The Cambridge AI Hub was founded by Ron Young in March 2025 and is funded by membership subscriptions to ensure sustainable research, development and growth for its members.
Our key value is to ‘practice what we preach’. We are fully immersed and practicing with new knowledge and AI methods and tools on a daily basis. It is our experience over many years of introducing new methods and tools that gaining intellectual knowledge only, is insufficient. This is because a new AI paradigm change, with new ways of thinking and working, will only resonate deeply when we are experiencing the methods and tools on a daily basis. It requires both intellectual and experiential knowledge.
So we urge members to leap in and engage fully with the new paradigm of human knowledge and AI working together in a symbiotic way that leads to extraordinary and continuous innovation.
In 1988 he enrolled at Essex University, UK for a Masters Degree in AI specialising in knowledge based systems. This was the era of ‘symbolic AI’ and ‘expert systems’ that required knowledge to be input by human experts using logic, reasoning and inference engines.
In 2000 he was invited by the British Standards Institution (BSI) to Chair the knowledge management standard development committee, BSI KMS/1, and this was followed by his involvement in the development of European CEN Standards for Knowledge Management in 2004.
In 2007, he founded Knowledge Associates Cambridge Ltd, initially to help individuals, teams and entire organisations successfully understand and implement knowledge and innovation management systems.
From 2014 he became excited by AI again by the extraordinary progress made with ‘neural networking’ and ‘self learning’ AI systems, and the extraordinary progress from organisations like Google Deep Mind with AphaGo and AlphaFold, and current LLM developments today with OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Meta, DeepSeek etc. He is currently researching ‘Agentic and Integrated Agentic AI’ as part of ‘multi-modal AI and robotics’.
From 2015 to 2025 he was a member of the International Standards Organisation (ISO) development committees for knowledge management (ISO 30401:2018), innovation management (ISO 56001:2024) artificial Intelligence management (ISO 42001:2023) asset management (ISO 55001:2024) and quality management (ISO 9001:2020).
Research Interests
His special area of interest today is human knowledge and AI working together to enhance human competencies, the EU AI Act, UK Pro-Innovation Strategy, Global AI Strategies and, especially, research into AI systems safety.
Professor Yonghong Peng
Anglia Ruskin University Cambridge
Professor of Artificial Intelligence
Deputy Dean for Research and Innovation
Faculty of Science and Engineering
Location:
Areas of Expertise:
Artificial Intelligence , Machine learning , Ethics
Research Supervision:
Professor Yonghong Peng is the Professor of Artificial Intelligence. He pioneers research in Artificial Intelligence (AI), machine learning and data science, particularly concerning algorithmic explainability, transparency, and model security, aiming to improve AI safety and enable human-centred AI. His research includes technological advancements and application innovation across medical and health, environment and sustainability.
Background
Before his current role, Yonghong was the Professor of Artificial Intelligence, and served as Director of the University Centre for Advanced Computational Science at Manchester Metropolitan University (MMU), where he provided strategic leadership in fostering AI-powered interdisciplinary research and innovation and establishing strategic partnerships. He led the MMU's membership in the Turing University Network. He led his team in delivering a comprehensive assessment on the Cyber Security Risk to Artificial Intelligence for the UK Department for Science, Innovation and Technology (DSIT).
He joined ARU in June 2024 with aspiration to advance AI technologies and AI-powered interdisciplinary research and innovation to effectively leverage Cambridge's ecosystems in science, health, and deep tech and beyond.
Spoken Languages
English and Chinese
Research interests
Yonghong’s research aims to advance AI technology and architectures to tackle the fundamental challenges of AI in our rapidly evolving world.