Sign up now to join one or more of the 12 UKOMAIN Interest Groups and express your interest in leadership opportunities.
UKOMAIN Interest Groups (IGs) are focused, lightweight communities organised around key themes in multimodal AI and its real-world deployment. We adopt a broad definition of multimodal AI in our recent Perspective in Nature Machine Intelligence, which includes modalities such as vision, language, audio, time series, sensor, spatial, tabular, and graph data, and considers multiple levels of multimodality, including data types, subtypes, views, and fidelities.
Membership is open to anyone interested in multimodal AI. Each IG aims to develop one tangible annual output, such as draft guidance, a reference architecture, an evaluation framework, a policy briefing, a tutorial resource, or a community position statement.
Benefits of joining include
The first eight groups align with UKRI’s Tomorrow’s Engineering Research Challenges (TERCs): health and wellbeing, transportation systems, robotics, materials discovery, space research, nature-based engineering, global engineering solutions, and responsible engineering. The remaining three groups are community-focused: early career researchers, women in multimodal AI, and industry collaboration and innovation.All IG activities are expected to follow the UKOMAIN Code of Conduct.
IG Leadership Expression of Interest (EOI): Interest Groups are coordinated by a Lead and one or more Co-Leads. Leads help convene light-touch discussions, guide the group towards at least one tangible annual output aligned with UKOMAIN objectives, and provide a short annual update report to the Executive Board each January. Meetings are expected to be proportionate and manageable, for example every six to eight weeks. Leadership roles are collaborative rather than burdensome, and responsibilities can be shared.
UKOMAIN will support IG Leads through visibility, amplification via events and communications, and eligibility to request administrative and financial support for activities aligned with agreed deliverables. Appointments are confirmed by the Executive Board on a rolling basis, are time-limited, and reviewed annually. Confirmed IG Leads and Co-Leads will be listed here with name and affiliation.