UK UNIVERSITIES AI UNIVERSE

How to read these numbers

• Note: take all comparative boxes with a pinch of salt. This is not an absolute measure in any case. It's just a measure of what happens to be online. Volume of online references is not a reliable guide to quality of output. All suggestions on method improvement are welcome.
• Comparing universities purely with AI tools is not really useful, so think of this more as interesting anecdotal update on the aggregate level of activity across UK universities, based only on publicly available information that AI agents could find. It's not pretending to be definitive, and still less a measure of success
• Volume of online references is not a reliable guide to quality of output, and all suggestions on method improvement are welcome.
• Organisation counts are directory entries, and many are nested units: a lab inside a department inside a School or Division. They are not independent centres, so treat them as how much activity has been mapped rather than as a ranking.
• The universities' source directories were researched separately, with somewhat different scopes. Oxford's lists only colleges that have AI entries; Cambridge's lists all 31 colleges and greys out those with none. Imperial has faculties, not colleges: its map's side column shows cross-faculty institutes (I-X, Data Science Imperial and others), which are not counted as colleges here. Exeter likewise has faculties and no colleges: its side column shows cross-cutting AI institutes and centres (IDSAI, the Centre for Environmental Intelligence and others), also not counted as colleges. Manchester is the same: faculties and no colleges, with a side column of cross-cutting AI institutes and centres (the Centre for AI Fundamentals, the Christabel Pankhurst Institute and others), not counted as colleges. Edinburgh's three Colleges (Science and Engineering; Medicine and Veterinary Medicine; Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences) are faculty-level divisions, shown here as faculties; its side column shows cross-cutting bodies (the Edinburgh Futures Institute, EPCC, the Bayes Centre, Data-Driven Innovation and the Generative AI Laboratory), also not counted as colleges. Bristol likewise has three faculties and no colleges: its side column shows cross-cutting AI bodies (the Jean Golding Institute, Bristol Digital Futures Institute, Intelligent Systems Laboratories, Bristol Robotics Laboratory and the Bristol Centre for Supercomputing), not counted as colleges. Warwick is the same: three faculties (Science, Engineering and Medicine; Social Sciences; Arts) and no colleges, with a side column of cross-cutting AI centres (the Centre for Interdisciplinary Methodologies, the Tissue Image Analytics Centre, Warwick Data, DIMAP and the Centre for Digital Inquiry), not counted as colleges. UCL has eleven faculties, grouped into eight chart columns, and no colleges; its side column holds the cross-faculty AI institutes (the UCL Centre for Artificial Intelligence, the UCL Hawkes Institute, the Institute of Healthcare Engineering, the UCL Robotics Institute and the AI Hub in Generative Models), not counted as colleges. www.ucl.ac.uk blocks automated requests, so UCL news comes from Internet Archive snapshots of UCL News, and UCL events are hand-checked. Durham has four faculties (Science; Social Sciences and Health; Arts and Humanities; Business); its colleges are residential and none has an AI entry in its directory, so its side column shows the cross-faculty AI institutes (the Institute for Data Science, the Leverhulme Centre for Algorithmic Life, the Institute for Medical Humanities and the Institute for Computational Cosmology), not counted as colleges. St Andrews has schools grouped in the Faculties of Science, Medicine and Arts, and no college has an AI entry in its directory; its side column shows the cross-school AI institutes and centres (the Sir James Mackenzie Institute, IDIR, CREEM, CIRCA and the Centre for the Critical Reimagining of Human Rights), not counted as colleges. Glasgow's four Colleges (Science and Engineering; Medical, Veterinary and Life Sciences; Social Sciences; Arts and Humanities) are faculty-level divisions, shown here as faculties; its side column shows the cross-college AI centres (the Centre for Data Science and AI, the Advanced Research Centre and the RIG Centre), also not counted as colleges. King's College London has nine faculties (including the Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology & Neuroscience, The Dickson Poon School of Law and King's Business School), shown here as faculties; its side column shows the cross-faculty AI institutes (the King's Institute for Artificial Intelligence, the Digital Futures Institute and the King's Institute for Human and Synthetic Minds), also not counted as colleges. Southampton has five faculties (Engineering and Physical Sciences; Environmental and Life Sciences; Medicine; Arts and Humanities; Social Sciences), shown here as faculties; its side column shows the cross-faculty AI institutes (the Web Science Institute, AI@Southampton, the Southampton Marine and Maritime Institute, the Southampton Institute for Arts and Humanities and the Institute for Life Sciences). Sheffield has five faculties (Engineering; Health; Science; Arts and Humanities; Social Sciences), shown here as faculties, with the Advanced Manufacturing Research Centre as its own column; its side column shows the cross-faculty AI centres (the Centre for Machine Intelligence, the Insigneo Institute and Sheffield Robotics). Neither has colleges. Lancaster has four faculties (Science and Technology; Health and Medicine; Arts and Social Sciences; the Management School), shown here as faculties; its colleges are residential and none has an AI entry in its directory, so its side column shows the cross-faculty AI institutes (the Data Science and AI Institute, LIRA and Security Lancaster), not counted as colleges. Leeds has five faculties (Engineering and Physical Sciences; Health and Life Sciences; Environment and Social Sciences; Arts, Humanities and Cultures; the Business School), shown here as faculties, and no colleges; its side column shows the cross-faculty AI institutes (the Leeds Institute for Data Analytics, Robotics at Leeds and the Leeds Institute for Societal Futures). Cardiff has three colleges (Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences; Biomedical and Life Sciences; Physical Sciences and Engineering), shown here as faculties; its side column shows the cross-college AI institutes (DTII, IROHMS and CUBRIC), not counted as colleges. Liverpool has three faculties (Science and Engineering; Health and Life Sciences; Humanities and Social Sciences), shown here as faculties, and no colleges; its side column shows the cross-faculty AI institutes (AI for Life, the Digital Innovation Facility, LAMBDA and DMSI). Queen's University Belfast has three faculties (Engineering and Physical Sciences; Medicine, Health and Life Sciences; Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences), shown here as faculties, and no colleges; its side column shows the cross-faculty AI institutes (CISC, CSIT and Momentum One Zero). Newcastle has three faculties (Science, Agriculture and Engineering; Medical Sciences; Humanities and Social Sciences), shown here as faculties, and no colleges; its side column shows the cross-faculty AI centres (the Centre for Data Science and AI, NICD and Open Lab). Nottingham has five faculties (Science; Engineering; Medicine and Health Sciences; Arts; Social Sciences), shown here as faculties, and no colleges; its side column shows the AI at Nottingham gateway and related centres (CVL, DREAM, Somabotics). Bath has three faculties (Science; Engineering and Design; Humanities and Social Sciences) plus the School of Management, shown here as faculties, and no colleges; its side column shows the cross-faculty AI centres (the Centre for Artificial Intelligence, IDSB, IMI, ART-AI and the Centre for Spatial Intelligence). Oxford Brookes is shown by school (Engineering, Computing and Mathematics; Business and Law; Arts and Architecture; the Institute of Public Care), with no colleges; its side column shows the cross-school AI institutes, centres and networks (AIDAS, the Centre for AI, Culture and Society, DASOBU and AIDAN). Hertfordshire is shown by school (Physics, Engineering and Computer Science; the Business School), with no colleges; its side column shows the AI research centres (CAIRR, NSRC, CoDIR and the Centre for Astrophysics Research). The Open University is shown by faculty (STEM; Wellbeing, Education and Language Studies; Business and Law), with no colleges; its side column shows the AI research institutes and centres (the Knowledge Media Institute, the Institute of Educational Technology and the Centre for Research in Computing). herts.ac.uk and open.ac.uk block automated requests, so their news comes from Internet Archive snapshots of the University news pages. The six universities added on 30 October 2026 (Aston, Royal Holloway, Ulster, Swansea, Aberdeen and Northumbria) come from a shorter batch compendium extended by own research, so their directories are smaller; entries without a verified public page are listed without a website. Aston is shown by college, Royal Holloway and Aberdeen by school, and Ulster, Swansea and Northumbria by faculty; each side column shows the cross-cutting AI institutes and centres.
• Connections are the distinct pairs of organisations linked by a parent or related-record relationship in the data.
• Papers are 2026 AI papers with a university affiliation, harvested from open indexes (OpenAlex, Europe PMC, Crossref). Counts depend on what each index returned on the day; per-source counts are shown under the chart.
• Events count only upcoming dates (today or later). News (30 days) counts the AI news items each site's news harvest found published in the last 30 days, from university and unit news pages plus hand-verified outside press coverage of the university's AI work (for example FE News or Insider Media) (dated items only, de-duplicated by link and by title and date; items without a publication date are excluded). The news crawlers themselves show only the newest items.