30 November 2023
Diving deeper into ARIA opportunity spaces
Our founding cohort of Programme Directors are shaping opportunity spaces: areas we believe are likely to yield breakthroughs. Here, we dig into what makes an opportunity space worth betting on.
At ARIA, we believe people drive scientific progress. We’re betting on the creativity and intrinsic motivation of our Programme Directors (PDs) to shape our emergent focus areas.
The first job for each of our founding PDs is to put that approach into action. Each PD is defining an opportunity space – an area they believe is likely to yield significant breakthroughs, and from which funding opportunities will emerge.
An ARIA opportunity space is defined in three ways. It must be:
1. Important if true (i.e. it could lead to a significant new capability for society)
2. Under-explored relative to its potential impact
3. Ripe for new talent, perspectives, or resources to change what’s possible
Example in action – “Smart machines need smarter bodies”
- Important if true: “Between 2000 and 2100, the proportion of the world population aged 65 and older will triple, bringing with it increasing labour shortages, especially for physically demanding work. Robotics has a crucial role to play in helping us reduce burdens and boost prosperity + longevity.”
- Under-explored relative to its potential impact: “Advances in sensing and computation are improving robot brains, but to reap the transformative benefits of intelligent machines, we need better bodies.”
- Ripe for new talent, perspectives, or resources to change what’s possible: “Progress in AI, control, materials, and manufacturing has opened up design spaces that were previously inaccessible e.g. due to noise, low manufacturing tolerance or complexity.”
Each opportunity space represents fertile ground we'll harvest for technical breakthroughs. Over time, it will serve as a bedrock for various multi-year programmes directed by the PDs, as well as additional flares of seed funding to support researchers pursuing bold ideas.
Our integrated activity in opportunity spaces will create more routes to breakthroughs, but also catalyse new communities, institutional capacity, and inflows of capital – all of which are essential for large-scale social and economic transformation.
We’re publishing our thinking in real time to start building those communities now. We’d love you to read the documents and share them with your network before funding opportunities go live. What are we missing, whom should we speak to, and what are the ideas that could change the world with ARIA's support?