Mapping ERC frontier research artificial intelligence

The European Research Council (ERC) is the premier European funding organisation for excellent frontier research. Since its establishment in 2007, it has been a cornerstone of the EU’s research and innovation funding programmes. The ERC gives its grantees the freedom to develop ambitious research projects that can lead to advances at the frontiers of knowledge and set a clear and inspirational target for frontier research across Europe. The ERC funds a rich and diverse portfolio of projects in all fields of science and scholarship, without any predefined academic or policy priorities. These projects can have an impact well beyond science and provide frontier knowledge and innovation to help solve societal challenges and inform EU policy objectives. This report aims to highlight how ERC-funded curiosity-driven research projects are developing or using Artificial Intelligence in their scientific processes, and how these projects and their outputs can help to both define and enable the implementation of policies related to AI and its cross-cutting applications. This report represents the first comprehensive analysis of the ERC’s AI portfolio and it is structured as follows: 1. Chapter one provides an overview of ERC-funded projects developing or using AI in science. 2. Chapter two focuses on their scientific landscape by offering a more detailed analysis of their evolution and distribution in ERC scientific domains, disciplines, and topics. 3. Chapter three gives an overview of their policy landscape, that is, by linking the projects to specific policy areas and providing examples that are relevant to the EU policies on AI. 4. Chapter four covers an analysis of a subset of ERC-funded AI projects that pose particularly pressing ethical, legal, and social questions surrounding the development or use of AI.