Access to Expertise

Partner with Us

The Bayes Centre is housed at the heart of the University of Edinburgh’s campus in a purpose-built £45M facility where around 500 academics, students, and industry partners work side by side to create value from the use of AI and data.

hands shaking

This community offers a unique combined capability in terms of academic and technology expertise, business networks, and innovation support not available anywhere else in Scotland.

We work with industry partners across all sectors to provide connectivity to world-leading academic excellence in mathematical, computational, engineering, and natural sciences. This multidisciplinary approach gives our partners access to research across the University as well as to novel technologies, labs and facilities.

Our University’s expertise and translational capacity is demonstrated across a number of key stats:

  • #1 in the world for Natural Language Processing research (REF2021)
  • #1 in the UK for AI research power (REF2021)
  • #5 in the world for industry, innovation and infrastructure (Times Higher Education Impact Rankings 2022)

We also host world-class research centres and facilities such as the Edinburgh Centre for Robotics, the Edinburgh Lab for Integrated AI and the ARM Centre of Excellence which bring together leading researchers across disciplines and institutions in multi-million research initiatives led by the University of Edinburgh.

Working with our Bayes team will also put you in touch with a dynamic community of inspirational entrepreneurs. Our culture is all about open innovation, with large and small companies working together learning from each other. As an industry partner at Bayes, we encourage you to become involved with our entrepreneurial programmes and regular networking opportunities to help you build relationships with these high-potential start-ups.

How to work with us

Our industry partners can benefit from becoming a part of our network of over 60 industry and public sector partners, leverage the expertise of academic experts and students for R&D, establish a virtual or physical presence in Edinburgh, invest in joint innovation projects, support or collaborate with tech ventures in our ecosystem, or create training opportunities for their staff. We offer a range of partnership opportunity options:  

Strategic partnerships & Innovation Labs

Strategic partnerships offer industry the opportunity to collaborate with academics and technical experts on major challenges in order to drive innovation and strategic ambitions. These can take the form of Innovation Labs where industry partners work with lead academics and post-doc researchers to solve complex problems and deliver transformational levels of impact which can disrupt existing markets, and offer exciting learning opportunities for all participants including academic experts.

Collaborative Projects

If you need to tackle particular challenges we offer bespoke collaborative projects designed specifically around your requirements and drawing on multi-disciplinary research expertise. These types of projects tend to be short, focused and high-impact working with students or researchers to help deliver solutions. We will work with you to scope the project and identify potential funding. 

PhD placements & Secondments

A three- or four-year PhD project engages a talented graduate to work in a research area of strategic importance to your company. In some instances we can also offer shorter PhD placement placements or internships. If you are looking for specific expertise for an innovation project, we can deliver this for you via an employee secondment into a research group, or a part-time placement of academic staff into your company.

Technical Services & Consultancy

We deliver technical specialist services and expertise to help organisations solve problems or move projects on to the next stage. We also work closely with the University’s consultancy service which provides flexible, short or long term expertise access to world-class academics across a wide range of disciplines.

Student Projects

If you have a smaller research question or challenge that you wish to explore, you can become an industry partner for one of our MSc students. We look for projects from a range of different disciplines around data science and AI from companies, organisations, charities and government departments. You can find out more and submit a proposal here.

Next Steps

If you are interested in any of these opportunities, our business development team is on hand to discuss your organisation’s needs before we explore projects and make introductions to relevant academics as well as consider potential funding sources.

Contact us to discuss your requirements and find out more about what we can offer at the Bayes Centre.