Periodic Reporting for period 1 - Human Plus (HUMAN+ Towards expertise in enhanced human/technology experience)
Reporting period: 2020-07-01 to 2022-06-30
The HUMAN+ fellowship programme seeks to create meaningful dialogue across academic disciplines and enterprise sectors to generate unique insights on how to place the human at the centre of approaches to technology development to ensure better long-term outcomes for the individual and wider society. Key to this is developing a cadre of researchers that 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. To facilitate this pioneering approach fellows are allocated supervisors from both the Computer Sciences and the Arts and Humanities, so academic staff are also working together in new ways. To top it off, there is a major focus on intersectoral engagement. Enterprise partnerships immerse fellows and supervisors with the real-world challenges of a broad range of organisations working in their areas of interest while providing organisations with an opportunity to exchange ideas and networks with world class researchers.
The overall objectives are 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-centre technology, creating pathways for internships and secondments.
The overall objectives are 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-centre technology, creating pathways for internships and secondments.
1. Community building initiatives to connect researchers in the Arts and Humanities and Computer Sciences and to connect the latter with enterprise, discuss the concept behind the programme and encourage their involvement as supervisors and mentors.
2. Two calls for applications have been organised ((call 1 from 30 October 2020 – 26 March 2021 and call 2 from 17 September 2021 to 25 August 2022) to appoint an international cohort of world-class researchers. Three fellows commenced their fellowships in October 2021 and a fourth in January 2022. All have multidisciplinary teams of supervisors from the Arts and Humanities and the Computer Sciences and enterprise. Call 2 was still open with a number of applications in process at the time of the report.
3. Providing fellows with the disciplinary rigour and training, secondment and networking opportunities that will enhance their transferable skills, career development potential and ability to work in non-academic sectors. Enterprise secondments have been progressed in line with the fellows' career development plans and the Future Lab format scoped out with a series of labs planned for the autumn. Fellows have attended an average of 16 professional training activities in the past year.
4. A serious of public engagement and profile building initiatives have been 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’ https://humanplus.ie/human-launch/; Enterprise Engagement Event (November 2020) - To continue to raise awareness of the programme amongst academics and the enterprise community, an enterprise event was held on 24 November 2020 (online) which had 36 participants from 19 different enterprises. Several industry representatives spoke on the importance of the programme for tackling real-world technological challenges. 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’; A series of blogs and web profiles of the fellows was launched in August 2022 https://humanplus.ie/category/blog/; and The Human+ Tech Talk series will run from Sep - Nov 2022 https://humanplus.ie/join-us-at-the-new-human-tech-talks-series.
2. Two calls for applications have been organised ((call 1 from 30 October 2020 – 26 March 2021 and call 2 from 17 September 2021 to 25 August 2022) to appoint an international cohort of world-class researchers. Three fellows commenced their fellowships in October 2021 and a fourth in January 2022. All have multidisciplinary teams of supervisors from the Arts and Humanities and the Computer Sciences and enterprise. Call 2 was still open with a number of applications in process at the time of the report.
3. Providing fellows with the disciplinary rigour and training, secondment and networking opportunities that will enhance their transferable skills, career development potential and ability to work in non-academic sectors. Enterprise secondments have been progressed in line with the fellows' career development plans and the Future Lab format scoped out with a series of labs planned for the autumn. Fellows have attended an average of 16 professional training activities in the past year.
4. A serious of public engagement and profile building initiatives have been 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’ https://humanplus.ie/human-launch/; Enterprise Engagement Event (November 2020) - To continue to raise awareness of the programme amongst academics and the enterprise community, an enterprise event was held on 24 November 2020 (online) which had 36 participants from 19 different enterprises. Several industry representatives spoke on the importance of the programme for tackling real-world technological challenges. 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’; A series of blogs and web profiles of the fellows was launched in August 2022 https://humanplus.ie/category/blog/; and The Human+ Tech Talk series will run from Sep - Nov 2022 https://humanplus.ie/join-us-at-the-new-human-tech-talks-series.
1. A cohort of academics across all career stages with experience working across their disciplines and sectors on human-centred approaches to technology.
2. Fellows outputs will capture the principal exploitable results of their research. Publications will be single-author and co-authored with their academic supervisors and enterprise mentors. 2 articles have been published, with 11 additional articles and book chapters in process for publication in 2023 by the first four fellows alone.
3. The delivery of a research enterprise secondment model to inform future fellowship programmes especially for the AH. Insights from secondment partnerships pioneer culture change in socio cultural human-centric technology design. The programme will generate more case studies of inter and transdisciplinary research in practice.
2. Fellows outputs will capture the principal exploitable results of their research. Publications will be single-author and co-authored with their academic supervisors and enterprise mentors. 2 articles have been published, with 11 additional articles and book chapters in process for publication in 2023 by the first four fellows alone.
3. The delivery of a research enterprise secondment model to inform future fellowship programmes especially for the AH. Insights from secondment partnerships pioneer culture change in socio cultural human-centric technology design. The programme will generate more case studies of inter and transdisciplinary research in practice.