ACADEMICS in Exeter are playing a leading role in a new £11.5 million AI-driven initiative hoping to transform how governments around the world use research evidence.

The Mobilising Evidence Through AI and User-informed Synthesis (METIUS) project will take specific aim at the decision-making process for urgent issues like climate change, education, and public safety.

The project is led by Queen’s University, Belfast, in collaboration with the University of Exeter, and supported by NIHR Applied Research Collaboration South West Peninsula (PenARC).

Governments often struggle to keep up with the huge amount of scientific research being published. Important findings can be hard to find or too complex to use in time-sensitive decisions.

This project aims to fix that by creating a faster, smarter way to bring the best available evidence directly to the people who need it most.

Teams at the Universities of Exeter and Newcastle will spearhead one of the project’s key strands – the Methods Work Package – which will focus on developing and enhancing the methods needed to create “living evidence syntheses” that stay up to date and deliver robust, broad scale, and timely actionable insights.

Professor Ruth Garside, of the University of Exeter’s European Centre for Environment and Human Health, who will be leading the Methods Work Package said: ‘The sheer volume and range of new research is a real challenge for policymakers who need to act quickly on key issues like climate change and international development.

‘We are hoping to develop concrete methods that will allow interaction between AI and researchers to help us cut through that noise and synthesise evidence more effectively – ultimately ensuring that critical decisions are informed by the most relevant and up-to-date scientific findings’.

Working with transdisciplinary departments from several institutions, METIUS will pioneer the use of AI to speed up how research is gathered, analysed, and summarised.

Professor Jo Thompson-Coon, who is part of the Evidence Synthesis Team within PenARC and working on the project, said: ‘We are excited that PenARC is part of this transformative effort.

‘Evidence synthesis has always been at the heart of what we do – METIUS gives us the opportunity to scale it up, speed it up, and ensure evidence truly reaches decision-makers when and where it matters’.

It will create easy-to-understand tools that help policymakers use this evidence, launch pilot projects in key areas like education, justice, and the environment, and build global networks to support evidence-based decision-making.

The project is funded by UK Research and Innovation through ESRC and NERC with co-funding from the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology (DSIT).