AI Digital Working Group

03 Jul 2024

Dr. Chloe Jeffries, Head of Strategic Funding at The University of Manchester, outlines the rationale for a new AI digital working group within the Faculty.

AI has the potential to have a profound effect on society. And just as it is already impacting virtually every sector, so it is already having an impact on everything we do as a University. To mitigate the risks and ensure the benefits of AI are felt through AI-assisted and AI-dependent technologies, we as a University must consider the social, environmental and economic contexts that AI technologies will operate in, and the consequences of their deployment.

Against this background a new AI Digital Working Group has been formed across the Faculty, convened by the Vice-Dean for Research and involving researchers from across all four Schools and a range of career stages. The rationale of the group is to connect researchers working across AI areas, to find commonalities around the methods and issues that they face, and to better understand what academics working in this area need in terms of resource and support, in collaboration with the Digital Futures Platform.

We also want to gain a sense of the ‘hot topics’ and emerging issues in this field, and help promote and advocate a distinct Humanities and Social Science approach to AI. We also want to clarify where we need to build capacity and whether there are any specific barriers that researchers face, as well as help to steer the exciting new SIRF investment in AI Trust and Security (see above). 

As we state above, the new investment in AI Trust and Security will also catalyse new collaborations across the University with both the Centre for AI Fundamentals based in the Faculty of Science and Engineering, and also with the Faculty of Biology, Medicine and Health – most notably with the Christabel Pankhurst Institute for health technology research and innovation.