Formalisation of a community of Practitioners in AI (Early Career)

Event summary

There is a lack of education within AI in the UK educational curriculum. This can be seen in the paper by Dr Oldfield that discusses the concerns of students and early career professionals in AI. This paper is based on a Research School funded by the London Mathematical Society. The students were particularly concerned about both risks of AI and how to use it in a robust manner. There were concerns over where they could find information from, how they could network with fellow professionals and how they could get a job.  There were ethical considerations and concerns raised about the development of AI products and the lack of support to either voice or rectify these concerns.  This was concerning as this was later repeated by humanities discipline students at the AISB conference and then by mid-level management within Government and Telecoms at further conferences. In addition, at a separate conference professionals raised concerns around their lack of ability to teach their children about AI as they lacked the skills to do so. We therefore expanded the project to address parents and children’s needs as well.

Creating a community where students, early career professionals and the wider public could access curated resources, speak to each other, network and voice concerns and start to solve them was something that had been coming up for many years in the AI discipline because the UK education system has not addressed citizen literacy in this area and there is no formalised reaching and assessment in this discipline. In addition, the upcoming legislation such as the EU AI Act would be imposed upon the professionals without their input and standards are being developed nationally and internationally without a collective voice of AI professionals being heard.

Therefore, it was decided to apply for funding from SPRITE+ to host an early careers event where they could access cutting edge developments, network with each other and leaders in their industry and be involved in a panel and discussion session to air their views and concerns.

Giving a voice to the community was the first aim followed rapidly by education and resource provision. The outcome of this event then informed the output of the citizen literacy project and we were able to capture further resource requirements that could be addressed by the citizen literacy project.

At the event we had numerous cutting edge researchers present and we made a special effort to ensure the majority of speakers were from the early careers bracket. We included a discussion and networking session so that attendees could learn from each other, collaborate and make connections. A discussion session allowed a deeper exploration of key topics in AI affecting early careers professional s right now and exploring ways to solve them. This led to further projects such as free online training courses, further networking events and an event for employers later in 2026 that are currently being taken forward by FRACTAI.

Outcomes & outputs

The outcome from this event is that it has validated the need for a non-profit body such as FRACTAI that can bring together and showcase ECR within the interdisciplinary area of AI. It has also given validation to the work of SPRITE+. SPRITE+ is currently putting together AI explainers which have been both requested by those on the citizen literacy project we have undertaken and the ECR event.

ECRS as a community are very much underserved across the professional body space but the gap in AI is large. Therefore, we have approached the University of Bristol and the University of Portsmouth to start pilots with their cohorts to see where we can support then more with free seminars and pdf resources on the FRACTAI website. We are increasing the volunteer community within FRACTAI to support this work. The outcomes have also informed our resource database and as a result we have extended the citizen literacy project to include ECRs. We hope to hold an ECR-Employer event later in the year and we have started quarterly career and CV clinics for ECR.

The insights will be used in feeding back to CEN CENELEC and ISO, we have already fed back on this and the output from the conference validates the previous feedback also. We are now also working with Science Creates to provide outreach to schools and young people.