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The Department for Science, Innovation and Technology (DSIT) has today announced the launch of the Spärck AI Scholarships, a major new initiative to nurture the next generation of AI leaders, with Cambridge University proud to join as a founding partner.
We are delighted to be a founding partner in this ambitious initiative, which reflects a shared commitment to attracting exceptional talent and reinforcing the UK’s position as a home for world-class AI.
The scholarships, aimed at exceptionally high-potential domestic and international students, will support study towards AI-related Masters degrees and provide an unparalleled package of benefits. Students will receive full tuition fees, a living stipend, and access to priority work placements with leading UK AI companies and government institutions.
The programme, which will open to its first cohort in the 2026/27 academic year, intends to enrol 100 scholars over its first four years. Scholars will be selected from the top 1% of AI talent worldwide, with applicants required to demonstrate academic excellence, leadership, and ambassadorial potential, alongside a STEM background.
Uniquely, the Spärck AI Scholarships will provide its students with priority access to work placements within UK-based AI companies and organisations, including the UK government’s AI Security Institute (AISI) and i.AI, their in-house AI incubator.
The scholarships are named in honour of Professor Karen Spärck Jones (1935–2007), a pioneering British computer scientist whose ground breaking work at Cambridge University laid the foundations for modern search engines and natural language processing. One of the most remarkable women in computer science, her seminal 1972 paper introduced the concept of inverse document frequency (IDF), a fundamental principle still central to information retrieval today.
Professor Deborah Prentice, University of Cambridge Vice-Chancellor, said: “Cambridge combines academic excellence with a dynamic, interdisciplinary AI community, from foundational research to real-world impact. We are delighted to be a founding partner in this ambitious initiative, which reflects a shared commitment to attracting exceptional talent and reinforcing the UK’s position as a home for world-class AI. We are especially proud that these scholarships are named after Karen Spärck Jones, a brilliant Cambridge computer scientist.”
A long-time valued member of the Cambridge community, Professor Spärck Jones was an undergraduate at Girton College (1953-1956), a Research Fellow at Newnham College (1965-1968), an Official Fellow of Darwin College (1968-1980) and a Fellow of Wolfson College (2000-2007).
She began her research career at the Cambridge Language Research Unit in the late 1950s and later taught for the MPhil in Computer Speech and Language Processing, on language systems, and for the Computer Science Tripos on information retrieval. She supervised many Cambridge PhD students across a wide range of topics and was a tireless advocate for women in computing, famously declaring: “I think it’s very important to get more women into computing. My slogan is: Computing is too important to be left to men.”
Her international influence was recognised by numerous awards, including the ACM SIGIR Salton Award, the BCS Lovelace Medal, and election as a Fellow of the British Academy (of which she was also Vice-President from 2000 to 2002) and the American Association for Artificial Intelligence.
The University of Cambridge is delighted to honour her legacy by co-founding this exciting new programme, which was formally announced today at London Tech Week.
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University of Cambridge students walking into the Senate House for their graduation ceremony.
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