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Announcing winners of the EFI Student Research Awards

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We are very pleased to announce the awardees of the third round of Edinburgh Futures Institute’s Student Research Projects. Our student projects are reflective of the Futures Institute’s participatory and future facing ethos – embracing criticality and with an aim to create demonstrable ethical, social, cultural, economic and environmental impacts. Support for student research Our ... Read more

We are very pleased to announce the awardees of the third round of Edinburgh Futures Institute’s Student Research Projects. Our student projects are reflective of the Futures Institute’s participatory and future facing ethos – embracing criticality and with an aim to create demonstrable ethical, social, cultural, economic and environmental impacts.

Support for student research

Our ambition is to build a holistic research environment that supports, encourages, rewards, and promotes research and its impacts. We are creating a culture of success, ambition, and engagement, by supporting student research that makes meaningful and measurable change.

This year, our panel identified four innovative and ambitious projects that will develop in the next few months. Each of the successful projects embrace the principle of co-design with external partners and tackle challenges such as improving identity verification processes, challenging data-driven systems that could bring ethical and ecological issues, and supporting AI literacy.

Edinburgh Futures Institute’s funding call is for awards of up to £1000 – the successful student projects receive funding and advice on how to connect to other people and groups working on related topics across the University, as well as support in promoting the outputs and outcomes of their activities.

The selected projects will contribute to knowledge and capacity building in Data Driven Innovation across the City of Edinburgh and beyond. They also relate to our key research programmes (Ethics of Data and Artificial Intelligence, Critical Infrastructure, CreativeTech, FinTech and financial services, Data Civics and the future of public services).

EFI Director of Research, Professor Melissa Terras said:

We are incredibly proud of these students for being so keen to develop their original and innovative ideas, working with external partners to benefit not only academic research but also wider society. Congratulations to all our awardees for their very well deserved success. We look forward to working with them and seeing how these projects progress!

The projects

  • Jame Besse, School of Social and Political Sciences, Science, Technology and Innovation Studies, Setting Up the Edinburgh Digital Due Process Clinic
  • Youngsil Lee, Edinburgh College of Art, Design Informatics, Data materiality towards the ecological future: Co-design for a food system
  • Auste Simkute and Aditi Surana, Edinburgh College of Art, School of Design, Can explainability narrow the gap between ‘old’ and ‘new’ expertise to support AI literacy, expertise development, and agency of experts?
  • Kai Jun Eer, School of Informatics, Privacy-preserving Digital ID to Improve Identity Verification Process.
  • Idil Galip, School of Social and Political Sciences, Knowledge Exchange and Creation within a Burgeoning Academic Field: The Meme Studies Index
  • Benedetta Catanzariti, School of Social and Political Sciences, AI Ethics and Society Edinburgh: Building Community in the Pandemic

There will be another call and support for more projects in January 2022. Please follow Edinburgh Futures Institute’s social media channels and be sure to register for our newsletter to keep up to date.

Find out more about previously funded student awards projects:

2020/2021: EFI announces student research award winners – Edinburgh Futures Institute

2019/2020: EFI Student Research Projects Announced – Edinburgh Futures Institute

 

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