Living Labs
Our living labs marry cutting-edge technology with pioneering social solutions to help answer some of our greatest social and environmental challenges.
Pioneering practical solutions for real problems
Our work goes beyond publishing papers on what we could do. We’re co-creating cutting-edge solutions with communities and putting them into the hands of people who can effect change from the ground up.
In our living labs, we’ll be binding social innovation with data science and AI to address a range of issues around social justice, democracy, climate change, and health and ageing.
What we’ll be working on…
Forecasting for social innovating using large language technologies
We’re developing powerful tools enabling social innovators to anticipate how political, economic, and social factors could affect their work, and evaluate actions they want to take against shared learning.
By combining human, evidence-based forecasting techniques with advanced language technologies, we can extend access to predicting things like migration patterns, environmental impacts and legislative changes more precisely.
Scaling up the scope and impact of active ageing through AI
We’re working on an AI-powered citizen science tool that enables social entrepreneurs to connect and empower intergenerational neighbourhoods to meet their own diverse needs.
Specifically, we want to see the most effective active ageing initiatives expand to benefit the health and wellbeing of not only older people, but the whole community.
Improving social inclusion in the welfare sector through data science and AI
Drawing on United Nations reports on e-Government and social inclusion, we’ll be exploring how to blend socially innovative approaches with data science and AI to promote more inclusive practice in the welfare sector.
The aim is to produce guidance and evidence showing practitioners how to increase participation — for example, among vulnerable groups of people — in their projects and processes.
Co-creating trustworthy tools to stimulate political participation
We’re developing AI-driven tools to get people at the grassroots participating in politics — by making political information more accessible, transparent and trustworthy.
These democracy-strengthening tools will draw on data from parliamentary sessions, voting records, and legislative documents to answer users’ questions about members of parliament and their parties.
Enhancing crowd engagement in transformative data-sharing ecosystems
While data is routinely abused for corrupt causes, it can also be exploited ethically for the benefit of people and our planet. This positive exploitation is the practice at the heart of our project.
The idea is to demonstrate the development of decentralised data-sharing platforms driven by collective intelligence, which in turn will catalyse more collaborative decision-making and inclusive social change.
Developing nature-based solutions for climate change adaptation
By blending local and indigenous knowledge with the latest data science, we can address the rising risks of climate change much more expeditiously.
This is the belief behind our project, which is to co-create AI tools that super-charge nature-based solutions to flooding and overheating. Through public participation, we’ll form recommendations for tools of this kind to support more nature-based interventions in the long-term.
I think you need to build fast, fail fast and learn from that.
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Kacy Lovelace
Glasgow Caledonian University
Juliana Machado
Glasgow Caledonian University
Anna Pasko
Glasgow Caledonian University
Annette Botha
Ghent University
Help us turn possibilities into positive impact
Our four years of doctoral research, real-world development and multidisciplinary training is just the beginning.
If we’re to make human advances more helpful to humans at scale, then the world needs not just a few bright minds and able hands, but a whole movement of them.
Will you help us reboot the role of data science and AI to serve social innovation and help build a better future for all?
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