HUMAN+ Towards expertise in enhanced human/technology experience

Project Information

Human Plus

Grant agreement ID: 945447

DOI

10.3030/945447

Project closed

EC signature date 30 April 2020

Start date 1 July 2020

End date 30 June 2025

Funded under

• EXCELLENT SCIENCE - Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions

Total cost

€ 2 648 160,00

EU contribution

€ 1 324 080,00

Coordinated by

THE PROVOST, FELLOWS, FOUNDATION SCHOLARS & THE OTHER MEMBERS OF BOARD, OF THE COLLEGE OF THE HOLY & UNDIVIDED TRINITY OF QUEEN ELIZABETH NEAR DUBLIN
Ireland

Periodic Reporting for period 2 - Human Plus (HUMAN+ Towards expertise in enhanced human/technology experience)

Reporting period: 2022-07-01 to 2025-06-30

Summary of the context and overall objectives of the project

The HUMAN+ fellowship programme sought to create meaningful dialogue across academic disciplines and enterprise sectors to generate unique insights on how to foreground the human in approaches to technology development for better long-term outcomes for the individual and wider society. Key to this is developing a cadre of researchers who can work across and within diverse disciplines. Integrating the perspectives of the Arts and Humanities, which are much newer to this field, is a particular focus.
The overall objectives were to:

1. Connect computer science researchers with arts and humanities researchers and enterprise to forge a human-centric approach to technological development.
2. Appoint 18 experienced researchers over five years, each for a duration of two years, to create a cadre of research leaders who understand technology as well as humanistic principles.
3. Develop stronger partnerships between the Computer Sciences, Arts & Humanities and industry, developing the discourse of human-centred technology, creating pathways for internships and secondments.

Work performed from the beginning of the project to the end of the period covered by the report and main results achieved so far

1. Community building initiatives connected researchers in the Arts and Humanities and Computer Sciences, and the latter with Enterprise, discussing the concept behind the programme and encouraging their involvement as supervisors and mentors. An Enterprise partner strategy was developed to attract diverse organisations interested in what it means to be human in an ever changing, technology driven, digital world.

2. Two calls for applications were delivered between 2021 and 2022, appointing 6 world-class researchers for two year fellowships. All had multidisciplinary teams of supervisors from the Arts and Humanities and the Computer Sciences and enterprise. Fellows worked on projects relating to (Anti-)Social AR Experiences: Mental Well-Being, Social Behaviour, Identity, and Prejudices in Augmented Reality Experiences with Digitally Created or Modified Human Bodies; Corporate Governance for Trustworthy and Human-Centric Artificial Intelligence; The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Data for Assessment of Self-directed Language Learning; Researching perception of embodied virtual humans to improve immersive virtual reality; and Morphological manipulations of the virtual body and physio-cognitive effects.

3. Fellows were provided with disciplinary rigour and training, networking opportunities to enhance their transferable skills, career development potential and opportunities to engage informally with an enterprise partner. The latter included representatives from Volograms, Accenture, Adaptemy, Akara and Seenel Imaging. The fellows attended 99 training activities between them, an average of 16.5 each. Fellows contributed to an average of 17 research presentations and conferences and co-organised an average of 3.5 research events.

5. A website and a series of public engagement and profile building initiatives were launched to promote the programme and the concepts underpinning it, as well as the fellows and their supervisor teams. For instance: On 11 June 2020 the programme was launched with an online panel discussion entitled ‘Human+Technology beyond Covid-19’ with 160 participants https://humanplus.ie/human-launch/. On 9 April 2021, the programme organised a public lecture by Professor Genevieve Bell, Director of the School of Cybernetics at the Australian National University on ‘The New Cybernetics? Making sense of the 21st century’, with 226 participants.

Progress beyond the state of the art and expected potential impact (including the socio-economic impact and the wider societal implications of the project so far)

1. Several researchers and supervisors associated with the project have since secured other sources of funding on human-centric related initiatives such as:
The VOICES project, an ERC funded project (101097003) led by Jane Ohlmeyer with computer sciences; Knowledge Technologies for Democracy (HEU project 101094302) led by Jennifer Edmond with Computer Sciences; From Cinematic Realism to Extended Reality: Reformulating Screen Studies at the Precipice of Hyper-reality’ project led by Jennifer O’Meara, (Irish Research Council); The HARNESS project (Harnessing AI and Data-Intensive Technologies) an HEU MCSA Doctoral Training network (101169409) led by David Lewis, Computer Science, involving TCD Law.

2. The 6 fellows appointed published 28 research peer reviewed outputs between them. Of the 28 publications, 18 were collaborative; 9 involved supervisors as co-authors. The collective works have received a total of 98 citations to date and Springer Nature reports that Nicola Palladino’s book The Content Governance Dilemma - Digital Constitutionalism, Social Media and the Search for a Global Standard has been accessed 12,000 times to date.

3.To develop stronger partnerships between the Computer Sciences, Arts & Humanities and industry, developing the discourse of human-centred technology, creating pathways for internships and secondments, the programme:
- Engaged with up to 100 organisations, with 6 partners secured for informal secondments and as enterprise mentors.
- Delivered the Human+ Tech Talks discussion series involving fellows and their supervisors and enterprise mentors, available on youtube and on soundcloud.
- Developed a Future Lab format.
- Delivered 1 coauthored white paper on ‘considerations of identity in the metaverse’ arising from the Future Lab with enterprise partners and supervisors (https://open-research-europe.ec.europa.eu/articles/5-162).
- 1 PhD student was funded on a project arising from a fellowship-supervisor collaboration with an industry partner.
- 1 fellow secured Irish research funding for a follow-on project related to their secondment, while their secondment partner also sought EU funding in parallel.
- 1 fellow secured Irish funding for a follow-on project with their supervisors.
- 1 fellow competitively secured access to medical devices to gather data for their project.
- The project partnered with DARIAH to host the DARIAH Innovation Forum in 2022, with the public keynote by Michela Magas, innovation advisor to the European Commission.
- The Human+ project was referenced in the Finnish Impact Foundation’s 2024 report on ‘the state of industry academia collaboration in the social sciences, humanities and arts Perspectives from the Nordics and beyond’.
- Piloted a research enterprise ‘secondment’ model to inform future fellowship programmes – noting that the term ‘secondment’ can be problematic for some organisations to facilitate on legal grounds.
- Generated insights from secondment partnerships pioneering culture change in socio cultural human-centric technology design in areas ranging from a focus on emotions at the human-chatbot-interface to working with a robotic start-up focusing on implementing their disinfectant robot; uncovering knowledge surrounding how people mediate the space around their bodies (i.e. their personal space) in the context of social virtual environments; brain imaging and immersive virtual reality; intelligent tutoring systems; corporate AI risk management frameworks and the day to day ethical/responsible AI practices; immersive media, cognition, and digital behaviour; identity in the metaverse.

3. Fellows were provided with training and opportunities to present and communicate their research to general audiences, including via a series of blogs and web profiles: https://humanplus.ie/category/blog/. On average each fellow delivered 9.7 communication and public engagement activities.

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Human+ fellows