In 2020/21, our EFI Research awards were managed in collaboration with colleagues in the CAHSS College Research Office, as a stream within the Challenge Investment Fund call. CIF Awards are aimed to support broader College research objectives to further synergies and areas of cross-disciplinary expertise within CAHSS, across College boundaries and/or outside the institution. Applicants whose research projects had a focus on the challenges and opportunities posed by Data Driven Innovation in one of the EFI research themes (FinTech and financial services, Data Civics and the future of public services, Creative Tech, Tourism and Festivals, Ethics of Data and Artificial Intelligence, Critical Infrastructure), were invited to flag this in their application form.
We supported projects exploring a wide range of issues such as AI sentiment recognition, Intelligent Operating Rooms, data infrastructures that promote ethical and democratic governance and the empowerment of local actors, child-friendly justice systems. You can find out more about the individual projects below:
Beverley Hood
Reader in Technological Embodiment & Creative Practice, Edinburgh College of Art
It’s all about the feelings… a pilot performance project using Artificial Intelligence sentiment recognition
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It’s all about the feelings… will be a pilot practice-based research project, exploring sentience recognition, bias and performance. It is intended as a first step towards an ambitious, large-scale touring performance work, which would take these pressing themes and concerns from academia to the wider general public. The key objectives of the project are to extend upon ethical, philosophical and HCI research around sentiment recognition and AI, using creative research methods, and to test the feasibility of sentiment recognition as a tool and medium for performance.
Beverley Hood’s profile page
Jennifer Lavoie
Chancellor Fellow in Global Challenges, Moray House School of Education and Sport
Justice for Who? Young Children’s Preferences for Justice Outcomes After a Minor Transgression
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Understanding children’s perceptions of justice is important because this may affect how they perceive and experience justice systems themselves, for example when acts of violence are committed against them through maltreatment. Yet, despite the importance of the concept, there exists limited knowledge of how the concept of justice develops during childhood, specifically how children judge whether justice has been served following a transgression. The aim of the proposed research is to examine how young children believe justice should be served in the face of a transgression committed against another.
Jennifer Lavoie’s profile page
Marlee Tichenor, Justyna Bandola-Gill & Sotiria Grek
Marlee Tichenor – Post-doctoral Research Fellow in Medical Anthropology , Justyna Bandola-Gill – Research Fellow in Science and Technology Studies, Sotiria Grek – Professor in European and Global Education Governance, School of Social and Political Science
Determining Sustainable Data Futures: Statistical Capacity Development in Africa
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The proposed project will analyse this new era of global governance by data through a focus on the struggles and collaborations between heterogeneous organizations over their processes and practices of producing statistical capacity development in the Global South. Our project will cast light on the continent of Africa, as the region that poses the greatest data challenges for international and local communities. The project’s goal is to interrogate this emerging and powerful relationship of knowledge and governance by analysing the interrelations between state and non-state actors in the production of data for education, health, and poverty policy in three African countries that receive such assistance, such as Senegal, Nigeria, and South Africa, the latter of which also provides such aid on the continent.
Marlee Tichenor’s profile page
Justyna Bandola-Gill’s profile page
Sotiria Grek’s profile page
Jennifer Yule
Lecturer in Marketing, Business School
Patient Perspectives on the Intelligent Operating Room
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The intelligent operating room (IOR) where digital technology inputs can assist human team members through pre, intra and postoperative stages of surgery is becoming a reality. However, there is a critical gap in the development and application of this technology regarding the patients’ perspective on the collection, use and application of data in the IOR. The IOR has the potential to impact patient outcomes and inherently involves the patient at the centre of the data gathering exercise, therefore the patient perspective should be integral to technological developments. The aim of the project is to establish a multidisciplinary research network leveraging insights from multiple stakeholders to develop a conceptual framework of patient-centred perspectives on digital data capture in the OR.
Jennifer Yule’s profile page
Research support
In addition to these research projects, we have also supported several events, workshops and initiatives with a focus on Data Driven Innovation, including:
Pip Thornton
Chancellor Fellow, School of Geosciences
Push the Boat Out festival
Push the Boat Out is a brand new poetry festival, located in Edinburgh, which will showcase fresh, provocative, radical, audacious, inspiring poetry and spoken word, and bring people together to enjoy, experience and interrogate it. This grant will support an installation at Push the Boat Out will display the text of Orwell’s 1984, as currently priced by Google’s advertising algorithms, and displayed as a rolling tickertape on 2 LED panels suspended from the ceiling in the entrance lobby to Summerhall. The LED panels will also be used to value and scroll the work of selected poets and writers taking part in the festival. The installation is the latest in a series of research-led creative interventions exploring the value of language in an age of digital capitalism.
Pip Thornton’s profile page
Daryl Green
Head of Special Collections, Deputy Head of the Centre for Research Collections, ISG/Centre for Research Collections
A Wealth of Information
This project will seek to quantify the impact of the arrival of a significant part of Adam Smith’s library to the University’s intellectual community in the late 19th century. By using extant catalogues of this collection, data mining digitised copies of those texts and analysing the intellectual output (i.e. University theses) of the University in the last 25 years of the 19th century, and then finally comparing this data to the borrowing records of New College Library during this same period. This work we allow us to build a model for measuring intellectual impact of a major donation from a highly influential Scottish thinker.
Daryl Green’s profile page
Lucy Havens
PhD student in the School of Informatics
Biased text in Cultural Heritage Catalogues
The project’s aim is to annotate text for gender bias, create a gold standard dataset and then train a classification algorithm to enable large-scale detection and classification of types of gender bias in text. No gold standard dataset for cultural heritage metadata exists, so the dataset would be a unique contribution and help further efforts to bring digital methods to cultural heritage institutions. Furthermore, no gold standard dataset annotated for bias exists, let alone gender bias, so the dataset will be a unique and valuable contribution to the natural language processing community.
Lucy Haven’s profile page
Glenna Nightingale
Chancellor Fellow in Nursing Studies, School of Health in Social Science
Data storyboarding in research and teaching at HiSS
The project’s objective is to construct a storyboard for a five minute “explainer-type” animation for an app used as a “student’s companion” in the statistical component of courses within CAHSS. The animation will contextualize the statistical and data visualization principles and present statistical concepts valuable to students and researchers in a unique, and engaging storytelling fashion. The aims of the app are (i) to portray the importance of data visualization in research and to (ii) support the in teaching/explaining of statistical concepts. In the long term the app will also be a springboard to providing customized masterclasses in data visualization and statistics via a consultancy.
Glenna Nightingale’s profile page
Juli Huang
Lecturer in Anthropology, School of Social and Political Science
Building research capacity for ‘The new data economies of social enterprise’ project
The objective of the project is to increase the capacity to carry out digital and remote data collection, via the development of a network of local research assistants in five locations in rural Bangladesh. The support received from EFI will enhance the capacity of the research project, ‘The new data economies of social enterprise,’ which explores how small grassroots organisations in Bangladesh and Scotland imagine and generate data economies that challenge inequalities and promote social cohesion. The project also experiments with new methods for collaborative data collection in comparative international perspective (Scotland and Bangladesh).
Juli Huang’s profile page
Katucha Bento
Lecturer in Race and Decolonial Studies, School of Social and Political Science
The Hysteria of a little flu: Effects of Covid-19 on HEIs in Brazil
This research discussed the key challenges faced by public Higher Education Institutions (HEI) in Brazil during the COVID-19 lockdown. The pandemic led universities across the country to close their campi and adopt an online interface for academic activities. However, many of these institutions do not have the technological infrastructure for such, nor do the staff and students. Using data collected from over seventy public HEIs in Brazil, the idea is to develop a creative discourse analysis that generates a visual idea of the impact of Covid-19 with illustrations based on words used by the participants and to identify how the colonial legacies are correlated with postulates of power, truth, and freedom. The decolonial approach will finally enable to grasp how the pedagogy of the oppressed can be renegotiated and envision possible futures for accessible possibilities to offer free quality university in Brazil.
Katucha Bento’s profile page
