be sent to dsail@lancaster.ac.uk. Successful applicants will be informed during the week commencing 16th November.

Full details of the call are available here

DSAIL Prizes 2026 – Call for Nominations

DSAIL invites nominations for three prizes celebrating excellence and inclusive impact across data science and AI: the Early Career Researcher Award, the Diversity in Data Science Champion Award, and a new open category, Outstanding Contribution to Data Science & AI, which recognises excellent contributions of any kind – including teaching, research, research impact and engagement – to the data science and AI community at Lancaster.

Self-nominations and nominations by others are equally welcome, and all nominees must be current DSAIL members. We particularly welcome nominations of individuals from historically underrepresented and underserved backgrounds, and adjustments will be made for career breaks. Each prize winner will receive a certificate and a gift voucher.

Deadline: 17:00, Friday 27th November 2026. Nominations, consisting of a statement (max. two pages) explaining how the nominee addresses the criteria for the award, should be emailed to dsail@lancaster.ac.uk. Winners will be announced at the Pies and Prizes event on Monday 14th December.

Full details and eligibility criteria are available here

UKRI: Enabling AI adoption across science and engineering

A funding opportunity that might be of interest to DSAIL members.

ProbAI Funding

Round 3 of our Funding for Doctoral Prize Fellowships has just opened – funding for up to one year for finishing PhD students to work in probabilistic AI research. We are looking for strong candidates with a background in one of the underlying mathematical areas of probabilistic AI.

A successful candidate will be employed by a host university in the UK (this could be any UK University, as long as they are eligible to receive EPSRC funding). The aspiration is that the Doctoral Prize Fellowship provides a stepping stone to becoming an independent researcher.

Deadline: Monday 16th November 2026

CyberFocus Innovation Funding: Translating cyber security research into real-world impact

Funding Round 3 is now open

CyberFocus is pleased to announce that its third funding call through the EPSRC CyberFocus Place Based Impact Acceleration Account is now open, creating new opportunities for researchers across the North West to develop collaborative cyber innovation projects with non-academic partners to deliver real-world impact. Proposals will translate cyber security research into real-world impact, with a focus on collaboration, civic benefit, and alignment to regional strategies. Projects should help develop partnerships, strengthen public engagement or inform policy development.

Who Can Apply:

The Principal-Investigator (PI) must be a researcher from one of the seven CyberFocus partner HEIs (Cumbria; Lancaster; Liverpool; Manchester; MMU; Salford; ULan). Researchers from partner HEIs and non-partner HEIs can be Co-Investigators on the project.

All applicants must collaborate with an external, non-HEI partner, who should be based in, or demonstrate they have clear regional impact in, the North West.

Funding Streams

There are five Funding Streams, which range in duration (3 months to 12months+) and funding available (£10k-£40k+): the Seed stream to test new partnerships and collaborative potential; the Growth stream to deepen partnerships with clear impact pathways; the Accelerator streamto drive impact for mature partnerships; the Public Engagement stream to support engagement between cyber research and wider society; and the Policy Impact stream to advance policy aligned to regional or national cyber strategies.

Project Themes

Projects must align with at least one of the CyberFocus themes; at least one thematic area outlined in the CyBOK framework and demonstrate relevance to at least one North West regional strategy (further details on project themes available on the CyberFocus funding webpage).

Contact Us

The CyberFocus team is happy to discuss potential proposals ahead of application submission. If you have any questions about your proposal or eligibility, contact the CyberFocus team at: cyberfocus@lancaster.ac.uk

Reminders

EPSRC Next generation artificial intelligence (AI): explainable AI

Closing date: 20th October 2026, 4:00pm UK time

Full details are here

ESRC Doctoral focal award plus: innovating in data-driven research

Closing date: 14th October 2026, 4:00pm UK time

Full details are here

Lancaster's Policing Academic Centre of Excellence (L-PACE), in partnership with the UKRI-funded NetworkPlus for Analytical Behavioural Science in Security and Defence (NABS+) is pleased to announce a new commissioning call: https://lnkd.in/eBwFeB93

Current Job/PhD Opportunities

School of Computing and Communications

Senior Research Associate: SCULI: Security in Ultra-Large Scale Systems - 0163-25-RR-R

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Disclaimer

The opinions expressed by our bloggers and those providing comments are personal, and may not necessarily reflect the opinions of Lancaster University. Responsibility for the accuracy of any of the information contained within blog posts belongs to the blogger.