Indicative collaboration, experiment and intervention activities include:

• (re)scripting AI systems e.g. for alternative learning analytics
• embedding social theory and empirical evidence in emergent AI systems, e.g. the current drive to create electronic institutions
• the creation of a ‘Future Me’ platform to make visible the data generated in everyday practice and establish controls for use of these data in the future
• collaboratively designed AI for scheduling care work that optimises on moments of undirected togetherness rather than reductive schedule efficiency
• commonly-owned AI gig work infrastructure that enables worker flexibility, while embedding a minimum level of mutually-agreed remuneration and sickness protection.

Team members:

• Professor Weiru Liu (Engineering Mathematics, Bristol)
• Dr Dan McQuillan (Computing, Goldsmiths)
• Dr Hongbo Bo (Engineering Mathematics, Bristol)

We are working with a range of Augmented, Virtual and Mixed Reality (AR/VR/MR) technologies to create experiments and interventions with the Centre's Domains. This includes the use of the Bristol Digital Futures Reality Emulator, a ground-breaking facility that enables the integration of real-time and historic data, in interactive visualisations synchronised with sound, haptics and smell for up to six people at a time, with functionality to extend to remote sites for further collaboration.

Indicative collaboration, experiment and intervention activities include:

• creating immersive experiences for care, grounded in social research on caring practices and lived experience
• participatory research to build anticipatory capacity with community partners though co-designed and interactive immersive experiences of potential future.

Further reading (blog): Imagining our Immersive Digital Futures

Team members:

• Professor Kirsten Cater (Computer Science, Bristol)
• Professor Susan Halford (Sociology, Bristol)
• Rich Hemming (Computer Science, Bristol)

Indicative collaboration, experiment and intervention activities include working with the Bristol Digital Futures Institute’s ‘nomadic network’. This offers the technical affordances to democratise network connectivity services through a transferrable and deployable open network platform, taking communities ‘off-grid’ (beyond commercial network service providers) to support the bottom-up co-creation of services and applications driven by communities. In addition, we are exploring:

• the development of data analytics and online platforms e.g., for action on sustainability
• organizing voluntary work
• support for new forms of content creation and consumption.

Team members:

• Dr Rasheed Hussain (Electrical & Electronic Engineering, Bristol)
• Professor Susan Halford (Sociology, Bristol)
• Leona Huang (Electrical & Electronic Engineering, Bristol)

We are working with a variety of robotics technologies in the Bristol Robotics Laboratory including the Swarm Robotics Testbed to create experiments and interventions with the Centre's Domains. Indicative collaboration, experiment and intervention activities include:

• democratizing robotic futures – low cost, simple robots configured as swarms working together to achieve meaningful tasks, such as organising food banks, setting up pop-up distribution centres for refugees or powering SMEs
• human robot interactions that empower users to understand and, when desired, control autonomous systems
• robots that interface with the natural world, built from new soft or biological materials, to include future wearable or implantable technology for medical applications, or biodegradable robots to monitor the environment
• robots for participation and engagement, e.g. as mobile interactive media (e.g. small mobile smart screens) to help humans reach consensus, brainstorm, tension options or role play.

These projects are co-designed and piloted in community settings in line with the principle of ‘Robotics for the People'.

Team members:

• Dr Sabine Hauert (Engineering Mathematics, Bristol)
• Dr Dan McQuillan (Computing, Goldsmiths)
• Dr Razanne Abu-Aisheh (Engineering Mathematics, Bristol)