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Announcing AI Core Concepts: A New Learning Resource for Scientists

07 April 2025

Bridging the AI Knowledge Gap for Researchers

Accelerate Science is proud to launch AI Core Concepts, an online training resource designed for researchers across all disciplines who want to incorporate artificial intelligence into their work. It’s designed for researchers from all backgrounds, who don’t have maths and computer programming knowledge, but need to quickly get to grips with contemporary techniques.

What you’ll learn

Our curriculum is divided into two focused sections:

1. Foundations of AI: Build intuition about how AI systems work through accessible explanations of core methods such as supervised learning, unsupervised learning, and natural language processing.
2. Practical Implementation: Understand the process of building AI systems with examples of real-world applications and advice on where and how different techniques are useful.

Why use these resources

AI and data-driven approaches are transforming the entire scientific research lifecycle across disciplines. Our resources aim to:

• Build confidence with core AI concepts
• Help identify AI applications in your research
• Demystify technical vocabulary
• Provide practical next steps for implementation

What is included in the course

As part of the course you will cover the following topics:

Part 1: Core Concepts:

• What is AI?
• Supervised Learning
• Unsupervised Learning
• Reinforcement Learning
• Generative AI
• Limitations of AI
• Natural Language Processing
• Computer Vision

Alongside the core content, we’ve featured a number of case studies of researchers across Cambridge already using AI in their work. Each section contains an explainer about the researcher’s work and a short video exploring the techniques they are using and how they are applying them in their field. We hope these case studies give inspiration to think about using AI in new and innovative ways.

Part 2: Practical Considerations

• The AI Project Lifecycle
• Data for AI Models
• Training AI Models
• Evaluating AI Models
• Practical advice for implementation
• Next steps – signposting additional resources

View the full Core Concepts course.

Watch the videos on our YouTube channel.

Many thanks to our video participants Chris Bannon, Sireesha Chamarthi, Samia Mohinta, Felix Steffek and Dinithi Sumanaweera.