The Centre for Social Care and Artificial Intelligence Learning (SCALE) will harness the potential of AI for social care, aiming to kickstart activity and build critical mass in a new, exciting, and fast-moving cross-disciplinary research area.

Increasing demand and cuts in funding for social care are posing significant challenges to the sector. Artificial intelligence offers the potential to address these challenges, and build smarter, more agile, and more effective social care services that support and enhance human relationships.

We launched in April 2025 after receiving £1.8 million in funding from Health and Care Research Wales.

Aims

As incorrect decisions in social care have high potential for harm, introducing AI will require new techniques to manage risk and safety. Solutions must also be cost-effective, and ensure there is no digital divide in the level and quality of care provided.

SCALE will deliver real-work impact by placing those with direct experience of services at the centre of our work. We will include service users from adult and children’s social care, as well as practitioners and policymakers, to build sustainable long-term collaborations and to secure external funding.

Research

Our research will cover all areas of Children’s and Adult Social Care with Artificial Intelligence (including Natural Language Processing, Data Science and Analytics, Robotics, Visual Computing).

We will initially focus on:

• supporting the social care workforce and leadership
• supporting adults, children, carers, and families
• analysing data in new and interesting ways

People

SCALE will bring together a transdisciplinary group of Cardiff University researchers from the School of Computer Science & Informatics, the Children’s Social Care Research and Development Centre (CASCADE), the Centre for Adult Social Care (CARE), together with the Centre for Trials Research (CTR) and the Secure Anonymised Information Linkage (SAIL) Databank at Swansea University.