Cambridge & DSIT: Spärck AI Scholarships
Source: cam.ac.uk
The Department for Science, Innovation and Technology (DSIT) has announced the Spärck AI Scholarships, a new initiative to support future AI leaders. Cambridge University is a founding partner in this initiative.
These scholarships are for high-potential students and will support study towards AI-related Masters degrees, offering benefits such as full tuition fees, a living stipend, and access to priority work placements with leading UK AI companies and government institutions.
The program intends to enroll 100 scholars over the first four years, beginning in the 2026/27 academic year. Scholars will be selected from the top 1% of AI talent worldwide, and must demonstrate academic excellence, leadership, ambassadorial potential, and a STEM background.
Spärck AI Scholarships provide students with priority access to work placements within UK-based AI companies and organizations, including the UK government’s AI Security Institute (AISI) and i.AI.
The scholarships are named in honour of Professor Karen Spärck Jones (1935–2007), a British computer scientist whose work at Cambridge University helped lay the foundations for modern search engines and natural language processing. Her 1972 paper introduced inverse document frequency (IDF).
Professor Deborah Prentice, University of Cambridge Vice-Chancellor, said that Cambridge is a founding partner in this initiative and is proud that the scholarships are named after Karen Spärck Jones.
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 and was an advocate for women in computing.
The University of Cambridge is co-founding this program, which was announced at London Tech Week.