With a strategy now in place, and a commitment to better support University wide activity, we need to grow Bayes’ academic identity – whilst also providing themes, opportunities and services that School based academic staff can relate to and engage with.  The medium-term ambition is to position Bayes as an internal point of interdisciplinary activity, the place where academic and research staff can (physically or virtually) engage with other colleagues who have similar interests, industry partners who are keen to collaborate and access wider University data-driven initiatives that might not be part of their School’s core activity.  Our unique offering across the areas of entrepreneurship, data science education and industry liaison makes us well equipped to support and enable that community – but we need to structure it in a way that can be more effectively promoted and understood.

We already have:

• Partners (occupants and co-located external collaborators signed into lease agreements)
• Members (occupants and co-located external collaborators in the early stage of project development)

In order to avoid confusion with existing nomenclature, Executive Group have decided to develop an ‘Academic Ambassador’ model, where we can better identify those who are working in one of our themed research areas, or in some kind of partnership with Bayes.  This is nothing like the EFI secondment model, and would continue to leave staff based within Schools, resourced by Schools etc, effectively offering Bayes as a ‘soft’ additional institute that they are collaborating or identifying with. 

The identification (and CSE/DDI endorsement) of research themes has been a major step forward.  The next (ongoing) challenge is to recruit suitable theme leads, and work with them to build and promote an active research community across our priority theme areas:

• Digital Twins
• AI in Financial Services
• AI & Health
• Space & Satellites
• Business Informatics

In order to support and promote the development of these themes, we need to develop a structured offering of how we support these activities, why it’s beneficial to engage via Bayes and how our operating model could support and promote this research leadership.  Executive Group have asked the Operations Team to lead on this.