project

HUMAIN project secures Horizon Europe funding

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We’re happy to share that the project HUMAIN has been successfully funded under Horizon Europe. HUMAIN focuses on the ethical and human-centric adoption of Artificial Intelligence in mission-driven sectors that are vital to society: Culture, Education and Open Science. The project responds to the rapid uptake of AI—from generative tools in the creative industries to AI-supported teaching and scholarly publishing—and addresses the need for data-informed guidelines and regulatory frameworks that align AI innovation with public values and societal missions.

The User Centric Data Science group at VU will contribute to the project by analysing the use and impact of AI in the cultural heritage and creative sector, helping ensure that AI applications support inclusive, responsible, and human-centered practices

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HEDGE-IoT project kickoff

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The HorizonEurope project HEDGE-IoT started January 2024. The 3.5 year project will build on existing technology to develop a Holistic Approach towards Empowerment of the DiGitalization of the Energy Ecosystem through adoption of IoT solutions. For VU, this project allows us to continue with the research and development initiated in the InterConnect project on data interoperability and explainable machine learning for smart buildings.

Researchers from the User-Centric Data Science group will participate in the project mostly in the context of the Dutch pilot, which will run in Arnhems Buiten, the former testing location of KEMA in the east of the Netherlands. In the pilot, we will collaborate closely with the other Dutch partners: TNO and Arnhems Buiten. At this site, an innovative business park is being realized that has its own power grid architecture, allowing for exchange of data and energy, opening the possibility for various AI-driven services for end-users.

VU will research a) how such data can be made interoperable and enriched with external information and knowledge and b) how such data can be made accessible to services and end-users through data dashboards that include explainable AI.

The image above shows the Arnhems Buiten buildings and the energy grid (source: Arnhems Buiten)

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HAICu project funded

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It has pleased NWO to award the HAICu consortium through the National Research Agenda programme. In the HAICu project, AI researchers, Digital Humanities researchers, heritage professionals and engaged citizens work together on scientific breakthroughs to open, link and analyze large-scale multimodal digital heritage collections in context.

At VU, researchers from the User-Centric Data Science group will research how to create compelling narratives as a way to present multiple perspectives in multimodal data and how to provide transparency regarding the origin of data and the ways in which it was created. These questions will be addressed in collaboration with the Museum for World Cultures on how citizen-contributed descriptions can be combined with AI-generated labels into polyvocal narratives around objects related to the Dutch colonial past in Indonesia. 

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