Overview

The Knowledge 4 All Foundation (K4A) is a non-profit organization headquartered in London, UK, focused on advancing social impact via data science, education, and innovation. The foundation operates primarily by promoting the results of data science projects and organising specialised events (workshops, seminars, etc.). It attracts new partners and collaborators by building relationships with academic and research institutions, participating in international events, and networking. K4A has been working in the field of Artificial Intelligence and Open Education.

K4A uniquely supports its 1067 researchers and 68 member institutions by co-funding more than 260 events, 60+ machine learning challenges, 35.000 academic video lectures, and creating machine learning tools and software.

Aim and Mission

Knowledge 4 All Foundation promotes the spread of knowledge and vivid academic debate to anyone with access to the internet anywhere in the world. It therefore benefits all those interested in academic knowledge and debate, where they do not currently have immediate access to such resources and debate. It also helps to develop more widespread interest in such resources and debate.

The Foundation promotes the open access to academic resources (such as video lectures, learning objects, paper, reports, books, and scientific data), together with tools to give users access to these resources and to match them to their needs. Furthermore, the Foundation aims to help overcome the barriers of limited discoverability and accessibility, as well as enable interaction between users and providers, and among users with common interests.

The Foundation is a forum where creators, technology developers, managers and users of such resources and tools can meet to actively promote the free availability and distribution of such content and tools, as well as develop strategies for fostering interactions between users and providers and among users with common interests.

PASCAL legacy

While retaining some of the structuring elements and mechanisms (such as the Pump-Priming and Challenges programmes) of its predecessor network of centers of excellence in machine learning, PASCAL and PASCAL2, K4A refocuses towards the emerging challenges created by the ever-expanding applications of adaptive systems technology and their central role in the development of artificial cognitive systems of different scales.

Funding Activities

In addition, its Challenges, Pump Prime and Harvest programmes, counting more than 60 projects, also provide opportunities for close collaboration between academic and industry researchers. Other noteworthy outreach activities include curriculum development, brokerage of expertise, public outreach, and liaison with relevant R&D projects in the European Programmes, as well as the Lacuna Programmes.

Capacity Building through Events

K4A has a legacy of organising, funding and co-funding around 260 events (conferences, symposiums, workshops and tutorials) to bring together the community of AI users with those researchers who have developed tools, proofs of concept and demonstrations of feasibility. Among those are numerous NeurIPS (at the time called NIPS) workshops and more prestigious ones like the 2nd World Open Educational Resources (OER) Congress.

Communities and Networking

The Foundation has an extended professional and research community of over 60 members, some of the most important research and development centres in the field of Machine Learning, a research field in Artificial Intelligence, and a wide researchers community.?K4A?has also developed an innovative series of video journals in connection with its members. Recently, it shifted its focus from Global North to Global South marginalised AI communities such as the Deep Learning Indaba and Masakhane Community.

Partnering within European Framework Programmes

The European Framework Programmes for Research and Innovation are the European Union’s (EU) main instruments for implementing its common scientific and innovation policy. K4A has been involved in the eighth and current, ninth Framework Programme, “Horizon Europe”. K4A is a much sought-after partner in the Framework Programme, partially as a dissemination, but mostly exploitation as a civil society and SME role.

AI4D Programme to kickstart AI in Africa

In Phase 1 of the AI4D Programme, the foundation spearheaded the Language Dataset Challenges to address the scarcity and poor discoverability of data for African languages. This initiative resulted in 52 dataset submissions, with 13 receiving awards. Building on this success, K4A launched the Language Dataset Fellowships, supporting nine teams in developing datasets across various languages and natural language processing tasks. These efforts significantly contributed to the integration of African languages into digital platforms, promoting linguistic diversity and enabling broader participation in the digital economy. This work culminated in the Wikimedia Foundation Research Award of the Year 2021.

Harvest Programme with Industry

Harvest sub-programme provides opportunities for close collaboration between academic and industry researchers. Harvest projects provide a forum for the development of exemplar applications of direct relevance to industry that can demonstrate the power and range of applicability of the developed approaches.

Challenges Programme playing with datasets

Competition has always driven people to achieve results that are better than they might have achieved working alone. Knowledge 4 All Foundation runs its highly successful Challenges programme, or hackathons, enabling its members to create their own Machine Learning challenges for each other and to disseminate their results in K4A-sponsored workshops. The Challenges also enabled diverse real-world applications from other fields to be introduced to the machine learning community. More than twenty challenges were held during the lifetime of PASCAL and PASCAL2, some now so established that they have steered research agendas across the world; their regular workshops are almost conferences in their own right. From sign language to mind-reading, and heart sounds to distorted galaxies, these are some of the challenges.

Pump Prime Programme for novelty

One pioneering approach that showed enormous success is the Pump Priming Programme. While providing money for travel and secondments is always effective, there is nothing like the opportunity for research funding to focus the minds of academics. Knowledge 4 All continues its role of a mini funding agency and encouraged its members and others outside the field to collaborate and perform exciting new research together by supporting a series of preliminary investigations in areas of interest to the network.

Lacuna Fund Programme for missing datasets

Lacuna Fund is the world’s first collaborative effort to provide data scientists, researchers, and social entrepreneurs in low- and middle-income contexts. K4A helps institutions to deliver projects and navigate the Fund’s complex granting system.

Video Journals Programme for innovative publishing

The Video Journal Programme provides an innovative platform for researchers to present and share their work through concise, engaging video abstracts. Designed to enhance accessibility and understanding, the programme enables authors to summarize their research papers in short videos, giving viewers a quick yet insightful overview of the key ideas, contributions, and relevance of the work. Each video is linked to the original paper and additional materials, fostering a comprehensive understanding and encouraging discussions through interactive comment features.

UNESCO Chairs Programme

UNESCO Chairs are prestigious programs established to promote international collaboration and innovation in research, education, and capacity building in alignment with UNESCO’s core missions. These chairs serve as hubs for the advancement of knowledge, fostering partnerships between academia, civil society, and the private sector. K4A has played a pivotal role in supporting the activities of three UNESCO Chairs that have significantly impacted education and technology. These initiatives reflect K4A’s commitment to fostering inclusive, global advancements in education and technology.