ShapingAIforEveryone: A University-wide Campaign to Showcase Innovative Action in Artificial Intelligence
Written by Sophie Harbour
The University has just launched a new campaign to highlight Cambridge’s role in advancing AI for social good. While the aim to deliver public benefit appears straightforward, its achievement is demanding and success depends on a unique combination of energy and environment, of actors and enablers.
At the King’s E-Lab, AI has been a steady feature over the past few years, weaving into a broader exploration of technology and innovation. In 2023, the Lab hosted Geoffrey Hinton—the British ‘godfather of AI’—for a thoughtful and thoroughly engaging discussion on the potentials and the challenges of such new technology.
Since then, the theme has continued to evolve: different events have brought together a mix of voices to explore the possibilities and implications of AI; postdoctoral researchers are incorporating the technology into their projects with promising results; and E-Lab students have applied entrepreneurial thinking not only to imagine new technological futures, but to help build them.
These collective efforts demonstrate that AI must not just be shaped for everyone, but that it must be shaped by everyone. Inclusivity in design and discussion guarantees that the value of AI can be harnessed across different disciplines in unique and empowering ways.
Events
These endeavours to develop AI for social good are enabled by an environment that actively steers attention to pressing and immediate challenges, asks difficult questions, incorporates as many voices as possible, and fuels creative thinking.
In February 2025, for example, the E-Lab hosted the 10-year anniversary conference of InnoFrugal, an organisation which focuses on collaboration, education and diversity to spotlight questions of sustainability and responsibility. The day highlighted “FrugalAI” and demonstrated the enthusiasm, desire and possibility to develop and invest in “lean, inclusive, efficient AI.”
To support this momentum, we need to bring everyone into the conversation. In November 2024, Martin Percy’s interactive film workshop, "AI Basics: Thrills or Chills?", showed just how we can do that. Funded by Innovate UK, the workshop uses the benefits of participatory workshopping to “do more than just lecture people about [AI] or tell them stories” but to get them to actively think through what AI is and could be.
This interactive spirit is what drives the E-Lab’s approach to student and community activities – encouraging people to bring to life the ideas they have. Take, for example, the 2024 Hackathon, which marked the first UK hackathon designed to get students to use the power of LLMs to address legal challenges. It produced remarkable results; including a winning team who designed a solution to support chronically overworked legal aid lawyers who bear the brunt of immigration and asylum cases. This “PrecedentAI” provided a glimpse of a future in which those motivated to help others in resource-strained and stressful environments are supported rather than burnt-out.
Researchers
With a focus on health and nature, research at the University of Cambridge is leading the way in imagining AI’s potential. For their part, the E-Lab researchers are investigating food security, wildlife protection, circadian rhythm and patient-centric care to realise this potential.
Charles Emogor is incorporating AI and machine learning to support mechanisms to track wildlife poaching (especially in Pangolin trading). His research focuses on crime prevention in national parks, leveraging machine learning and spatial data on poaching, gathered by rangers, to enhance the effectiveness of ranger patrols.
Coco Newton combines neuroscience with health systems design and engineering to translate new technologies for earlier disease detection and dementia prevention. She recently earned first place in the Precision Health Innovation Prize for a project on combining AI with design science in a collaborative effort between Cambridge and Delft Technical University in the Netherlands. The work showcased a novel hybrid-intelligence research method that involves ‘social listening’ of big data from online patient forums and thus centres the patient and caregiver perspective.
Chris Micklem has been using a deep neural network-based approach to vastly improve the single-cell segmentation of his microscopy data. Conducting single-cell-level analysis is important, as it enables the identification of consequential dynamics that are lost in bulk-averaged observations. By applying AI to the study of cyanobacteria in this way, Chris hopes that the deeper insights gained will facilitate more effective use of these photosynthetic bacteria for climate-positive purposes.
And Nadia Mohd-Radzman, who was featured in the Guardian for her work on mental health and broad beans, plans to use AI to improve plant peptide technology by translating intuitive peptide design into data-driven models; using experimental wet-lab data as training input. With this data, AI/ML can help generate robust gene regulatory networks that can be tested and refined through iterative wet-lab experiments. She believes that “repeating this cycle will improve our ability to predict how plant peptides can be used to enhance crop resilience to climate stress.”
Students
E-Lab students continue to drive innovative thinking in their respective areas of interest.
Jacob Forward (History, King’s College), for example, was a member of the winning Hackathon team, PrecedentAI, and is personally leading research at the intersection of AI and History. Experimenting with new methods for archival search and retrieval, he is harnessing generative AI to work more efficiently with historical sources at scale. In his most recent project, the AI Roosevelt vs Reagan Presidential debate, he reanimated these former presidents from their public speeches (you can check out the event recording here).
Prior to taking part in the 2024 E-Lab September Residential Programme, Max Lyu (Engineering, Christ’s College) worked over the summer at the Cambridge Cyber-Human Lab, Institute for Manufacturing to utilise computer vision validations which guide and teach users to perform manual tasks. His AI-integrated augmented reality (AR) application leverages computer vision to assess the accuracy of paper folding (see video below!). In Max’s view, “this innovative approach holds significant potential in industrial settings, such as assembly line work, quality control, and precision maintenance tasks." In addition to this, Max is a committee member of the Cambridge University Robotics Society, aiming to make robotics experiences accessible to everyone.
These kinds of student societies and initiatives are an area in which E-Lab members excel. Chris Sosnowski (Medicine, Christ’s College), also from the 2024/2025 residential cohort, currently serves as Vice-President of both the Cambridge MedTech Foundation and the Cambridge Robotic Surgery Society. These roles build on his former executive committee position in the Royal Society of Medicine Student Section, where he promoted education on AI by organising networking events, webinars, and a series of workshops. Chris’s own research explores the challenges and limitations of AI in surgery and its impact on multidisciplinary team meetings, in collaboration with Imperial College London, but his committee work (and Max’s alongside it) highlights a key point: this research is rarely developed in isolation.
The Right Question
This is a mere snapshot of activities and people. Yet it suggests that asking “What impact is AI going to have?” is not the right question. It is not, after all, the abstract “AI” that is in fact going to have the impact. Instead, it is the plant scientists working to integrate AI to build climate-resilient crops for food security who will have the impact. It is the health researchers pioneering new approaches to implement essential health care support mechanisms who are going to have the impact. It is the zoologists leveraging machine learning to provide vital tools to resource-strained wildlife organisations who are going to have the impact. It is the historians, doctors, filmmakers, teachers and engineers who are going to imagine and enact the AI that steers our futures – the E-Lab is glad to be a part of these individuals’ journeys and to provide the space they need to come together and share their efforts.
Sophie Harbour
Sophie is the King’s E-Lab Coordinator and a Research Associate at the Cambridge Peaceshaping, Climate, and Conflict Lab (CPCCL). She earned her PhD in Political Theory from the Department of Politics and International Studies at the University of Cambridge in 2025, specialising in democratic theory and care ethics. In addition to her academic research, Sophie has served as an external research consultant for Boston Consulting Group (BCG) and the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), focusing on climate mobility, water governance, and social innovation.