In late March 2025 the Research Software Engineering (RSE) department completed the first round of Collaborative Research & Development (CR&D) projects as part of The Turing Innovation Catalyst (TIC), an Innovate UK-funded programme aiming to utilise the University’s AI expertise to develop SMEs based in Greater Manchester. Each project involved developing a proof-of-concept AI-driven solution to a challenge the business faces, guided by a leading academic.
The RSE Department and the Platform Engineering Team, both part of Research IT and IT Services, played key roles in delivering TIC’s CR&D projects. A team of RSEs led by senior RSEs Chris Fullerton and Jonny Taylor worked closely with Sue Ingham and Isabel Rivera (TIC programme staff) to take companies from an initial idea through to completion. With 54 companies registering for the programme, the RSE team met with 35 of them to develop plans for projects. We then helped to match academic leads with these projects, completing 22 with the highest potential.
The RSE team provided project-management using a modified version of our Agile project management process. Our RSEs also provided AI and software engineering expertise, doing development work on 9 projects as well as providing specific guidance and testing to help researchers prepare their code for handover to companies. As a team, our experience with software engineering in a research environment means we’re well suited to working on innovative and uncertain applied AI projects like this.
A vital part of delivering these projects was access to fully private, on-demand GPUs with associated data storage. Rapid, flexible, and easy access to the heavy weight hardware needed to train and run advanced AI models is essential for working on innovative, exploratory projects. The Platforms Engineering Team developed a solution using AWS Sagemaker Studio, providing powerful compute resources for model training with a familiar Jupyter Notebook or VS Code like interface that could be quickly learned and used by both RSEs and researchers.
There was a huge amount of interest in the CR&D project strand, and we worked with companies from a wide variety of sectors: from healthcare to digital marketing, and green energy to scientific research. So far, we’ve referred 13 of the companies we worked with to the University’s Business Engagement and Knowledge Exchange team, to investigate ways they can immediately continue to work with the University. The TIC programme has been a huge success, winning Tech Hub of the year at the 2024 Prolific North Tech Awards and receiving funding to run for another year. We're looking forward to welcoming another cohort of companies and working with them on exciting and ground-breaking CR&D projects in TIC's second phase.
If you’re interested in working with the RSE department on an AI-related project (large or small), get in touch with us via Connect and we’ll organise a meeting to discuss how we can work together. If you’re interested in getting involved in TIC’s CR&D projects, drop them an email for more information.