Ada Lovelace Institute

The Ada Lovelace Institute is a London-based independent research and deliberative body whose stated mission is to ensure that data and AI work for people and society. It combines policy-facing research with public-deliberation infrastructure — citizen juries, deliberative councils, participatory inquiries — designed to bring evidence about public attitudes and lived experience into the way AI systems are governed in the United Kingdom and internationally.

The Institute was established by the Nuffield Foundation in 2018 with an initial £5 million commitment over five years, in partnership with the Alan Turing Institute, the Royal Society, the British Academy, the Royal Statistical Society, the Nuffield Council on Bioethics, the Wellcome Trust, techUK and Luminate. It operates as a semi-autonomous body that is legally part of the Nuffield Foundation but has its own governing structure and terms of reference, and is based at 28 Bedford Square in Bloomsbury, London.

Governance and leadership

The Institute is overseen by an independent board chaired by Sir Alan Wilson, the former Chief Executive of the Alan Turing Institute, who took up the role of Executive Chair in 2021. The first board members were appointed in 2018 and included Alix Dunn alongside Helen Margetts (Oxford Internet Institute), Huw Price (Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence), and Hetan Shah (then of the Royal Statistical Society); the board has been refreshed in subsequent cohorts.

Operational leadership has rotated through several phases. Imogen Parker led the Institute's establishment phase from 2018 onward; Carly Kind subsequently served as Director before leaving for the role of Australian Privacy Commissioner; Francine Bennett held the post as Interim Director; and Gaia Marcus — formerly a deputy director in the UK Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities — took up the directorship in June 2024.

Programmes and approach

The Institute organises its work around several research domains, but its distinctive contribution to the make-AI-good landscape is its Public Participation & Research practice, which treats deliberative dialogue, participatory and peer-led methods, and qualitative social science as core tools rather than as ancillary engagement. The Institute describes the use of participatory and deliberative methodologies as "key to Ada's mission to build evidence, convene diverse voices and influence practice and policy."

Major participatory projects include:

• The Citizens' Biometrics Council, convened in 2020 with 50 demographically diverse members of the UK public over a series of in-person and online workshops between February and October. The Council issued 30 recommendations and concluded that biometric technologies require stronger regulation, tougher oversight and clearer standards for best practice. The Council was subsequently reconvened to advise the Information Commissioner's Office on its draft biometric-data guidance, and the ICO has confirmed that the Council's recommendations informed its final guidance.
• A series of citizen juries on fair data sharing in the NHS, undertaken in support of the Wellcome Trust, that bring members of the public together with subject-matter experts to deliberate on the ethical conditions under which NHS data should be shared.
• The Participatory data stewardship framework (September 2021), which sets out how the principles of public participation can be applied to data governance and has since been used by funders, public bodies and civil-society organisations as a working reference.
• Going public, the Institute's synthesis report on participation in AI governance.
• Public Voices in AI, a 12-month UKRI-funded collaboration that ran from April 2024 to March 2025 with the ESRC Digital Good Network at the University of Sheffield, Elgon Social Research, the Alan Turing Institute and University College London, exploring how to represent public voices in AI research, development and policy.

Alongside this deliberative work, the Institute runs nationally representative surveys on public attitudes to AI. The March 2025 survey it conducted jointly with the Alan Turing Institute found that 72% of the UK public said laws and regulation would increase their comfort with AI — an increase of ten percentage points from 2022/23 — and has been used by the Institute and partners to argue for binding regulation rather than purely voluntary industry codes.

Posture in the movement

The Ada Lovelace Institute is best understood as a research-advocacy hybrid rather than a grassroots organising group: it sits closer to the policy-and-evidence end of the make-AI-good landscape than to street-level campaigning, and most of its outputs are reports, briefings and convenings rather than protests or petitions. What brings it into scope here is the consistency with which its work engages members of the public who are not themselves AI specialists, through citizen juries, deliberative councils, and peer-led inquiries, and then carries those publics' considered views into UK and international AI-governance debates. Its participatory infrastructure has been picked up by sister organisations and government bodies — including the ICO and the Wellcome Trust — and has helped establish "public deliberation" as a recognised input into UK AI policy rather than a one-off engagement exercise.