RESEARCH DEVELOPMENT

We continue to champion impact-driven, challenge-led multidisciplinary research between colleagues across all divisions and our industry and community partners. Our current priorities are to facilitate research in the following themes: Creative and Cultural Education, Health and Wellbeing, Humanmachine Creativity, Diversity and Sustainability and Creative Heritage.

Health and wellbeing

We have completed a project recently with colleagues in Bioscience using generative AI, which is AI created to generate media art to generate realistic field images of parasites, to help develop tools to better diagnose tropical diseases. This is an exciting project in which AI technologies developed in the creative industries find an important application in fundamental bioscience research. We have also started a collaborative project with our Kent and Medway Medical school, exploring how 3D avatars can help support adherence to cognitive rehabilitation.

Human machine creativity

Another highlight this year is an innovative project, known as “Art Heart”, which combines wearable technology and AI to understand how humans interact with performance arts. This is done by monitoring audiences’ heart rate using a Fitbit-like wearable device while they are watching a live performance (see image right), creating a unique dataset which will be analysed by AI algorithms to understand human emotional reactions. We also aim to develop an AI to turn that audience data into a work of art. This fusion of artistic creativity and technologically advanced productivity provides creative power for the sustainable development of future art and human-computer interaction technology.

Creative heritage

The 'Shakespeare's Parlour' project set out to create a virtual, immersive experience of the kind of space within which Shakespeare might have written, in Unreal 5. We worked with creative writers, actors, digital artists and storytellers whose skill is to reproduce the past in creative ways. We’re currently working with a digital storyteller to explore how people will encounter and interact with the virtual space and its contents, thinking through questions of inclusion and exclusion now and then, and how our users can help us understand our historical evidence in new ways.

Future

In the coming year, we will set up a new cross-division research group in cultural and creative industries, bringing colleagues from across the university to address exciting research and practical questions.

We aim to set up a cross-division doctoral training centre in the area of human-AI partnership for creative industries, training PhD students in a multidisciplinary setting, involving experts in AI, creative arts, philosophy and sociology to address ethical issues around how AI could impact human creativity, how AI developers and artists can co-create responsible and trustworthy AI, and ultimately to answer the questions of how this human-AI partnership can reshape the definition of creativity itself.

Introducing our first iCCi Fellows

We have recruited five fellows who have been working on a broad range of topics, including i) the use of artificial intelligence (AI) in creative content generation, ii) investigation of sentiment analysis and text mining of local planning data to support placebased funding, iii) exploring models of professional practice for disabled-led arts, iv) translating brain scans to procedurally generate music using neuroscience approach, v) development of AI to help transfer a 2D concept art into a fully 3D environment into Unreal engine. One of the fellows, Mo Pietroni-Spenst, is organising a “slow conference” exploring the issues of disability and accessibility in arts. The slow conference is set to run between Monday 20 March and Thursday 6 April.