About us

We are working to create a world-class Data Science Institute at Lancaster (DSI@Lancaster) that sets the global standard for a truly interdisciplinary approach to contemporary data-driven research challenges. DSI@Lancaster aims to have an internationally recognised and distinctive strength in being able to provide an end-to-end interdisciplinary research capability - from infrastructure and fundamentals through to globally relevant problem domains and the social, legal and ethical issues raised by the use of Data Science.

The Institute is initially focusing on the fundamentals of Data Science including security and privacy together with cross-cutting theme areas consisting of environment, resilience and sustainability;health and ageing, data and society and creating a world-leading institute with over 300 affiliated academics, researchers, and students.

Our data science, health data science and business analytics programmes have launched the careers of hundreds of data professionals over the last 10 years. Students from our programmes have progressed to data science roles at Amazon, PWC, Ernst & Young, Hawaiian Airlines, eBay, Zurich Insurance, the Co-operative Group, N Brown, the NHS and many others - please look at our Education pages for further details of the courses on offer.

Speculative Machines and Us: Histories and Futures of AI

The term ‘speculative machines’ references Alan Turing’s ‘universal machine’ (1936), yet it also indexes the speculative operations of emerging forms of generative AI. This one-day symposium will explore transnational genealogies of artificial intelligence and ‘the digital’ and consider how and why they matter to present and future AI imaginaries, research, and technologies – and their associated promises, threats, and potentialities. Event contributors are invited to trace backwards from the current focus on, and hype around, pre-trained transformer models and other machine learning technologies to re-engage past or alternative incarnations of AI and digital computing (i.e. cybernetics, post-war neural network research, logic-based and symbolic processing AI, early machine learning, “nouvelle AI” and robotics etc.) and their affective, cultural, socio-technical, political, economic, and ecological particularities, problematics, and, perhaps, ‘undetonated potential’ (Freeman, 2010). How were past visions of digital mediation linked to changing accounts of human sense perception and an ‘aesthetic infrastructure of sensorial training’ (Halpern, 2014: 15) – and with what contemporary resonances, impacts, or provocations?

Amid the increasing entanglement of data analytics, Big Tech, political authoritarianism, ecological extractivism, and neocolonial “common sense”, symposium participants may also wish to speculate on the biopolitical and geopolitical futures of generative AI – and their epistemological, ethical, and environmental implications. If our digital past(s) are not fixed or ‘lost’ but rather a ‘space for potential’ (Chun, 2021: 224), what alternative paths and possibilities for human-machine relations might such temporal experiments and explorations open up or activate? How might the afterlives of earlier forms of digital technology and mediation offer a rich archive from which to collaboratively intuit, design, refuse, or fabulate AI futures? Exploring these interdisciplinary themes and questions might include critical and creative engagement with media and cultural theory, science and technology studies, speculative design, computer science, informatics, human-computer interaction, critical data studies, digital humanities, media history, digital arts, digital archive studies, digital sociology and geography, and other relevant fields.

Speculative Machines and Us is funded by the British Academy, with support from the Centre for Science Studies, the Data Science Institute and ImaginationLancaster.