- Led by Dr Anna-Maria Sichani, School of Advanced Study, University of London
- Partnered with The Alan Turing Institute
This fellowship will tackle the training needs for responsible AI adoption within the cultural heritage sector. Partnering with The Alan Turing Institute, the fellow will help develop and embed a comprehensive digital skills training provision for responsible AI for the cultural heritage community to empower informed, responsible and ethical use of AI.
Artificial Intelligence (AI) presents a transformative opportunity to enhance and curate digitised or born-digital cultural heritage collections, facilitating seamless exploration, analysis, and interconnection for the research community and the general public. However, given the plethora of new AI concepts, tools, and methods, as well as the necessary data-related considerations, professionals and researchers in the cultural heritage field lack a robust responsible AI skills provision that will empower a considerate and sustainable integration of AI methodologies and best practices in their everyday professional and research practice. These shortcomings in responsible AI skills result in what looks like a patchy and flawed integration of AI in the cultural heritage, with lower quality or availability of datasets, alongside practices that raise urgent social, legal and ethical questions. ‘How can we embed responsible AI (RAI) literacy skills across the cultural heritage community to empower informed, responsible and ethical use of AI?’ This fellowship aims to address the above challenge by developing a structured and comprehensive, yet flexible infrastructure towards a comprehensive digital skills training provision that places communities of practice at its epicentre and encompasses key aspects of AI, responsible data principles, data models, workflows, ethics checklists, and case studies, tailored specifically to the needs of professionals and researchers working with cultural heritage data, helping spread Responsible AI literacy more evenly across and beyond the sector.
The project will be hosted at the Digital Humanities Research Hub, School of Advanced Study and partnering with The Alan Turing institute, the UK’s national institute for data science and AI, with a strong tradition on building bridges between Data Science, AI and the Humanities and a commitment to skills training and capacity building in data science and responsible AI. By mobilising a cross-sectoral network of stakeholders through a series of community-building events (focus groups, workshops, edit-a-thons), the fellowship will seek to approach a training provision for responsible AI for the cultural heritage community as an infrastructural, community-driven investment, offering an important and timely intervention that will future-proof cultural heritage professionals and researchers working in these areas and help spread Responsible AI literacy more evenly across and beyond the sector. This fellowship aims: – to define a responsible and sustainable AI research culture and practice within the UK cultural heritage community – to establish a network of stakeholders that will support knowledge exchange on RAI developments within the UK cultural heritage community – to assess domain-specific RAI training needs and priorities – to develop a RAI training workbench that will foster wider adoption of RAI standards and sharing of best practices within the cultural heritage community, including datasheets, model cards, legal, ethical, social and environmental considerations – to develop a white paper with recommendations on RAI training provision for the cultural heritage community in order to benefit from and utilise newly-produced knowledge around responsible AI – to infuse the AI ecosystem at large with cultural heritage community’s commitments to responsibility and care, including quality awareness, documentation, transparency and awareness for biases through a series of presentations in public fora and conferences.
Personal website: amsichani.github.io
Institutional page : https://www.sas.ac.uk/digital-humanities/dhrh/people/sichani
X : https://twitter.com/amsichani
Linkedin: https://uk.linkedin.com/in/anna-maria-sichani
