The toolkit is designed to be easy to use, leveraging large language models, including Google’s Gemini family of models, to summarise vast amounts of data to provide insights into potential telco-relevant applications.
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“The R&D Discovery Toolkit fulfils a critical need in the sector. We’ll see companies, investors and other organisations able to easily discover and connect with people who are active in particular R&D areas,” said Ian Smith, head of UKTIN. “This will drive better and more efficient collaborations, as well as provide a platform to share research, resources and facilities on.”
UKTIN contends that the UK telecoms sector is “historically difficult to navigate” with the market suffering from disparate data sources making it challenging for newcomers to be informed on industry and academic developments, trends, and opportunities.
The new AI-powered toolkit is designed to address the gap, providing a user-friendly platform to help businesses navigate the current R&D ecosystem.
The toolkit can summarise data with users able to interact with insights through an AI assistant.
Its simple design enables the toolkit to be used by everything from established UK players to small businesses, students looking for career inspiration, and even international organisations looking to break into the market.
The toolkit was co-developed with the University of Bristol, with UKTIN pledging to continue to build it out based on data and user feedback.
“The Discovery Toolkit unlocks the potential of our national telecoms R&D capabilities in a way that has never been seen before - the technology is fast and sophisticated. AI-driven semantic search and large language models enhance data discoverability, allowing users to easily define their interests and access the latest information,” said Dimitra Simeonidou, a professor at the University of Bristol and lead for UK research capability at UKTIN.
“The service it provides is slick — its interactive data interpretation feature enables users to ‘chat’ with the data and transform raw information into actionable insights.”
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