The Edinburgh Futures Institute is committed to supporting, promoting, and enabling high-quality research in areas focused on the challenges and opportunities related to data driven innovation that have demonstrable ethical, social, cultural, economic and environmental impact.
The EFI Research team aims to support academic staff by developing strategic areas of research capability, developing and supporting research networks, and providing advice regarding grant applications related to our themes (Creative, Data Civics, Gov-Tech, Financial Services and FinTech, Tourism and Festivals, Future Infrastructure, Ethics of Data and AI).
We also aim to support a training and upskilling program of data-led research methods, managed by the Centre for Data, Culture and Society (CDCS), to allow existing staff and research students at the University of Edinburgh to grow and develop their own approaches to data-led research.
One of our priority areas is to support academics working on strategic research grant applications by providing expert advice on how to design, structure and resource a project and coordinate the submission process. We also support the grant application process by identifying colleagues who can constructively peer review proposals, facilitating networking and collaboration with external partners, providing teaching buy-out for applicants or buy-in for junior researchers who can support the PI in preparing the proposal. You can find the application form here, but please liaise with the EFI Research Manager if you have any specific request.
Our
Research Capability Fund supports researchers by providing practical support, for example access to new data sets, software licences, strategic equipment, digitisation and training. It’s an open call so academics can apply at any time by sending to
efiresearch@ed.ac.uk. The application form is available
here.
We also have two schemes to support projects which are relevant for our research themes: the EFI Research awards, which we now manage in collaboration with the CAHSS College Research Office as a stream within the Challenge Investment Fund. Please liaise with your School Research Office to check their internal deadline.
The second scheme is an open call to support networking activities, events and small pilot projects. Awards are usually up to £2,500 and we tend to confirm the outcome of the application within a week. You can download the application form here and send it to efiresearch@ed.ac.uk.
We support academics at all career stages through our internal affiliation programme, which aims to promote and support researchers who would like to develop their interests in or are already working on areas close to our themes. The guidelines and application forms are available on our Sharepoint here.
Research support
We have supported several events, workshops and initiatives with a focus on Data Driven Innovation, including:
Pip Thornton
Chancellor’s Fellow, School of GeoSciences
Franken-Poet: AI Poetry Project
This project follows an approach from the organisers of the Push the Boat Out poetry festival to return to the festival in 2022. Following the successful display of the Newspeak LED panels and the Poet vs Google poetry slam events in 2021 (which received EFI funding), Pip Thornton was asked asked if she could come up with a new digital input for the 2022 event. For PTBO 2022 she would like to use LED panels to create poetry using the collective creativity of the PTBO poets and their words, creating AI-assisted collaborative poetry. The Frankenstein poetry will scroll on the LED panels in the Summerhall cafe throughout the festival, and will also be available to be read, engaged with, and disseminated via a custom designed web interface. Going forward she would also like to look at publishing some of the Frankenpoetry in a zine or similar.
Pip Thornton’s profile page
Rebecca Macklin
Leverhulme Early Career Fellow, English Literature, School of Literatures, Languages and Cultures
Intersecting Energy Cultures: Transdisciplinary community collaborations for just transitions
This funding will support in facilitating a two-day, hybrid workshop being held at the University of Pennsylvania and co-hosted by the University of Edinburgh in November 2022. This gathering will be the inaugural event in the activities of a two-year international and transdisciplinary working group, led by Dr Rebecca Macklin (Edinburgh) and Prof Bethany Wiggin (Pennsylvania).
The Intersecting Energy Cultures project (https://ppehlab.com/intersecting-energy-cultures/) will bring together researchers working with community-based partners in global sites on projects relating to the overlapping workings of energy industries. Over a two-year lifespan, they seek to develop new interdisciplinary methods for co-producing knowledge with local communities impacted by energy production. The project addresses the need to include local and indigenous community knowledge in the global transition away from fossil fuels, seeking to develop new ways to facilitate the inclusion of local perspectives into academic and policy energy forums. The working group will run for a two-year period, hosting regular online meetings; producing a set of open access outputs; and a final, in-person event in Edinburgh in 2024.
Rebecca Macklin’s profile page
Anna Rezk
PhD student in Design Informatics, Edinburgh College of Art
Agency and Identity in Implicitly Personalised Media Landscape
The proposed project will make up the pilot case study for a PhD, which is conducted in partnership with the BBC Research and Development. It will tackle the themes of user agency and identity in implicitly personalised media content. This topic is highly relevant in light of the BBC’s efforts to implement personalisation in their news content.
The aim is to elicit participants’ feelings around personalised content curation by juxtaposing their uniquely generated feeds with their calculated user profiles after interacting with a low fidelity system featuring commonly used personalisation and audience segmentation techniques. Structured interviews will give an insight into the participants’ feelings around identity and agency when confronted with personalisation and user profile generation/audience segmentation. Furthermore, through the participants’ feedback, ideas for improved personalisation will be identified whilst considering the risks of creating filter bubbles.
Anna Rezk’s profile page
SJ Bennett
Research Associate, Data for Children Collaborative with UNICEF, in collaboration with the Centre for Technomoral Futures
Building a Community of Early Career Researchers: AI Ethics & Society Doctoral Consortium 2022
Building upon the success of the first Doctoral Colloquium, this project aims to bring together students researching the ethical and societal impacts of Artificial Intelligence, with mentors with domain expertise and experience in relevant research methods. As part of the event, attendees of the previous colloquium will facilitate a workshop discussing the opportunities and challenges of multidisciplinary working, and suggesting tools for collaborative research. There will also be a wellbeing session with the aim to equip new and existing students with tools to aid navigating psychological and logistical aspects of PhD life. Networking opportunities will be provided throughout, culminating in an evening drinks reception which both students and mentors are invited to attend. As attested by feedback from last years attendees, this event is important for fostering a sense of community amongst Edinburgh early career researchers in AI Ethics, an area which is distributed across different departments and schools.
SJ Bennett’s profile page
Björn Ross
Lecturer in Computational Social Science, School of Informatics
Social Data Science Hub
Dr Ross is part of the SDS Coordination Committee, headed by Dr Christopher Barrie, who are seeking to establish a dedicated Social Data Science Hub (SDS) at the University of Edinburgh. They now count among their ranks a growing number of colleagues working in the field. A dedicated hub will help them gain visibility, collaborate, attract research funding and attract students.
The concept of the hub is intended to create a space to bring together researchers from the many disciplines and schools where colleagues are working in this area, and a focal point for the SDS community as a whole. This plan has been formulated, and met the approval of over thirty colleagues across multiple schools and disciplines.
The primary purposes of the Hub are as follows:
- Establish a seminar series oriented mainly towards PGR students and staff (with occasionally invited external speakers)
- Create a web presence for the whole UoE SDS community, to facilitate recruitment of PGR students and provide a resource for existing students
- Provide a public platform for the aggregation of new publications and projects by the joint SDS community at the UoE
Björn Ross’s profile page
Pip Thornton
Chancellor’s Fellow, School of GeoSciences
Articulating Data: machine listening, vocalisation, and the (in)security of language in a digital age
Articulating Data is a 2-day single track symposium, concerned with interrogating the systems which evidence, process, and profit from our textual and vocal communications in an age of ubiquitous machine learning and AI. With keynotes from academia and the critical art world, the symposium will bring together ideas from across disciplines, and provide a platform for early career scholars and artists working in this field.
As part of Articulating Data, commissions of £2,500 are available to a limited number of artists or creative practitioners for the development and exhibition of new work (digital or/and analogue) at the symposium which critiques or engages with these issues.
Articulating Data is led by Dr. Pip Thornton, Chancellors Fellow in GeoSciences at the University of Edinburgh, in collaboration with, Dr. Murad Khan, Senior Lecturer in Creative Computing at University of the Arts London, Dr. Andrew Dwyer, Lecturer in Information Security at Royal Holloway, University of London, and Martin Disley, Artist and Researcher at Design Informatics, University of Edinburgh.
Pip Thornton’s profile page
