History

The Knowledge 4 All Foundation was founded in 2009 by lead partners in PASCAL and PASCAL 2 research networks of Excellence.

After three iterations of research projects starting from NeuroCOLT and NeuroCOLT2, PASCAL and PASCAL2 coming to a successful end in November 2013, the European Commission  announced plans to establish a different funding scheme, namely Horizon 2020 and Erasmus+ which were not to include Networks of Excellence, therefore effectively stopping the funding of large scale scientific and research communities.  The Commission requested from the partners to create a continuation of the PASCAL’s best practices, therefore Knowledge 4 All Foundation became PASCAL’s legacy organisation.

The key successes of PASCAL2 have been to make a big impact in research direction in a positive way, and encourage proactive and forward-looking research. To empower young people and help them feel that they can make up their own minds about their own research programme. PASCAL created a new breed of young, hungry researchers, which was great to see. And to be a bit sentimental we’ve found a really nice group of people, a nice atmosphere. The way people worked together has been really positive.

The Knowledge 4 All Foundation is the legacy foundation. The idea was to create a permanent presence in Europe. To achieve this we established a legal entity that could carry forward some of the activities of PASCAL. We founded it as a UK company, registered as a charity. The main focus is on the VideoLectures.Net website and the PASCAL2 network of machine learning experts.

The Foundation has promoted VideoLectures, for example, it ran a boot camp in Ghana in 2009 in an outreach programme for the third world. It has established a journal of videoed machine learning abstracts in 2010, comprising the spotlights from past NIPS conferences three years running. It also has been instrumental in working with UNESCO in appointing two UNESCO Chairs with its trustees.

You can keep in touch with all our progress, including our most recent grant announcements, on our News page here – or by following us on Twitter, Facebook or Linkedin.