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Industry Collaboration Index

Sector Award · Frontier technologies · 2026

Artificial Intelligence: the winner and finalists

10 finalist partnerships, chosen from 449 eligible university and company partnerships in the open record. The winner is listed first; the other finalists follow in alphabetical order of university. The winner in each category is the finalist with the highest partnership score (volume of joint work 40%, years active 30%, field-weighted citation impact 30%) in the frozen Edition 1 record. No panel, nomination or payment plays any part. Winners were announced with the index at 05:30 BST, Thursday 15 October 2026, after the corrections and opt-out window closed at 17:00 BST on Tuesday 13 October.

All award categoriesThe Artificial Intelligence sector index
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Winner · partnership score 93.0, the highest in the category

University of Oxford×Google

United Kingdom · company based in United States · 32 joint works in the sector · active 5 of 5 years · field-weighted citation impact 4.46
FM
Francis McKayAcademic co-author · University of Oxford · 2 joint works in the partnership · ORCID
AK
Alan KarthikesalingamIndustry co-author · Google · 4 joint works in the partnership · ORCID
“Tackling bias in AI health datasets through the STANDING Together initiative” (2022, 83 citations)
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Carnegie Mellon University×Microsoft

United States · company based in United States · 30 joint works in the sector · active 5 of 5 years · field-weighted citation impact 3.70
JP
Jignesh M. PatelAcademic co-author · Carnegie Mellon University · 2 joint works in the partnership · ORCID
SD
Shaleen DeepIndustry co-author · Microsoft · 2 joint works in the partnership · ORCID
“ReAcTable: Enhancing ReAct for Table Question Answering” (2024, 44 citations)
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Harvard University×Google

United States · company based in United States · 44 joint works in the sector · active 5 of 5 years · field-weighted citation impact 3.65
AB
Andrew L. BeamAcademic co-author · Harvard University · 4 joint works in the partnership · ORCID
JS
Jasper SnoekIndustry co-author · Google · 2 joint works in the partnership
“Empirical Frequentist Coverage of Deep Learning Uncertainty Quantification Procedures” (2021, 2 citations)
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Peking University×ByteDance

China · company based in China · 24 joint works in the sector · active 5 of 5 years · field-weighted citation impact 2.36
JC
Ji ChenAcademic co-author · Peking University · 9 joint works in the partnership · ORCID
WR
Weiluo RenIndustry co-author · ByteDance · 5 joint works in the partnership · ORCID
“Towards the ground state of molecules via diffusion Monte Carlo on neural networks” (2023, 64 citations)
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Shanghai Jiao Tong University×United Imaging Healthcare

China · company based in China · 18 joint works in the sector · active 5 of 5 years · field-weighted citation impact 2.21
QW
Qian WangAcademic co-author · Shanghai Jiao Tong University · 3 joint works in the partnership · ORCID
DS
Dinggang G. ShenIndustry co-author · United Imaging Healthcare · 9 joint works in the partnership · ORCID
“TaG-Net: Topology-Aware Graph Network for Centerline-Based Vessel Labeling” (2023, 32 citations)
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Stanford University×Nvidia

United States · company based in United States · 14 joint works in the sector · active 5 of 5 years · field-weighted citation impact 2.67
MP
Marco PavoneAcademic co-author · Stanford University · 2 joint works in the partnership · ORCID
RM
Riccardo MarianiIndustry co-author · Nvidia · 2 joint works in the partnership · ORCID
“Trustworthy AI, Part II” (2023, 1 citation)
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The University of Sydney×Jingdong

Australia · company based in China · 18 joint works in the sector · active 5 of 5 years · field-weighted citation impact 3.30
LZ
Luping ZhouAcademic co-author · The University of Sydney · 4 joint works in the partnership · ORCID
CZ
Chen ZuIndustry co-author · Jingdong · 4 joint works in the partnership · ORCID
“Semi-supervised medical image segmentation via a tripled-uncertainty guided mean teacher model with contrastive learning” (2022, 205 citations)
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Tsinghua University×ByteDance

China · company based in China · 23 joint works in the sector · active 5 of 5 years · field-weighted citation impact 2.42
CZ
Changshui ZhangAcademic co-author · Tsinghua University · 3 joint works in the partnership · ORCID
YG
Yiwen GuoIndustry co-author · ByteDance · 3 joint works in the partnership · ORCID
“Recent Advances in Large Margin Learning” (2021, 15 citations)
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University of Cambridge×Microsoft

United Kingdom · company based in United States · 22 joint works in the sector · active 5 of 5 years · field-weighted citation impact 3.91
NB
Natalia G. BerloffAcademic co-author · University of Cambridge · 2 joint works in the partnership · ORCID
BR
Babak RahmaniIndustry co-author · Microsoft · 2 joint works in the partnership · ORCID
“Training of physical neural networks” (2025, 74 citations)
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Zhejiang University×NetEase

China · company based in China · 13 joint works in the sector · active 5 of 5 years · field-weighted citation impact 2.04
YL
Yong LiuAcademic co-author · Zhejiang University · 2 joint works in the partnership · ORCID
RW
Runze WuIndustry co-author · NetEase · 5 joint works in the partnership · ORCID
“Omni-Frequency Channel-Selection Representations for Unsupervised Anomaly Detection” (2023, 235 citations)

Partnership score: volume of joint work 40%, years active 30%, field-weighted citation impact 30% (shrunk toward 1.0 when evidence is thin). Joint works count half where the only company author also holds a post at the university. The named researchers co-wrote the cited paper and represent a wider team. Full rules.