Yutong Liu & Kingston School of Art / Better Images of AI / Talking to AI 2.0 / CC-BY 4.0
Doing AI Differently Edinburgh Workshop
Date: Wednesday, 12 February 2025, 10am - 12pm
Location: EFI, Room 1.40
EOI Deadline: Please respond to our short EOI by 3 February.
The Edinburgh Workshop is an early opportunity to discover and help to refine the research vision and topic scope for an Arts & Humanities Research Council (AHRC–UKRI) International Science Partnerships Fund (ISPF) funding call launching April 2025. This call will focus on UK, US and Canadian collaborations.
The initiative is led by The New Real (University of Edinburgh/The Alan Turing Institute) and Data-Centric Engineering (The Alan Turing Institute) wiith Arts & Humanities Research Council (AHRC–UKRI) and partner institutions in the UK and North America. The Edinburgh Workshop is co-hosted by The New Real and The University of Edinburgh's Generative AI Laboratory (GAIL).
Edinburgh Workshop participants will be able to access a limited number of funded opportunities to participate in a larger Doing AI Differently London Workshop on 13 & 14 March 2025 at The Royal Academy of Engineering aligned to AIUK.
About: Doing AI Differently
Further information here: www.doingaidifferently.org
This initiative positions the arts and humanities as integral—not supplemental—to AI development, moving beyond post hoc analysis to shape its technical foundations.
Core Challenges
1. Developing Interpretive Technologies.
Leveraging current AI architectures to implement deeper interpretive capabilities, developing approaches to represent multiple perspectives and capture semantic depth while maintaining computational tractability.
2. Exploring Alternative AI Architectures.
Exploring fundamentally new approaches to AI design that move beyond current limitations in foundation models and gradient-based learning to enable more pluralistic and culturally adaptive AI systems.
3. Advancing Human-AI Ensembles
Moving beyond simple substitution or assistance models, to foster new relationships between human and artificial intelligence, each contributing unique capabilities to achieve outcomes neither could accomplish alone.
Initiative Objectives:
1. Develop pilot projects demonstrating humanities-driven technical advances in AI
2. Establish funding mechanisms fostering interdisciplinary partnerships
3. Create scalable pathways for humanities scholars to participate in large-scale AI projects
Expected Outcomes:
New paradigms for addressing complex, context-dependent tasks in AI
Enhanced AI tools for deep contextual analysis across disciplines
AI systems better aligned with societal values and ethical considerations
The rapid deployment of increasingly sophisticated AI systems makes this timing critical, and we seek to develop inclusive, research-led ideas that will provide practical ways to address some of the recommendations set out in the recent UK Government AI Opportunities Action Plan. This initiative adds the opportunities for research and innovation in AI – artificial intelligence – in the UK (see Transforming our world with AI).
More Information:
- View our complete vision statement: www.doingaidifferently.org