Research and innovation

As second in the world and the top university in UK and Europe, Imperial has sought to not only be a world-leading university, but a world-changing one. Tackling some of the most pressing issues of our age, Imperial is increasing the scale and impact of its research – from investing in the talent pipeline to increasing collaboration between academics, clinicians, industry and policymakers. By adopting a convergence science approach, Imperial is removing barriers between disciplines, allowing for new models of research that lead to fresh perspectives and accelerate progress.

Philanthropy will be key to achieving this ambition. Your giving – whether you choose to support future leaders, drive discovery in priority areas, or help extend the scale and pace of real-world impact – could be felt by millions globally, for many generations to come.

Research at the pace of innovation

At Imperial, brilliant minds are working to ensure that AI is a force for good – not just for some people, but for everyone. Among these many talented individuals is Dr Shamsuddeen Muhammad, Google DeepMind Academic Fellow, who is doing important work in improving inclusivity and removing racial bias in language models.

For many people around the world, large language models are failing. Languages without a high level of digital footprint – for example, African languages such as Swahili and Hausa – are not being used to train AI models, which can lead to serious implications when it comes to hate speech. 

Dr Muhammad co-founded HausaNLP to champion the representation of the Hausa languages in AI technology, and launched AfriHate to create a dataset for identifying hate and abusive speech across 15 different African languages, to fully inform language models.