Human-Centred AI Systems to Inspire Swansea City Residents to Engage in Creative Placemaking

The project aims to surprise and disrupt Swansea resident expectations - to reveal the creative life of the city centre in unexpected ways. The project will be successful as it illustrates how creativity, technology and commerce are interdependent. Examples of the kind of work this might involve include: a generative digital sound art installation that changes according to the way the public move in and around a space and how they interact with each another; digital walls and augmented reality to create an immersive space that can be
altered and affected by social interaction; lighting, temporary surfaces, sound, play - as well as events and traditional audience style presentations/performances.
The following are high level aims. An Experience Centre that enables visitors to explore words, movement and visual arts though different interactive modes, including the digital. A data enabled approach to considering "engagement" that goes beyond footfall/visitor numbers and instead looks at how people experience culture and produce new interactive city spaces in the process A digitally empowered network of local artists and visitors who create and share work throughout the city via public screens.

This project will involve intensive engagement with citizens, artists, City and County officers and many others. The project will be shaped by their needs and values. Specifically (i) we will follow the ESPRC's Framework for Responsible Innovation (ii) City and County already have processes for citizen engagement which will be adopted where possible. Additionally, the project can embed responsible innovation principles via an advisory project board that includes all stakeholders; periodic open forums with stakeholders and Swansea residents; and by using appropriate tools to share research findings and solicit feedback from a diverse group of stakeholders and Swansea residents

The Proposal
The goal of "something magical for visitors" would guide the public engagement aspects of the project and their role in creative placemaking. The project as currently envisaged would be structured as discrete experiments that use technologies to surprise and delight users in order to better understand how and why people engage both with and in Swansea's cultural
spaces. Part of these experiments will include a site-specific Experience Centre, a space where visitors engage with art-based technologies and activities. The research questions therefore will emerge from the practice of building, deploying and testing.

Example HCI domains the project will cover include:
Interactive Screens
1. Review of existing of existing responsive screen software/hardware used in retail or exhibition
2. Review of selected references that are relevant to Swansea
3. Prototype screen installation(s) for deployment within Swansea and engagement data gathering
Digital Generative Art
4. Review of existing of existing state-of -the-art public facing digital and generative art used in major international cities and/or galleries
5. Review of selected reference cases for digital and generative arts that are most relevant to Swansea
6. Prototype generative art installation(s) for deployment within Swansea and engagement data gathering

This project connects with the ongoing one led by Anna Carter (Cohort 1) and joint meetings will be held to ensure complementarity.

The Centre will nurture 55 new PhD researchers who will be highly sought after in technology companies and application sectors where data and intelligence based systems are being developed and deployed. We expect that our graduates will be nationally in demand for two reasons: firstly, their training occurs in a vibrant and unique environment exposing them to challenging domains and contexts (that provide stretch, ambition and adventure to their projects and capabilities); and, secondly, because of the particular emphasis the Centre will put on people-first approaches. As one of the Google AI leads, Fei-Fei Li, recently put it, "We also want to make technology that makes humans' lives better, our world safer, our lives more productive and better. All this requires a layer of human-level communication and collaboration" [1]. We also expect substantial and attractive opportunities for the CDT's graduates to establish their careers in the Internet Coast region (Swansea Bay City Deal) and Wales. This demand will dovetail well with the lifetime of the Centre and provide momentum for its continuation after the initial EPSRC investment.

With the skills being honed in the Centre, the UK will gain a important competitive advantage which will be a strong talent based-pull, drawing in industrial investment to the UK as the recognition of and demand for human-centred interactions and collaborations with data and intelligence multiplies. Further, those graduates who wish to develop their careers in the academy will be a distinct and needed complement to the likely increased UK community of researchers in AI and big data, bringing both an ability to lead insights and innovation in core computer science (e.g., in HCI or formal methods) allied to talents to shape and challenge their research agenda through a lens that is human-centred and that involves cross-disciplinarity and co-creation.

The PhD training will be the responsibility of a team which includes research leaders in the application of big data and AI in important UK growth sectors - from health and well being to smart manufacturing - that will help the nation achieve a positive and productive economy. Our graduates will tackle impactful challenges during their training and be ready to contribute to nationally important areas from the moment they begin the next steps of their careers. Impact will be further embedded in the training programme with cohorts involved in projects that directly involve communities and stakeholders within our rich innovation ecology in Swansea and the Bay region who will co-create research and participate in deployments, trials and evaluations.

The Centre will also impact by providing evidence of and methods for integrating human-centred approaches within areas of computational science and engineering that have yet to fully exploit their value: for example, while process modelling and verification might seem much removed from the human interface, we will adapt and apply methods from human-computer interaction, one of our Centre's strengths, to develop research questions, prototyping apparatus and evaluations for such specialisms. These valuable new methodologies, embodied in our graduates, will impact on the processes adopted by a wide range of organisations we engage with and who our graduates join.

Finally, as our work is fully focused on putting the human first in big data and intelligent systems contexts, we expect to make a positive contribution to society's understandings of and involvement with these keystone technologies. We hope to reassure, encourage and empower our fellow citizens, and those globally, that in a world of "smart" technology, the most important ingredient is the human experience in all its smartness, glory, despair, joy and even mundanity.

[1] https://www.technologyreview.com/s/609060/put-humans-at-the-center-of-ai/