Professor Drew Hemment
Job title:
Professor in Data Arts and Society & Theme Lead in Humanities, Arts & Social Sciences at The Alan Turing Institute
Office:
Edinburgh Futures Institute
Biography
Drew Hemment is Professor of Data Arts and Society at the University of Edinburgh and Theme Lead for Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences at The Alan Turing Institute. Drew is Director of The New Real centre for AI, Arts and Futures research, and Director of Festival Futures at Edinburgh Futures Institute.
As Theme Lead at The Alan Turing Institute, Drew investigates how the arts and humanities can shape emerging AI, and increase understanding on the fundamental interactions and synergies between AI, humans and physical systems. Drew conducts research in the emerging field of Experiential AI, which addresses the task of providing end users with richer modes of model understanding and greater agency in co-creative experiments with AI. This area sits at the intersection of visual arts, critical design, human-computer interaction, explainable ai and data science, and proposes that creative research methods can help the AI field to develop in a societally responsible manner. Central to this is the development of transdisciplinary concepts, methods and tools to open up technology and data for exploration and discovery, and connect science and data to applications and impacts in the real world.
Drew is a Fellow of the Royal Society of the Arts, a Turing Fellow, and an Editorial Advisor at Leonardo. In 1995, Drew founded FutureEverything, named by The Guardian one of the top 10 ideas festivals in the world. In 2016, he founded the GROW Observatory, the world’s first continental scale citizens’ observatory. His work has been recognised by 14 international awards including Soil Award 2019 (Winner), STARTS Prize 2018 (Honorary Mention), Lever Prize 2010 (Winner), and Prix Ars Electronica 2008 (Honorary Mention).
Building Near Futures, Course Co-Organiser
Edinburgh Futures Institute, SCQF Level 11 (Postgraduate)
This course develops students' agency and critical competencies in envisioning, articulating, and questioning ideas about the future. By introducing futuring frameworks, methods and tools, it equips students to investigate future scenarios, challenges and controversies with and for society. It explores how futures methods - including creative and experiential methods - can generate insights that can be implemented in the present to effect real world change. In teams, students create fragments of near future worlds, and work together to display those fragments in an online, near future publication or gallery.
Research
Research
Hemment, D., Murray-Rust, D., Belle, V., Aylett, R., Vidmar, M., Broz, F. (2024). Experiential AI: Between Arts and Explainable AI. Leonardo. https://doi.org/10.1162/leon_a_02524
Hemment, D., Vidmar, M, Koppel, K., Earl, S. (2024). Open Prototyping: The Co-creation Toolkit. The New Real. https://doi.org/10.2218/newreal.9613
Bryan-Kinns, N., Ford, C., Zheng, S., Kennedy, H., Chamberlain, A., Lewis, M., Hemment, D., et al., (2024). Explainable AI for the Arts 2 (XAIxArts2). C&C '24: Proceedings of the 16th Conference on Creativity & Cognition https://doi.org/10.1145/3635636.3660763.
Hemment, D., Currie, M., Bennett, SJ., Elwes, J., Ridler, A., Sinders, C., Vidmar, M., Hill, R., Warner, H. (2023). AI in the Public Eye: Building Public AI Literacy through Critical AI Art. ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency (FAccT). Chicago. https://doi.org/10.1145/3593013.3594052.
Hemment, D., Simperl, E., Sandler, M., Kennedy, K., Benford, B., Manghani, S. (2024). A manifesto for Intelligent Experiences. The New Real Magazine. Vol 1, No 1. https://doi.org/10.2218/newreal.9248
Hemment, D. (2023). Generative AI Arts: A Synthetic Future Foretold. The New Real Magazine. Vol 1, No 1, Editorial. https://doi.org/10.2218/newreal.9246
Hemment, D., Vidmar, M., Panas, D., Murray-Rust, D., Belle, V., and Aylett, R. (2023). Agency and legibility for artists through Experiential AI. In the 1st International Workshop on Explainable AI for the Arts (XAIxArts). ACM Creativity and Cognition (C&C) 2023. Online, 3 pages. https://arxiv.org/abs/2306.02327
Hemment, D. (2020). Reordering the assemblages of the digital through art and open prototyping. Leonardo (Vol. 53, No.5). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. p.529-536. https://doi.org/10.1162/leon_a_01861
Hemment, D., Bletcher, J., & Coulson, S. (2020). Open Prototyping: A framework for Combining Art and Innovation in the IoT and Smart Cities. In Eds. Hjorth, L., de Souza e Silva, A., Lanson, K. The Routledge Companion to Mobile Media Art. London: Routledge. pp,.270-283. ISBN 9780367197162
Hemment, D., Aylett, R., Belle,. V., Murray-Rust, D., Luger, E., Hillston, J., Rovatsos, M., Broz, F. (2019). Experiential AI. AI Matters. 5: 1. ACM New York. https://sigai.acm.org/static/aimatters/5-1/AIMatters-5-1-10-Hemment.pdf
Current PhD students
Bilyana Palankasova
Valuing festivals as incubators of digital creativity – capturing the process of commissioning and presenting digital art