2
Science and Technology Committee
Uncorrected oral evidence: Advanced Research and Invention Agency (ARIA)
Tuesday 8 September 2026
10.15 am
Members present: Lord Mair (The Chair); Lord Booth; Lord Drayson; Lord Duncan of Springbank; Baroness Jones of Whitchurch; Baroness Nicholson of Winterbourne; Lord Patel; Lord Ranger of Northwood; Lord Stern of Brentford; Lord Willis of Knaresborough; Baroness Willis of Summertown; Lord Winston.
Evidence Session No. 1 Heard in Public Questions 1 - 15
Witness
Dr Kathleen Fisher, Chief Executive Officer, Advanced Research and Invention Agency (ARIA).
USE OF THE TRANSCRIPT
29
Dr Kathleen Fisher.
Q1 The Chair: Welcome to this morning’s meeting of the Science and Technology Select Committee. We are very pleased to have as our witness Dr Kathleen Fisher, who is the CEO of ARIA, the Advanced Research and Invention Agency. Dr Fisher, we are very happy to have you here. I will ask the first question. You took over as CEO of ARIA in February of this year. By way of an opening statement, could you set out for us your key priorities for the role and how you think your approach will differ as ARIA matures as an organisation?
Dr Kathleen Fisher: Thank you very much for the question and the opportunity to meet with you today. I am Kathleen Fisher, as you said. I am the CEO of ARIA and I have been in post since February. When my predecessor, Ilan, met with you, ARIA was in its infancy. At this point, ARIA is starting to deliver on its promise, which is exciting. We have more than 300 creators who are working on various projects across 15 different programmes and we are starting to see exciting results coming out of those programmes that I am happy to talk to you about in more detail throughout the time that we have together.
My time as CEO will be marked by growth and execution. We will be getting the flywheel of ARIA spinning at full velocity to deliver on the mission and promise of ARIA. We will spend the full £1.2 billion of the money allocated to ARIA in the most recent spending review to deliver on the next cohort of programme directors, the next cohort of activation partners and multiple opportunity seeds, as well as seeing the cohort 1 and cohort 2 programmes to possible extensions and many exciting results.
Of course, ARIA’s success is not measured by things like the number of creators under contract or amount of money spent but on results. It will take a while to get the results that ARIA is set up to achieve, the decadal results that DARPA is famous for. The things that ARIA will be measured for are three different impacts. The first is scientific breakthroughs, scientific miracles that change the way we think about different concepts, breakthroughs that change the conversation. Of course, many of our programmes will fall short of the North Star aspirations that we have for the programme. By setting those aspirations high, we often are able to drive work further than ever anticipated. However, if we fall short, we still can achieve amazing things in falling short. No matter what, we will advance the cause of science. Sometimes the fastest pace to a breakthrough is by a well-understood failure.
The second impact is societal impact or economic impact. That is some of ARIA’s most important work, crossing the valley of death, which is of course hard anywhere and in any time. We take that extremely seriously and we plan for it from the very beginning. When we start thinking about a programme and the scientific impact that we are hoping for, we think about what happens if we get this scientific impact, how this will translate into societal impact and what we need to do to make that societal impact happen as quickly and as expeditiously as possible so that we do not have to wait 50 years for that impact. To that end, we have just created the post and hired a chief translation officer, so there is someone on the executive team whose full-time job is focusing on crossing the valley of death.
The third impact is a change in mindset. ARIA is a beacon of hope in a time that is somewhat filled with pessimism. Part of the reason why I wanted to come to ARIA was because I saw it as such a beacon of hope. The creation of ARIA represented a commitment by the UK Government to commit not to simply reacting to the future but driving the future and helping to shape it.
I spent seven years at DARPA, three years as a programme manager and four years as office leadership, spending time doing the high-risk, high-reward, programme-director, manager-driven projects, each of which had a very ambitious North Star goal. I have seen how effective that style of research can be. I was impressed, blown away, by the audacious way that the UK set up ARIA to succeed in a very similar style and I was honoured and delighted to be chosen to be ARIA’s CEO. Part of the reason was because I have seen and know how strong the UK science and technology research base is. It has the core to be able to drive similar success.
Everything that I have seen at ARIA since coming in as CEO only reaffirms that base, that ARIA is on track to deliver that same success for the UK and the world, if left with the same authority and funding that it has seen to date. Thank you very much for giving me the opportunity to come here and talk to you today. I look forward to your questions.
The Chair: Thank you very much. Before we move on to other questions, could you set out for us some of the existing programmes that excite you most? We are interested in the cross-cutting work that ARIA does with its activation partners, its innovator circles and the AI and science programme generally. Would you pick a few that excite you most?
Dr Kathleen Fisher: I would be delighted to. It is hard to choose. I love all my children but in the course of today I hope to be able to talk about many of them. I will start by talking about the forecasting tipping points programme because it allows me to make a couple of different points at the same time, but I am happy to follow up and talk about any of them.
The forecasting tipping points programme is exploring, using and developing sensor technology, low-cost distributed technology and models to look at tipping points in climate change, specifically the AMOC current in the North Atlantic and glacial melt in Greenland, to hopefully develop an early warning system about possible climate change that could have substantial impact on the climate of the UK. Whether or not that North Star comes true, part of what they are developing is low-cost sensors, one of which is a small company in Plymouth called Oshen, which is developing autonomous solar and wind-driven robots called sea stars. Instead of having one big ship that monitors the ocean current, a whole fleet of them could be deployed at very low cost. Oshen originally had one of these sea stars. They have now deployed five and the plan is that in a year they would have 50 of them to be able to be deployed and monitor the subpolar gyre. They are now deployed and able to receive, on a minute basis, instructions that are being derived by the models on where to go and what measurements to retrieve to send back to inform those models.
That company was subsequently contracted by NOAA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration of the United States, and asked if they were willing to try to monitor a hurricane to get the conditions of the eyewall of the hurricane. The CEO of that company, Anahita Laverack, thought about whether we want to do this. It is super high-risk, trying to deploy these metre-big vehicles during a hurricane, and the odds of failure are pretty high. However, she is amazing and said, “Let’s go for it, that is worth the risk”. They deployed their sea stars during it, and it was not just any hurricane. It turned out to be category 5 Hurricane Humberto. They succeeded at monitoring and transmitting back the conditions during that category 5 hurricane. They subsequently have contracts with five different Governments to monitor various sea-state conditions.
This is an example of the way ARIA works and the benefits it can deliver. Even if the forecasting tipping points programme falls short of its North Star—and we are still on track to potentially deliver the North Star of the programme—this type of small company could grow and deliver enormous technology for monitoring ocean conditions for different applications. It is an ancillary benefit.
You asked about the ecosystem. One of the ecosystems that we have is activation partners. ARIA does not give funding to our creators and then sit back and watch. We actively monitor the progress and work to remove friction throughout the process of scientific discovery through to hopefully massive economic benefit. One of our activation partners is Amodo Design, which is a small company in Sheffield. It came to us and said, “You do not know this yet, but one of the frictions that your scientists will run into is that they need bespoke engineering”. It was right that we need bespoke engineering and it is now providing bespoke engineering to more than 35 of our creators.
One of creators was, again, on the forecasting tipping points. It turns out it needed batteries that work in Greenland where temperatures go down to negative 50 degrees; normal battery technology does not work at negative 50 degrees. Those creators talked about the normal process that they would use, which is applying to a funding agency for a grant to pay for bespoke battery technology. That process would take six months. If they got that grant, they would go and put out an RFP to find a company that could do engineering for them and they would iterate with that company to create a battery. They estimated that the whole process at best would take 18 months. Instead, they had a conversation with Amodo Design. It iterated three times and it produced a modular battery pack that would work in negative 50 degrees Celsius, in three months. That removed a massive amount of friction from their effort. It also works for all the other teams that are working on low-cost sensors for Greenland. There are potentially 11 other teams that benefited from that same effort. That is an example of an activation partner and the synergies that we are seeing.
I have already taken up too much of my time, so I will defer talking about other children who I love in ARIA to other questions.
The Chair: Those are two very interesting examples. Thank you very much.
Q2 Baroness Willis of Summertown: Good morning. I am already enthused by your examples. My question is about how you define success. To start with, how do you track progress on your projects when dealing with this incredibly expansive portfolio? Three years is a very short interval of time, so how do you manage to do that in a light but effective way?
Dr Kathleen Fisher: We track progress in lots of different ways. The first one starts with the programme directors themselves and the programme creation process. When we design the programme, we design in what we think the measures of success will look like, milestones or metrics, and what we think success should look like. This is programme by programme because what success looks like in forecasting tipping points, in an AI safety programme and in a precision neurotechnologies programme are all completely different, so it is programme by programme. When we design the programme, we set up milestones or metrics of what we think it will look like.
Then the programme directors meet with the creators quarterly, so they are saying to them all the time, “How are you doing on the science? How are you doing on translation?” It is stacked, so you first do the science and then you do the translation, but you are thinking about both all the time. We track red, amber, green on how we are doing towards those. Sometimes the science might not come out exactly the way you expect, but you can pivot the science—you can change the science a little bit and change red to amber or amber to green as you are going. We do not say that if the science is not doing exactly what they said out of the proposal, that is a failure. We are well aware that we are doing very hard science and you cannot predict exactly what will happen, so there is room for manoeuvre. The programme director is constantly monitoring what is happening and working with the creators to shift as appropriate while keeping the North Star goal of the programme in mind.
At an annual cadence, the programme director reports to ARIA where the programme is on track for its metrics and milestones. At that point, we bring in outside experts on the science and translation side, who look over the programme materials and provide guidance to the agency, to me, the chief science officer and the chief translation officer on whether this is still worth doing or we should be pivoting. The programme directors have been quite proactive and I have been pleased to see, coming in from DARPA, that programme directors have been terminating projects that are not on track. The agency has been either adding resources or repurposing resources that are not on track. The safeguarded AI programme, for example, determined that one of the tracks of the programme, which was about verifying AI itself—statistical AI—would not be possible, given how fast AI is moving, and repurposed that part of the funds towards using a combination of AI and formal methods to verify infrastructure instead, which is a good repurposing of those funds. We are regularly looking at the work that we are doing to make sure that the funding is appropriately allocated.
Baroness Willis of Summertown: Thank you. That sounds very robust. Can I just ask a junk question? It was going to come up later but I will bring it in now. When you get the external reviews or the reviews outside of that, are they also checking about overlap with what other people are doing? How do you ensure that this remains unique to and going for the blue-sky thinking rather than existing work?
Dr Kathleen Fisher: One of the questions we always ask at the very beginning is whether this work is distinct. How does it fit with the ecosystem? Would this work happen without ARIA doing it or not? That is key. If this work would happen without ARIA, it is not work that ARIA should do. We ask that question during programme formulation and the outside experts on the panel at that point. We ask them again during programme review. This is one of the questions that always gets asked.
It is a question that requires a good deal of context to be able to answer, because if there is no work going on in an area, ARIA cannot fund the work either, because you need to have a creator base that is working in the space. If there is a lot of work going on, it is totally not appropriate. Therefore, you need to split this needle. There is a needle that you have to thread. If there is nothing going on, there is no one who can do the work. If there is a lot of work going on, it is not appropriate. I remember when I was a programme manager at DARPA and having to thread exactly this needle and being frustrated by the person who was poking me, saying, “First you say I cannot do it because there is no work and now you say I cannot do it because there is too much work”.
Baroness Willis of Summertown: Thank you. Overall as a whole, what does success look like for the portfolio? When we had Matt Clifford here, he said that the one success in a sense will be the success of the overall programme, whereas a number will fail, by the very nature of the work. Do you share that vision?
Dr Kathleen Fisher: Mostly, yes, although I have a slightly more nuanced take on it. Over a 60 or 70-year period, like DARPA, there will be punctuated massive successes—the power law, where every 20 years or so there will be, in US terms, a grand slam, a programme that is so incredibly impactful that it easily pays the budget for ARIA for a 20-year period. However, in the meantime it will not be that there will be zero successes but they will be smaller. The Oshen example by itself is probably not a grand slam but it produces really useful technology that is profitable. There are similar examples that change our understanding of science, are good advancements, create useful companies and industry that may be not of the same, “Oh my God, it changed everything”, but are still very worthwhile and probably pay the bills. They just do not have the same type of impact.
Baroness Willis of Summertown: Yes, I get that. I think that you do share that vision, but I understand where you are coming from.
The third question is that the length of grant is very short—three years. First, is that, in your view, long enough? I was thinking about my own research and within three years you are barely off the starting blocks. Do you follow it up? Are there follow-on grants and how do you choose what you will follow? It could take something 10 years, for example. Take nuclear fusion, for example. If we had not had the government support, that would have stopped years ago. How do you balance that?
Dr Kathleen Fisher: It is three to five years; it is not always three years. What is useful about that is that it does not continue by default. It stops by default and then you can continue it. An illustrative example, again from DARPA, is that DARPA invested in artificial intelligence for 60 years, but it did not set out to invest in AI for 60 years. It invested in AI for 60 years because over and over and over again different people continued to decide that investing in AI was a good choice, even though for most of that time there were not massive returns on AI.
ARIA has mechanisms to decide to double-down, to add investment, to reinvest in areas, but those reinvestments are decisions that this is still a good area for ARIA to invest in, still something that would not happen without ARIA’s investment, that other funding agencies, other sources of funding, would not pick up the ball and run with it. Therefore, what is important is that the funding does not continue by default. It stops by default and ARIA has to make a proactive decision to continue the funding.
Two or three weeks ago I was at Newcastle talking with a researcher who was working on the forecasting tipping point. He had a sensor that could detect moisture, which he originally was using to detect moisture for farms but was repurposing to detect glacier melt in Greenland. He originally wrote the proposal for ARIA, thinking that it would take three years. He has accomplished in a year what he had planned to do for three years. Part of that was because he originally planned to work 20% time, but ARIA asked him, “Can you only work 20% time? If we could fund you, can you work 80% time?” He said, “Sure, I would love to work 80% time”. We talked to his university and his university was fine with him working 80% time. Therefore, working for ARIA can compress the amount of time. Like the example that I talked about with Amodo and the bespoke engineering and pooling the resources, you can go faster. Part of it is that we are working at a sprint.
Baroness Willis of Summertown: Let us say that he has gone to 80%. Does that mean that his funding only lasts for one year?
Dr Kathleen Fisher: No, his funding is extended. He can go further.
Baroness Willis of Summertown: He can go further. My other question is that you said you will continue the funding of a subject area, but what about the people? If you have someone who is an absolute star, does that stop or can you carry on funding the same person?
Dr Kathleen Fisher: It would depend on what they wanted to do with their research and whether that aligned with ARIA’s purpose. ARIA does not have a long enough track record to know, but there is a synergy that happens where people find ways to continue working and get funded for a long period with DARPA. DARPA is larger, so it is easier at DARPA than at ARIA, but in the fullness of time I could imagine that happening at ARIA as well.
Q3 Lord Duncan of Springbank: Following up on Baroness Willlis’s point, if you find that a project is not going where you thought it was going but it has done a lot of useful stuff, how do you influence a pivot point within the project that says, “It will not get to where we thought it was, but we still think it has enough—we would like it to pivot”? Is there a mechanism within your structure that says, “We can guide you further to a different destination in real time”?
Dr Kathleen Fisher: Absolutely. This is why the relationship of the programme directors with the creators is so important and why the programme directors are constantly meeting with the creators. The programme directors and the creators are talking all the time about what they are doing and how the science is coming out and where it is going. If the original vector is not turning out to be promising but a related vector is turning out to be promising and it is still in the direction of interest to ARIA—hopefully in the direction of the North Star of the programme—that is a perfectly fine pivot.
One of the lessons that we are learning is that originally our contracts were very specific and some of those pivots would need to be adjusted in the contract, which is overhead. We are learning to write contracts that are more flexible in the terms so that we can do those pivots without having to rewrite a contract, where it is still specific about the work that is being done but the milestones are tracked separately. They do not need to be tracked in the contract per se, which is a best practice from DARPA, for example.
Lord Duncan of Springbank: That would not interfere with how you measure the success?
Dr Kathleen Fisher: Yes, we can measure success not in the contract. Measuring success independent from the contract is a best practice that we are adopting.
Q4 Lord Winston: Thank you very much indeed for coming this morning. What you are saying to us is very interesting. Could you give us a view of the selection of programme directors—obviously they are critical to the aims—to give them as much latitude and freedom as possible? As you recruit your third cohort very soon, what are the things that you have learned about the qualities of the directors that you find most important? Do you think that will change during the course of your current approach to appointing them? Finally, has this been influenced greatly by seeing the existing progress of the projects they are doing?
Dr Kathleen Fisher: Thank you for the question. We are in the middle of recruiting cohort 3. It is important that we recruit programme directors regularly because they are term-limited, so they will leave and ARIA will be always recruiting. The vision is that we will be recruiting cohorts every two years. One of the important lessons is that we recruit an entire cohort, because that will give us balance across our opportunity spaces. One of the exciting things about how ARIA recruits programme directors is as a cohort so that we can view a whole class of candidates at the same time, which is different to how DARPA does it. DARPA recruits one at a time, which means that you are making a decision about whether this person is above the bar, whether this person above the bar, and you have a very small pool at any one time to be considering for a particular post.
At ARIA the current class deadline is 28 September and we have more than 1,200 applicants right now. In the last round we had 400 applicants. This is a testimony to how well ARIA is perceived here in the UK and abroad, which is really exciting, because the quality of the programme director is important for the success of the agency and the programmes.
On your question about the qualities that we are looking for in a programme director, they are multiple. One of them is technical depth. They are managing science breakthroughs and they need to understand good science and what good science looks like. They also need to be technically broad, because all of our programmes are interdisciplinary, so you need to have an appreciation not just of one particular discipline but be able to talk across disciplines. You also need to have good technical judgment, because people will come to you and try to sell you stuff. You need to be able to appreciate whether that sales pitch is well grounded or it is snake oil. It is technical depth, technical breadth and technical judgment.
You also need to have an entrepreneurial spirit, because ARIA is not in science for science’s sake. Just getting a scientific breakthrough is not enough. ARIA’s mission is to make the UK and the world a better place through scientific breakthroughs. Making the world a better place requires getting across the valley of death, so our programme directors have to have that entrepreneurial spark. We are looking for that in some way. You need to have good communication skills because, as the programme director, you do not do the technical work yourself. You explain and convince and cajole other people to do the technical work, and that requires good communication skills. Similarly with leadership skills, because you have to have the hard conversations with the scientific teams that, “You are not doing what you need to be doing”. You have to be able to fire people and to motivate people to do the work. That requires good leadership skills.
You also have to have good resilience, because you have to go around the UK and the world to explain what you are trying to do and get told by people that it is stupid or that it is really exciting. It is like doing a PhD. The first time you put together a programme—that process—even if people tell you you are doing a good job, you do not believe it. When doing a PhD, you do not believe it until you are all the way through the process, so you have to be resilient.
Nobody comes to ARIA or to DARPA with all of those skills, which is probably not surprising given the list of things I have just told you. Therefore, you also have to be able to take feedback well, because if you do not take feedback, the time it takes to learn all those skills is too long because you only have a three-year appointment plus one or two years of renewal. People who are able to learn on the job faster by listening to people who are working hard to coach you to get up to that set faster will make a bigger difference faster. Those are the set of skills that we are looking for. We found them in the first two cohorts and I am convinced that we will find them in this cohort as well.
On some of the learnings, the first cohort was heavily academic and the second cohort was heavily entrepreneurial. We are looking in the third cohort for a balance of both academic and entrepreneurial. In the first cohort we allowed people to be 80% time, to accommodate academics. The second cohort we made 100% time at ARIA. The third cohort will go back to letting people be 80% time to allow people to be academics. That is partly because academics often have PhD students who they do not want to abandon. I have seen at DARPA that it is definitely doable to be an academic on 80% time and be effective as an ARIA or a DARPA programme manager.
The Chair: To intervene for a second, on the 1,200 applicants who you have just mentioned, do you have, off the top of your head, what proportion of those would be academics and what proportion would be from outside academia?
Dr Kathleen Fisher: I do not know. I am sure that there is a healthy mix, but I can get you statistics.
Lord Winston: It would be useful to know.
The Chair: Yes, it would be helpful to know.
Lord Winston: Is that possible?
Dr Kathleen Fisher: We can get you the statistics. Maybe wait until the 28 September deadline so that we can get you the statistics of the full pool. We have been going on a tour around the world and the UK to highlight the positions and to explain working with ARIA.
Lord Patel: Does it matter for your programme whether it is academics or those who come from industry?
Dr Kathleen Fisher: The people matter a huge amount. I think that both academics and industry people can be hugely successful as programme directors. Having a mix in the cohort is valuable because a bonding happens between the programme directors. They talk to each other a lot, so having some of each is a good combination. At this point we have a good mix of academics and entrepreneurs across the two cohorts. We would like to see that replicated within the third cohort.
Lord Winston: Could I come back with my last question? Your previous CEO suggested to us that the ideal projects were the ones where there was violent disagreement, where half the people looking at it thought that it was a fantastic project and the other half thought that it was complete rubbish. What do you feel about that? Do you feel that you can make those decisions to find the projects where there is very considerable disagreement in the panel that is looking at it?
Dr Kathleen Fisher: I do not know that I would be as strong as Ilan was, that what you are shooting for is 50:50. I think that zero people is a bad sign and 100% is a bad sign—it is somewhere in between. I do not think that you should be going for 100% of people who think that this is a good idea. If you are there, it is probably too settled and probably a case where the field is already going to go there. If nobody thinks that it is a good idea, you probably should not be doing it either.
Lord Winston: That is a pretty sane answer. Thank you very much.
The Chair: Lord Willis, would you like to come in online? Oh, I am sorry, we are not getting Lord Willis; we cannot hear you. Lord Winston, would you like to ask the question for Lord Willis?
Q5 Lord Winston: Very quickly, because it follows up on what we have been discussing already. Programme directors retain a great deal of autonomy. How do they allocate their funding with that autonomy, what approaches have been taken to allocate that funding and what is your view of how the research is best performed?
Dr Kathleen Fisher: I did not hear the last part of your question. Can you repeat it?
Lord Winston: What approach have your directors of projects taken to allocate the funding that they get? What is your view as to where the research is best performed?
Dr Kathleen Fisher: There are lots of different programme structures that can work and the right programme structure depends on what the programme is trying to accomplish. One structure is that you allocate all of the money up front and you then actively manage as the programme goes along, cutting the teams that are not effective. Sometimes you overallocate at the beginning because you assume that you will cut certain teams. The programmable plants programme, for example, took the first strategy there because plants, it turns out, grow really slowly, so they anticipated that, no matter what, it would take a long time for the plants to grow and doing something faster was not going to be helpful.
In the enduring atmospheric platforms programme, where the teams have a relatively expensive cost to send various vehicles up into the stratosphere to set up communications, the programme director wanted to take the approach where we invest in a whole bunch of different approaches, overcommitting at the beginning and then cutting the teams—the ones that show the least promise—which allows you to put more shots on goal. That is an advantage of that approach but it means that the teams know that they are actively competing against each other for a smaller pot, so they will not be working with each other because they know that they will get cut. Some of them will have to get cut because the programme does not have enough budget to continue all of them forward.
The forecasting tipping points programme set up a structure where they were not sure what approaches would work. Therefore, they set up a two-phase programme where they ran the first phase for 18 months and they will send out a second solicitation in the next month or two to set up the second phase of the programme. That was appropriate because they knew that they would be able to iterate and get information in the first 18 months that would dramatically affect what they wanted to do in the second part of the programme.
The trust everything, everywhere programme that Alex is running is running a competition because he wanted to see what was out there. That space is moving so fast and there are so many players and it did not seem that he would be able to get all of the people on contract that he wanted to be able to try out. By running a competition, you can throw it out there and see who will come to play. The challenge of a competition is that it is extremely challenging to get the rules exactly right so that you are rewarding what you want to be measuring and not inadvertently rewarding something else. You need to be very careful about setting it up so that the players cannot cheat in a way that you do not want them to be cheating. Those are all interesting different structures.
We recently hired a chief science and technology officer, who comes from spending significant time at DARPA and has had a large amount of his career working on different programme structures, to help particularly cohort 3 be very sophisticated in programme structures. One thing that he will be particularly looking at is setting up; I talked about phased structure and funding structure. Another interesting structure is the technical area structure. ARIA has done quite a bit on a social impact structure and an adoption structure of how this technology will be received, which has been interesting.
Another technical area that is very common at DARPA is an evaluation team, because often how you evaluate cutting-edge science is itself a research area and it provides programme directors with an interesting lever arm. If you are creating challenge problems, you can make challenge problems more or less difficult and you can choose challenge problems to facilitate translation or adoption. Having a separate technical area that is responsible for managing evaluation gives the programme director another lever arm to move. The new chief science and technology officer, who will be starting on 1 October, has deep expertise in these structure choices and he will be working with cohort 3 in those choices.
Q6 Lord Drayson: Good morning, Dr Fisher. My questions will focus on ARIA’s approach to bringing economic benefit specifically to the United Kingdom. When we spoke to Matt Clifford, he said that ARIA has been designed very explicitly as a value-creation mechanism rather than a value-capture one. However, ARIA has a mandate that says it needs to bring economic benefit to the UK specifically. How is ARIA doing that?
Dr Kathleen Fisher: Thank you for the question. I appreciate that ARIA has indeed a mandate to bring economic benefit to the UK. I think that ARIA is a value-creation agency primarily, but it also has a value-capture role. ARIA’s value-creation mechanism by itself will bring tremendous economic benefit to the UK. For example, the precision neurotechnologies effort that Jacques Carolan is bringing is working on creating technology to address neurological disorders and neuropsychiatric disorders that currently afflict one in six citizens of the UK and cost the National Health Service £4.1 billion a year. If that programme delivers technology that could treat those patients in a much more economic way, that will deliver enormous economic benefit to the UK without having any profit associated with it. Therefore, value creation can be economically impactful by not costing the NHS an enormous amount of money and by returning the people who are currently suffering from those ailments to the productive workforce.
That said, I agree that value capture is also an important part of what we are doing. That is part of the reason why we created the chief translation officer, whose job is to work with programme directors to identify what the impact path is. Every time we create a programme, we also think about what the path is for translation of this programme, what the path is for social or economic impact. Some of them are things like climate change, but some of them are creating companies and driving those companies to cross the valley of death and commercialisation and how they can deliver that benefit to the UK.
Our IP terms are designed to maximise that. We have chosen not to take intellectual property. We think that the best way to drive economic benefit for the UK is to have the creator themselves maintain the IP rights so that when the creator goes to start a company, their cap table is clean and they have the best terms to go to the venture capital companies and get funding. They will be maximally incentivised to go and do that process. We have, with multiple activation partners, worked to create a climate to incentivise an entrepreneurial spirit to go and drive the commercialisation through those mechanisms. I can say more, but I will stop there for now.
Lord Drayson: Your example, Dr Fisher, is a great example of how the programme would bring economic and societal benefit to the UK, but not specifically to the UK. Those issues that you highlighted are common globally. It is the economic benefit to the UK specifically that I want to drill down into, rather than a spreading of progress globally. When we spoke to ARIA’s leadership back in 2024, they very clearly expressed the view that any attempt to capture value for the UK specifically could jeopardise the success of the project attracting investment. Do you agree with that?
Dr Kathleen Fisher: Crossing the valley of death is really hard and crossing it successfully needs to be the first priority. If we can successfully cross the valley of death, we need to think about how to make sure we cross it in a way that maximises benefit to the UK. ARIA is working to create an environment that makes crossing the valley of death in the UK as maximally attractive as possible. That is why we are doing things like the venture café with the activation partner in London, Manchester and Edinburgh to create a climate where entrepreneurs know that they are not alone—that there are tons of entrepreneurs in the UK.
One of the things that I have been asked by creators who are thinking about becoming an entrepreneur is, “What if I create a start-up and it fails?” with the implicit notion that having a failed start-up is like a kiss of death and your career is over, versus the mindset in Silicon Valley where a failed start-up is a perfectly good thing to have on your resumé. It gives you credibility to start another start-up. The creator communities, the venture café, are creating the mindset that if you do not try, that is a failure. Trying and failing is a perfectly reasonable thing to do. It is why we have the activation partner, Fifty Years, which is one of the world’s best deep-tech venture capital companies, working with us to run the 50:50s partner, to work with scientists on how to create a pitch deck and how to be an entrepreneur—to create a population who will become entrepreneurs who decide that they want to create a great company and want to stay in the UK and do value capture here.
Lord Drayson: Dr Fisher, you have highlighted the important role of activation partners in crossing the valley of death, as you describe it. Why are some of your activation partners not based in the United Kingdom?
Dr Kathleen Fisher: When we made the agreements with the world-class, deep-tech investors who know how to convert science into world-class companies, the terms of the agreement required them to establish UK operations and to invest all of the money in the UK. Yes, they are US companies, but they are focusing these efforts on the UK. That is a good thing for the UK because they are bringing their expertise. They know how to do this but they are bringing them to the UK.
Lord Drayson: Yes, but as multiple inquiries have shown, the UK does not have a problem in attracting investment. The UK has a problem in commercialising the breakthroughs that are made here in the UK to generate economic growth from the UK. Is there a case to be made, when it comes to selecting investors to help commercialise ARIA’s discoveries, that ARIA should prefer UK investment partners?
Dr Kathleen Fisher: ARIA’s role is producing companies that have world-class technology and world-class teams and want to stay in the UK. If there are UK investment organisations that want at that point to fund the organisations, that would be fantastic. If there are not UK investment companies at that point that want to invest and there are US investment companies that want to invest and keep the company in the UK, that would be fantastic. The most important thing is that the company decides that it wants to stay in the UK, whether the funding comes from the US or the UK. The most important thing is that the company does not die.
Lord Drayson: Unfortunately, Dr Fisher, from this committee’s previous inquiry, in our Bleeding to Death report we have catalogued thoroughly the tendency of promising UK technology start-ups to leave the UK. Therefore, my concern is the risk that the activation partners become acquisition partners facilitating the cream of ARIA’s IP to ultimately benefit global investors outside of the UK rather than creating wealth and economic growth in the UK. Do you see this as a risk? If you do, what will you do about it?
Dr Kathleen Fisher: I do not see that as a huge risk. I see the huge upside of leveraging their knowledge and expertise to produce world-class companies that maximise the chance of crossing the valley of death, and therefore getting the benefits of the value creation no matter what, and maximising the chance of having companies that will in the long run decide to stay. It is not only ARIA’s responsibility to make it so that these organisations decide they want to stay in the UK. Our remit is producing the selection of companies and, as an entire ecosystem, we have the opportunity to create the conditions in which they will want to stay. We are doing our part to contribute to that ecosystem to make it attractive for those companies to want to stay.
Lord Drayson: You have already in your earlier answer touched on the issue of intellectual property. ARIA is unusual in that ARIA projects do not have the IP generated retained by ARIA. There was some explanation by Ilan Gur and Matt Clifford in their previous evidence to us that there are some royalty payment arrangements that come back to the UK, but you will be aware of the significant concern that has been raised on this issue. Have you considered or are you considering changing ARIA’s approach to intellectual property to help ensure that these breakthroughs do stay in the UK and do generate economic growth here?
Dr Kathleen Fisher: We are always reviewing our policies, and if we come across a policy that we think would serve ARIA’s mission better, we would be happy to adopt it.
Lord Drayson: I am afraid, Dr Fisher, that that is a very politician-like answer, a bit surprising from the CEO of ARIA.
Dr Kathleen Fisher: It happens to be true.
Lord Drayson: Are you reviewing this policy now?
Dr Kathleen Fisher: We are constantly—we are looking at our IP policies, but our current assessment is that the policy that Ilan talked about last year is the correct policy. ARIA’s best way of making the world and the UK a better place and producing economic return for the UK is through value creation. To do that value creation, we have to cross the valley of death, and that means getting the technology out. Our analysis to date is that the best way to do that is to put the IP in the hands of the creators. Most of the creators are in the UK and that intellectual property is, therefore, in the UK. If the intellectual property is licensed or assigned or sold outside of the UK, there is a royalty fee due to the UK. They are the same conditions that Ilan talked about last year. If we come across a better policy, we will implement a better policy. However, again our primary goal is the value creation and crossing the valley of death.
Lord Drayson: I think I understand that you are saying that you have everything under constant review, but you have not considered changing ARIA’s approach to IP.
Dr Kathleen Fisher: We have talked about changing ARIA’s approach to IP, but those conversations to date have concluded that our current policy is the best policy for accomplishing ARIA’s mission.
Lord Drayson: Thank you for that clarity. Thanks very much.
Q7 Lord Ranger of Northwood: Thank you for your time today. I am following on from Lord Drayson’s questioning about economic benefit to the UK. As someone who spent most of my time in the private sector, I am very supportive of collaboration between industry and government when we are at the cutting edge of science and technology. There was an announcement last week where the chair of ARIA, who has resigned now, was moving on to a global US firm, Anthropic, but was going to retain his position as chair of ARIA. That led to quite a bit of dismay in the UK, as we are talking about UK economic benefit and UK businesses—particularly now in the AI industry, where growth, development and investment is such a hotbed and we are competing in that global race. There was confusion that somebody who had been so close to the UK’s AI strategy, not only the AI Safety Institute and the AI action plan but the architect of the AI action plan, would remain in position as chair of ARIA and take up such a critical role. I say this, I should declare, a co-founder of the Business AI Alliance, which has several hundred UK AI start-ups in it, as vice-chair of the AI APPG and an adviser to some UK AI businesses. I heard this and it was felt and it was in the press, and there was a genuine anger and I think that it united the political spectrum as well as industry in questioning how this decision had come about. I know that yesterday Matt Clifford announced that he was resigning as chair, but I would like to understand what the thinking was within ARIA before that resignation in allowing that role to continue.
Dr Kathleen Fisher: It was not ARIA’s decision. It was up to BIST to decide on the mitigations in place. ARIA did not have a role in that decision.
Lord Ranger of Northwood: Did the executive team and you not have any consideration about how that may impact ARIA’s perception, the people involved in ARIA or the broader industry?
Dr Kathleen Fisher: It was a conversation between Matt and BIST. The appointment of the chair of the board is under BIST not under ARIA’s purview. Therefore, no, we were not involved in that conversation.
Lord Ranger of Northwood: Did you receive any feedback once that announcement came out about how it was being received?
Dr Kathleen Fisher: Yes.
Lord Ranger of Northwood: Would you like to share what feedback that was, without any—
Dr Kathleen Fisher: The feedback that I received was much along the lines of what you have reported.
Lord Ranger of Northwood: What was your view on that? How would you communicate a response to that feedback?
Dr Kathleen Fisher: The decisions and so on were conversations between BIST and Matt, and it is up to them to decide what they needed to do.
Lord Ranger of Northwood: The reason I am asking this, as I think you will understand, is about confidence in UK AI businesses and the relationship between such a significant funding body that is so strategically critical to decisions that the UK will take and its relationship with large international businesses such as Anthropic, and this was seen as a huge conflict. The concern is there that, yes, okay, the decision may sit with BIST, but what was ARIA itself thinking and what was its executive team thinking as this decision was being made? That has raised a lot of concern in the industry. Do you accept that point?
Dr Kathleen Fisher: I understand the concern, and ARIA was not consulted.
Lord Patel: Following on from that, do you think that there are lessons learned from this episode that occurred—that it is important that the future chair of ARIA does not have conflict of interests that may in some way end up not harming necessarily but impeding the work of ARIA in any way?
Dr Kathleen Fisher: I think that it is essential that the chair of ARIA does not have conflict of interests that impede the agency. It is important to acknowledge that we choose board members for their expertise in science and technology and translation. It is not uncommon that board members have interests that overlap with ARIA. Board members declare their interests and those interests are published on the website and are routinely monitored and updated, and we have mitigations that are put in place. ARIA has a code of conduct that is in line with the code of conduct for board members of public bodies and we monitor and put in place those mitigations regularly. You do not want board members who know nothing about the industry or the topics, so there is a judgment call about the expertise and the experience and the degree of conflicts.
The Chair: The point you are making is one of 100% transparency.
Dr Kathleen Fisher: Indeed.
The Chair: We understand. Thank you.
Q8 Lord Booth: Good morning, Dr Fisher. My question will come as no surprise in that I am calling in from my home in Cornwall. ARIA has been criticised in the past for the percentage of funding that goes on projects in the golden triangle of London, the east of England and greater south-east. In 2025 your corporate plan said that you would set diversity metrics based on gender and geography to drive a more diverse discovery process. However, in 2025-26, 67% of ARIA funding was spent in the golden triangle, and that was much unchanged from the previous year at 66%. Given the Government’s focus on regional economic development through research and development, what steps is ARIA taking that funds opportunity across the United Kingdom?
Dr Kathleen Fisher: I have talked about how ARIA’s mission is to make the UK and the world a better place through scientific breakthroughs. That mission on a per-programme basis requires a science miracle and then a crossing the valley of death miracle. That is a daunting mission and it requires working with the absolute best scientists. We know that the best scientists are spread out across the entire UK. I have talked about Oshen, which is in Plymouth. I have talked about Amodo Design, which is not a creator but an activation partner, in Sheffield. I have not mentioned Touchpoint, which is a small company that is on our robot dexterity programme in Sheffield. I mentioned the creator I talked to in Newcastle the other day. We have worked with fantastic creators.
Those are just four that I have mentioned not across the golden triangle, but we are not where we want to be. The golden triangle has a dense concentration of world-class scientists, so it is not surprising that they are well represented in our portfolio. However, as I said, we are not where we want to be. That is why we have put in place the requirement that our programme directors must do their discovery process. When a programme director sets up a programme, they kick the tyres on their thesis by going and talking to scientists all over the world, not just the UK. We now have a process of taking their programme thesis and identifying the science and technology that underlies that, cross-referencing that with the scientists across the countries and regions of the UK and figuring out where they are and requiring the programme directors to talk to a representative sample across all the countries and regions of the UK.
I just got back from meeting with the DCSA of Scotland and the DCSA of Northern Ireland, and I am scheduled to go to meet with the same in Wales. The DCSA of Scotland and the DCSA of Northern Ireland agreed to work with ARIA to make sure that in that process they would help us identify the scientists in Northern Ireland and Scotland that we should be talking to. Part of the challenge is that the way ARIA works is very distinct from the way the traditional funding agencies work. We do not have a call that comes out on a fixed deadline; for example, it is November, so the deadline comes out now. Our calls come out when the programme director has finished the discovery process and there is a relatively short period to when the proposals are due. The people who are in the know have been following the thesis publication or the discovery process to know that the proposal is coming and have already been talking to the programme director.
That is why I went to Newcastle a few weeks ago, Scotland two weeks ago and Northern Ireland last week to meet with faculty at University of Strathclyde, University of Glasgow, Edinburgh University, Ulster University and so on to communicate this. This is so that people across all the countries and regions of the UK know how to work with us so that we can pick the best scientists across all the countries and regions of the UK and at the same time distribute the funding more equitably across the countries and regions.
The programme directors are required to do this discovery across the UK and in proportion to the scientists in the areas of their programme. They cannot get the programme approved until they have demonstrated that they have done so. We had one programme director a couple of months ago say, “I got all but one”. “Okay, well, we will delay your programme approval meeting until you are done.” Then they say okay and get that one scheduled. We are taking that seriously. It is important for ARIA to deliver on our mission, and the best way of doing that is reaching the best talent throughout the entire UK, and we are committed to doing so. The same thing applies with gender as well.
Baroness Jones of Whitchurch: I am listening intently to what you are saying, and it is good to hear that you are doing that regional engagement. The reality is that the consequences of this are not having a great deal of impact. The statistics are not changing. The money is still going to the golden triangle, the south-east, and so on. It is all very well talking to people, but that is very different from putting your money where your mouth is and funding the projects with a much broader distribution. You will know that the new incoming Government are focused on regional development, and I am sure that there will be pressure on you to be able to demonstrate in practical terms how that distribution of investment is happening on a broader scale. Do you recognise that there is a lot more work to be done here? Engagement is one thing, but you need to go out and find new talent in places that you would not normally find it to bring it into your funding structure. Please reassure me that that is happening, because otherwise you will talk to lots of people, but the bids for the projects will still come from the usual suspects.
Dr Kathleen Fisher: That is what the engagement has set out to do—to find those people. Another thing we are doing is refining our data collection. Right now our data collection is only at the prime level. The primes are the people who have contracts directly with ARIA. In fact, primes have contracts with subs that are spread out, so prime contracts do not do a very good job of tracking where ARIA’s funding is going. We are working on refining our data collection so that we have a much better sense of where ARIA’s funding is actually going, tracking not just the people who receive ARIA funding but the people who apply for ARIA funding, at both the prime and the sub level, so that we can get a better sense of whether the problem is people not applying or people not getting funding.
When I went to the meeting in Newcastle, one of the comments that I heard in the audience was that they are serious about wanting to work with us. Part of the challenge is people not believing that ARIA wants to work with people outside of the golden triangle. Some of the engagement is extremely important from the point of view that we do not just care about the usual suspects; we care about working with the best people wherever they are. ARIA’s funding model of covering 100% of the costs and not just 80% means that universities do not have to pony up some of their own money and universities that are not so well funded are not at a disadvantage in applying for ARIA’s funding. The messaging is an important part of delivering in the long term. I want to try those mechanisms as the next step, which is a significant step up from what we have been doing, because I do not want to sacrifice ARIA’s prime mission, which is super important for the UK and the world.
Baroness Jones of Whitchurch: Going back to the discussion that we were having earlier, the latest stats show that 15% of your investment goes outside of the UK. Is that being reviewed? To what extent can we focus it? Fifteen percent is more than some of our regions, for example. Therefore, we are putting more money outside of the UK than in some of the regions that could have and do have very good research capacity. Are you reviewing that?
Dr Kathleen Fisher: We definitely think about that, but the freedom to invest there is important. When we choose to start a programme, we kick the tyres on whether the science hypothesis is plausible. Is it at a place where it has the potential of a breakthrough? If the science breakthrough comes, is the potential for societal impact enormous? If ARIA does not do this, is it unlikely to happen? Those are some of the questions. Another key question that we ask is: does the UK have enormous scientific potential in this area? If we put out the funding call, will we get really strong proposals so that we can run the majority of the science and research with UK technology? It is unlikely that all the science and technology capability to give the programme the maximum chance of succeeding exists in the UK.
We reserve the potential to fund up to 20% of the research outside of the UK. When we get the proposals in, every proposal that gets funded outside of the UK has to cross a high bar—that this is a capability that is not in the UK and will enormously contribute to the likelihood that the UK part of the programme will succeed and cross the threshold, the scientific barrier, the valley of death, do that value creation and produce the promise of the North Star of the programme. All the non-UK funding has to cross a much higher bar and have a case that it will add enormous value. Sometimes non-UK contracts cause the non-UK companies to relocate to the UK. For example, Normal Computing, one of the creators on the Nature Computes Better programme, moved to London and subsequently invested 150% of their ARIA funding because the talent it has found in the UK and London has been so strong. There are sometimes upsides to that non-UK funding as well.
Q9 Lord Stern of Brentford: Thank you very much for coming and for your very thoughtful answers. I want to take forward some of the discussion that has already begun on your understanding of and relationship with the research landscape across the UK. We have just discussed the regional part of that, so I will not ask you to repeat that. In response to Baroness Willis, you emphasised that if nobody is doing something, there may be a reason for that, and that may not be a good place for you to do your ploughing, as it were. If everybody is doing that, maybe you are not needed, and you did not want to stick with a number in the middle but somewhere in that spectrum, which will depend presumably on the subject matter.
Could you say something more about how your programme directors understand that research landscape? You have said that you are out there and you are trying to convince people that you are serious, and it sounds as if they are responding to that. This has to be done at a fairly granular level and the programme director has to understand what is going on where in quite a detailed way. How do they go about doing that?
Dr Kathleen Fisher: The programme director has some initial idea about what they are interested in doing. They read a lot of literature, and they use AI a ton, which is common practice these days. They then talk to a ton of people. It turns out, as with DARPA, if you are an ARIA programme director and you call people, they answer the phone or the email and spend time. I was talking to a programme director the other day and, “Wow, fancy, people answer the phone when you talk to them”. They talk to various people to refine the hypothesis. They go on what we call discovery tours. Ivan, who is the programme director for the materials science programme, went to talk to people in every country and region of the UK. In the process, they refine the programme thesis.
At some point, when they have kicked the tyres to their satisfaction, they publish the programme thesis, which is both a short statement and a multi-page document, outlining their beliefs and observations and what they think that says, to get open feedback. This statement is informed by all the conversations that they have had. At some point, either before or after the workshop—it depends a little on the programme; some have done it before and some after—they run a workshop, which is by invitation. They invite people who they have talked to or who have been named in the process. In this discovery process, you talk to one person and ask who else you should talk to, and that goes on. One of the termination criteria mentioned by a programme director was when that process does not discover any more names, they feel they have reached the conclusion.
The discovery workshop often ends up with three or four different scientific disciplines that do not normally talk to each other, and they are facilitated so that you get those people talking to each other and finding out what you can discover if you apply this technology to that problem. Often one of the other programme directors in the precision mitochondria programme was talking about how at the beginning they wondered, “Why am I here? Why are they here?”, and then on the morning of the second day, they realised, “Oh my God, we can do this, and we can do that”—a discovery process. After ingesting that information from the discovery process, publishing the thesis and getting open comments from the workshop, the programme director writes a programme approval document, which is presented to a panel at ARIA, including the chief technical officer, the chief translation officer, the CEO and outside experts for approval.
Lord Stern of Brentford: Those workshops would include also people from outside the UK, and their view of what is going on in the UK is of real value.
Dr Kathleen Fisher: Yes, for sure. The workshops often include the world’s experts on certain topics. There are many people from the UK, but the workshops vary in size depending on the programme. Some have multiple smaller workshops and some have a larger workshop, but there are many people from the UK and there are also people from outside the UK.
Lord Stern of Brentford: On tipping points, which is a subject that concerns a number of us in this group, you would obviously want to bring in people like the Potsdam Institute, PIK, and so on.
Dr Kathleen Fisher: There are definitely world experts on the panel. It is not just people in the UK.
Q10 Lord Stern of Brentford: Very good. Thank you very much for that. I would like to ask now about how you compare ARIA and DARPA. You are particularly well placed to answer that question. You have brought DARPA examples up during this discussion. Could you give us a broad-picture view of how you see ARIA and DARPA as similar or different, and how ARIA learns from DARPA, can learn from DARPA and so on?
Dr Kathleen Fisher: They are both high-risk, high-reward, programme director-driven, project-based agencies. The mission is different. DARPA’s mission is national security; ARIA’s mission is making the UK and the world a better place through breakthrough science. DARPA does a lot of classified work, which adds a ton of friction that ARIA does not have to deal with. DARPA’s budget is a lot bigger. DARPA is a lot older and has a proven track record that means it does not have to prove its existence, while ARIA still has to prove its existence.
DARPA has the Department of Defense as a customer and I think is overblown that people talk about how DARPA has a built-in customer. Having been the director of the Information Innovation Office, DARPA’s computer science office that just got renamed IPTO, there was nobody in the Pentagon who was eagerly awaiting the products of IPTO or I2O. I spent a lot of my time as the director of I2O strategising about how to take the results of our successful programme and subversively getting them to be translated into the Pentagon. I think that translates very well into ARIA, where we have to figure out how to engineer translation.
I mentioned earlier about the hiring process, how DARPA hires on a one-off basis, and ARIA hires more in cohorts. ARIA will still have to hire sometimes in individual cases; I had a lot of experience of hiring individual programme managers at DARPA, which will be helpful in the cases where we have to hire programme directors at ARIA individually. DARPA has another level of hierarchy that ARIA does not have because the scale of ARIA is smaller. The scale of ARIA is roughly the size of the office that I managed at DARPA. ARIA’s scope is all of science, roughly the way that DARPA’s scale is all of science, but the financial size of the office and the number of programme directors at ARIA is roughly the size of the office that I managed at DARPA, so a significantly smaller budget.
Lord Stern of Brentford: Thank you very much. I want to follow up on the public procurement side, because DARPA, being associated with national security, would have a customer in defence for a lot of what it did, although perhaps not the stuff that you were doing. The public procurement issue is still important for the UK because crossing the valley of death, as you have emphasised a number of times, depends on the market and potential customers—that is the first question in crossing the valley of death. Do you think there is scope for a more active link between public procurement in the UK and what ARIA does? If so, how could that happen?
Dr Kathleen Fisher: There definitely is, and I have talked to our chief translation officer about this. Every programme director has what we call an impact mechanisation plan: assuming your science pans out, what is your strategy for crossing the valley of death; or, as not every programme is doing commercialisation as their strategy, what is your strategy for impact? Some programmes have a strategy in place, but the science is very early, so they are mostly thinking about what they would do if the science panned out. Others are further along and may have an entrepreneur in residence working with the creators to put together business cases and teaching them that a pitch deck for a VC is not 17 slides about how cool the science is and one slide for “Give me money”; it is more like 17 slides on what the market is and one slide on “Give me money”. If they get further than that, it is all hands on deck. On some of the cases may need us to create a market, so how do we create a market, and how do we co‑ordinate with government to do that?
Advanced market commitments could be very helpful in creating a market. For example, the Scaling Inference Lab, a programme in the AI hardware space, started with creating novel hardware because of the end of Moore’s law and Dennard scaling. Perhaps the end of Moore’s law is overblown, but we are now having to create more unusual kinds of hardware and co‑ordinate different kinds of hardware to be able to continue producing more and faster hardware. That programme funded the creation of different kinds of hardware, which has been very successful so far: “This piece of funky hardware is doing things much faster”. But the end user does not care about funky pieces of individual hardware; you have to put them together into a system that delivers overall system performance. Therefore, we stood up the Scaling Inference Lab, which is actual rack compute that delivers performance an end user can measure, and we are partnering with the Government; they are providing a commitment to buy it.
That is an example of ARIA doing exactly what you were talking about, and that is what our chief translation officer works on with programme directors when they reach the point where they need all hands on deck, all parts of the Government who might be potentially helpful in doing that kind of translation.
Q11 Lord Stern of Brentford: Clearly, you need the other side of the partnership. To push the question a little bit further, do you think BIST and the Treasury should do more to encourage government departments to have a closer relationship with ARIA so that these possibilities of procurement are explored as early as possible? That also would, of course, be a way of responding in part to the question that Lord Drayson was emphasising about benefit in the UK.
Dr Kathleen Fisher: It depends on a programme-by-programme basis. So far when we have reached out we have met with partners across the Government who have been very enthusiastic and helpful in working with us on what is needed for the particular programme in a way that continues to preserve ARIA’s independence. I would welcome those continued kinds of engagement across the Government as we get particular programmes in particular locations in particular stages where that kind of engagement would be helpful.
Lord Stern of Brentford: I want to go on to something else, but to remark on that, it is one thing you reaching out to them; it is another for them to have an active role in getting all parts of Government to reach out to you.
Dr Kathleen Fisher: Indeed, and it is tricky because before we are ready, we do not want premature engagement but when we are ready, we absolutely want to be actively engaged with the appropriate parts of the Government.
Q12 Lord Stern of Brentford: My last question is about UKRI and the way in which the UK research and innovation landscape is changing—and it is changing for good reason. In that process, do you think there are major lessons from ARIA that can help inform the strategies being followed to recast those structures?
Dr Kathleen Fisher: I will start by saying that a healthy UKRI ecosystem is absolutely essential for ARIA to be able to do its job well. Part of the discovery process that I was talking about, or the basis of confidence for whether the science in a given area is mature enough or is at a point where an ARIA investment makes sense, relies on there being a science and technology base that is suitable for ARIA to build on top of. Part of the reason why I was excited to come to ARIA as a CEO is because in many indices about research and engineering in the world, the UK is around third, and per capita it is number one in the world. That is on the back of UKRI’s investment. You cannot have an agency like ARIA if there is no agency like UKRI doing the blue-sky research.
The funding for the long-term scientific infrastructure that ARIA pulls upon comes from UKRI. ARIA does projects; we go in and we do three-to-five-year funding, or maybe we do it for a long time, in successive funding chunks. We do not do the long-term commitment that UKRI does that sustains a healthy ecosystem of scientists. You cannot have a healthy ARIA if you do not have a healthy UKRI. It is extremely important for ARIA that there is a healthy long-term agency like UKRI.
The way ARIA funds is programme-based. We go in and we do a sprint in a particular area to say we think we can accelerate the progress in that area. UKRI does the important work of building the path forward, brick by brick. They are very complementary models. I think before ARIA was established, the UK was missing an important modality of doing research. With ARIA’s establishment, it has become an ecosystem that has a lot more promise.
I am not sure that I have a lot to say on lessons learned because I am not an expert in the UKRI. I was a researcher for many years. I was a professor for seven years, department chair for five in the NSF ecosystem in the US, which is only somewhat analogous to the UKRI analysis. I do not want to overstep my areas of expertise.
Lord Stern of Brentford: Is that something you would bear in mind? You are learning a lot about how to get research done and about the research environment in the UK. Do you see openings or value added in sharing that in a direct way with UKRI?
Dr Kathleen Fisher: Sure. I have already met with Ian Chapman multiple times, and I have met with the heads of all the UKRI organisations multiple times as well. We have a lot to learn from talking to each other, and certainly at the scientific level, there are many things to learn.
Lord Stern of Brentford: Before I hand back to Baroness Willis, I cannot resist just one observation, which is that—and I say this as a university professor—the UK’s deep strengths in science come from, in large measure, a few hundred years of first-class universities before UKRI came along. Our strengths, I hope, and we all hope, are enhanced by UKRI, but there is a deeper source there, which is, as many of us know, under some threat at the moment on the financial side. That is not a question; that is an observation. It is prompted by not overdoing the link between the strength of the UK science base and UKRI, although we all hope and encourage UKRI to do its best to make the most of that.
Dr Kathleen Fisher: I appreciate the information regarding both UKRI and the universities.
Q13 Baroness Willis of Summertown: One more question, coming back to how you ensure there is not overlap in the subject areas that you are working on compared to those being funded by other trusts and foundations. I have sat in workshops—I am not going to name the foundations but they are not in this country—for the very role that you mentioned of having international experts come in. I found in the two that I have done in the last couple of years that I was the lone voice in there; the rest of the people were scientists from that country with incredible levels of self-interest regarding what the areas should be going forwards. In some ways, that plays against the blue-sky nature, because you want the expertise but there is a balance in there.
Is there another way, with all your background and expertise from DARPA and your AI knowledge, that we should be moving away from workshops? What is your view on this? Are there alternative ways to work out what the new areas of research are? My second question is: how do you manage to avoid overlap? One criticism I have heard of ARIA is that some of the programmes directly overlap those being funded by other large trusts and foundations in other countries.
Dr Kathleen Fisher: We are experimenting with using AI extensively. This was the summer of AI, and “everyone is a dev” was one of the projects this summer. We have been experimenting extensively with using cutting-edge AI to kick the tyres and read the literature and challenge our assumptions. I personally have been using AI a lot, certainly not for making decisions, but it is incredibly good at reading a large volume of literature. I have an AI Gem, or whatever they are called—and I actually use multiple of them—and I have told it to not be sycophantic at all. I do not need it to suck up to me at all. I want it to challenge the assumptions, kick the tyres and always give me the sources to go back to. The programme directors do the same thing and are very sceptical of all these things. These are the kinds of tools that the programme directors and the leadership at ARIA are hungry for. We use those tools to supplement the workshops.
The workshops and the discovery are helpful, not just for being sceptical. I appreciate your point that there is a little bit of a conflict of interest because the people in the workshops are also possible funding recipients. The workshops are also mechanisms to recruit the creator base, so you need to do them as advertising but you also need to do them to gather information. The people who serve as experts on the review panels are expressly conflicted from ever receiving any funding in the programme, so they do not have a conflict of interest. We are doing our best to get unbiased opinions throughout the pipeline, even if the workshop feedback is not always unbiased.
On the point about other foundations potentially funding the same thing: we do ask the question about being differentiated among the experts who are on the panels and are conflicted from receiving funding, and we weigh that consideration strongly. Sometimes it may seem similar but not be that similar when you pull up the hood—the digital olfaction programme that we just approved is a good example. There was an article, maybe in Wired, about digital olfaction that came out shortly after the announcement. If you dig into the article, it was very much about specialised olfaction for a particular application, as opposed to a general-purpose e-nose. The question becomes whether you want 15 different electronic noses or one, and the game-changing nature of having one versus 15 or 70 as you go on. When I asked the programme director about the particular article, she had already talked to all the people quoted in the article. If we discover something that contradicts a particular part of the thesis, or the whole thesis, we pivot and shut down part of the programme or all of it.
Baroness Willis of Summertown: Taking the olfaction example, how would you react in your capacity as CEO if you found that the Gates Foundation, for example, had an almost identical call coming out at the same time?
Dr Kathleen Fisher: We would talk to them, and in fact we have been talking to the Gates Foundation, so I am comfortable on that particular point. We would talk to them and do a deeper discovery to figure out how much they overlap, who the creators being funded are, how much technical risk there is in that area, and how much creator population there is. It could be that funding two efforts in parallel might be perfectly reasonable, or it might be that there is not that much depth and it would be the same people involved, so double funding would not be appropriate. We would need to look at it and figure out the appropriate response.
Baroness Willis of Summertown: There is a network of other foundations, such as the Simonian Foundation, that talk to each other.
Dr Kathleen Fisher: Yes.
Q14 Lord Patel: My question is slightly tangential, but maybe it is part of it. ARIA seems to be focused mostly on technological advances that may occur. One of the key pillars of UK economic activity or economic growth is the life sciences sector, which is quite strong. Part of the government plans now are that UK life sciences are the engine, and the fuel is the huge amount of NHS data, dirty and fragmented in most part. The challenge is—and the UK is now beginning to invest in it—to streamline this data and curate the data in a format that is accessible, the NHS being a cradle-to-grave organisation. Do you have a view about where you think ARIA may focus on this area or be able to help? There has also been a criticism that because it is data, if it is given to outside organisations, it could be—how should I say?—put to different kinds of usage.
Dr Kathleen Fisher: Indeed. ARIA does have life science programmes. We have the precision neurotechnologies opportunity space, with two programmes in that area looking at neurological and neuropsychological disorders, with more than £100 million invested. We also have the programmable physiology opportunity space, which has a programme on viral resistance and a programme on precision mitochondria, amounting to roughly a £100 million investment. ARIA does do things in the life sciences. That said, ARIA has $1.2 billion to invest across all of science in the spending review period. Although $1.2 billion sounds like a huge amount of money, when spread across all of science, it is not very much, and ARIA can only do things where we have programme directors. The unit of energy or deployment is programme directors.
I experienced this viscerally at DARPA, where I wanted to do a programme on shutting down rogue AI—which seems extremely relevant these days—but I could not find a programme manager to hire who had the expertise and wanted to work in that space. It took me two years to recruit a programme manager for it. For ARIA to do work in a particular space, you have to hire a programme director in that space. The question of data and the protections around data is always important, and you have to be careful about who has the data and who has access to data. We take that very seriously. We always have the ethics, social responsibility and the normal procedures and practices about how you ethically and responsibly do work in a particular area. If we stood up a programme dealing with big data in a medical area, we would follow those practices and potentially conduct research on how to do that work even better.
Q15 The Chair: Dr Fisher, you have very helpfully answered many of our questions. I have just two final questions for you. You mentioned, and it is very welcome news, that ARIA has been funded through the recent spending review, so you will have, we hope, quite a long time to go as CEO. What will be your top priorities for ARIA during your tenure and what would you most like to look back on and say you have achieved with ARIA?
Dr Kathleen Fisher: My top priorities are delivering on many of the things I have talked to you about: the science miracles, the translation miracles and the shining beacon of hope. What I most want to accomplish is delivering on those things. ARIA’s long-term success is creating one of those breakthrough technologies, along the lines of the internet for DARPA, that establishes ARIA firmly in the minds of the UK and the world. That will take a while, and it is unpredictable when that might actually happen. In the meantime, we will deliver a steady progress of important breakthroughs and meaningful translation that will benefit the UK, both through value creation and value capture.
Another important contribution will be ARIA’s growth from a small start-up to a well-run organisation that is at full capacity, where programmes are ending at the same rate that programmes are being born. We are not quite at steady state at this point, but we are almost there. An organisation of 10 people who all fit around a table at the British Library operates very differently from one where everybody no longer fits around a table. Getting through that growth period is another important contribution.
ARIA is a place where people love to come, and I want to maintain that. I want people to come not because it is the new shiny thing but because it is a place where people know they can make a tremendous difference in the world and have a massive lever arm to change it for the better. Building and maintaining that is important. The people are critically important. I highlight that the people ARIA has attracted across the board are fantastic, and that is true of the operational teams, the communications teams, the finance team and the procurement team, in addition to the programme directors and their support staff.
Let me highlight one of the programme directors, Brian Wang, who, before coming to ARIA, started a company to create medication in advance of the next pandemic—hopefully not in the immediate future. He came to ARIA with the idea of new technology to address the same challenge, leveraging the innate immune system instead of the adaptive immune system. The challenge with the adaptive immune system is that vaccines have to be specially crafted for the particular virus, which is why we have to get a flu vaccine every year and why it does not always work. You have to predict what the particular manifestation of the flu will be, and if that prediction is not exactly right, the vaccine does not work. A little while ago, however, our understanding of the innate immune system advanced, and it is now possible that we might be able to sculpt and control the innate immune system more effectively.
One of the advantages of the innate immune system is that it is more general purpose, so it would be able to respond to all variations of the flu and not just be targeted to a specific version. Brian Wang’s goal is for that protection to last approximately three months at a time. That is what he came to ARIA to do, and that is the North Star goal of his particular programme. If successful, it would have enormous economic benefit. Among other things, it would finally provide a cure for the common cold, so that parents would not have to miss work when their kids are sick and we would not miss work when we were sick. We would, of course, want to commercialise that in a way that benefited the UK financially, not just in value creation but value capture. If it is successful, it would also provide an off-the-shelf treatment, most likely for the next pandemic, and so would have a national security application as well, delivering on ARIA’s mission of making the UK and the world a better place through breakthrough science.
The Chair: A cure for the common cold is a great ambition.
Dr Kathleen Fisher: Of course, it is high risk, high reward. It most likely will not work exactly as envisioned, but no matter what, it will advance science.
The Chair: Indeed. Dr Fisher, thank you very much. You have answered our many questions and have been very helpful and informative. We wish you every success in your tenure as CEO of ARIA, and we will keep in constant touch with what ARIA is doing. Thank you very much for coming to talk to us this morning. That concludes this session.