Imperial College London to Use Theta EdgeCloud in its AI Research

Theta Network welcomes one of the world’s top-tier research universities, Imperial College London, as the first U.K. and European university to adopt Theta EdgeCloud Hybrid for security and trustworthy AI research

We’re thrilled to announce that the Security & Machine Learning Lab at Imperial College London, one of the world’s top-tier research institutions, has joined Theta’s academic partner network by adopting Theta EdgeCloud Hybrid to support advanced research in security and trustworthy AI, as Theta Network’s first U.K. and European academic partner.

This marks Theta Network’s expansion into the U.K. and Europe, extending its global academic footprint beyond North America and Asia and reinforcing Theta’s commitment to supporting leading research institutions with decentralized, hybrid GPU infrastructure for real-world AI workloads.

With Imperial College London joining the network, Theta’s academic partner ecosystem now includes leading research universities such as Stanford University, Syracuse University, and Nanyang Technological University, alongside four of the top five universities in Korea — as well as many more.

About Dr. Sergio Maffeis, and Security & Machine Learning Lab at Imperial College London

The SML Lab is led by Dr. Sergio Maffeis, Associate Professor in Computer Security at Imperial College London. Dr. Maffeis received his Ph.D. from Imperial College London and his MSc from the University of Pisa, and has built a long-standing research career spanning web security, formal methods, programming languages, and machine learning. His work has been published at leading international venues including USENIX Security, ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security (CCS), IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy, AAAI, POPL, ISSTA, and RAID, reflecting sustained contributions across both foundational and applied security research.

The Security & Machine Learning (SML) Lab is based in the Department of Computing at Imperial College London and focuses on research at the intersection of computer security and AI. The lab investigates how machine learning can be applied to real-world security problems, and how machine learning systems can be made more robust and trustworthy using techniques from security and formal methods.

Figure 1 shows the CLOUSEAU framework from “Clouesau: A Hierarchical Multi-Agent Approach for Autonomous Attack Investigation” (ACSAC 2025), a cybersecurity system in which multiple AI agents automatically analyze security incident logs and iteratively assemble a clear report explaining how an attack occurred.

Theta EdgeCloud Enables Security & Trustworthy AI Research

Through Theta EdgeCloud Hybrid, the Security & Machine Learning Lab at Imperial College London can access a decentralized hybrid GPU infrastructure designed to support both high-performance training and efficient experimentation.

Theta EdgeCloud enables researchers to utilize a diverse mix of compute resources, including community-run NVIDIA RTX 40–50 series GPUs for flexible experimentation, high-end NVIDIA GPU resources such as A100 and H200 for large-scale and compute-intensive workloads, as well as AWS AI accelerators including Trainium and Inferentia nodes for efficient training and inference.

This hybrid approach allows research teams to seamlessly switch between lightweight prototyping and large-scale training, helping reduce infrastructure bottlenecks and improve overall research efficiency for security and trustworthy AI research.

“Theta EdgeCloud provides our lab with the high-performance compute necessary to push the boundaries of Reinforcement Learning and Foundation Model security,” said Dr. Maffeis.“By accessing a hybrid network of NVIDIA GPUs — from community nodes for prototyping to enterprise-grade A100s/H200s for large-scale training — we can accelerate our research without infrastructure bottlenecks.”

“We’re thrilled to add Imperial College’s SML Lab to Theta’s global academic partner network,” said Mitch Liu, CEO of Theta Labs. “EdgeCloud grants the lab access to a decentralized hybrid platform, combining thousands of community -run NVIDIA 30/40/50 series GPUs with enterprise A100/H200 clusters. With the addition of AWS Trainium and Inferentia chips, we are providing the lab with unprecedented flexibility for both deep learning training and high-throughput inference.”

About Imperial College London

Imperial College London is a world-leading research university specializing in science, engineering, medicine, and business. Based in London, Imperial is consistently ranked among the top universities globally and is known for its strong emphasis on high-impact research, innovation, and industry collaboration.

Imperial’s Department of Computing is internationally recognized for its contributions to computer security, artificial intelligence, and systems research, and plays a central role in advancing foundational and applied research across academia and industry.

About Theta Labs

Theta Labs is the leading provider of decentralized cloud infrastructure for AI, media and entertainment powered by a global network of 30,000 community-run edge nodes and a native blockchain. Backed by Samsung, Sony, Bertelsmann Digital Media Investments and Creative Artists Agency, Theta is among the top AI tokens on Binance.com and DePIN blockchains by market capitalization on Coingecko. Theta’s enterprise validator and governance council is composed of global market leaders including Google, Samsung, CAA and Binance.

Theta EdgeCloud is the first hybrid cloud-edge computing AI platform offering over 80 PetaFLOPS of GPU compute power combining enterprise-grade NVIDIA H100/A100 GPUs, community-run NVIDIA 30/40/50 series, and AWS’s next-generation AI instances, Inferentia and Trainium custom silicon. The platform now counts over 50 global customers including 4 of the top 5 South Korea universities, Stanford, Syracuse U, top professional sports teams including France Ligue1’s Olympique de Marseille, NHL’s Las Vegas Knights, NBA’s Houston Rockets and global esports teams Cloud9, Gen.G, among others.

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Imperial College London to Use Theta EdgeCloud in its AI Research was originally published in Theta Network on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.