The Institute for Creativity and AI

Our Institute is committed to fostering collaboration and exploration among researchers, academics and practitioners. It serves as a space where ideas can be exchanged, partnerships formed, funding sought, and positive change delivered. Here’s how:

Our mission

The Institute has three strategic aims:

1. To understand creative work in the presence of AI technologies and the challenges faced by professionals
2. To research and develop new forms of co-creative AI technologies to augment creative work across professions
3. To investigate the wider impacts of co-creative AI technologies on the professions

Why City St George’s?

City St George’s has a long and rich tradition of cross-disciplinary creativity research. Its academics have been coming together regularly for the last 25 years to collaborate and research creative work across the professions. Its interdisciplinary Centre for Creativity in Professional Practice was founded in 2008.

City St George’s also has a long tradition in applied AI research. It hosted the foundational meeting of the AISB, the world’s first learned AI society in the 1960s. Its research contributed to the evolving field of computational creativity. It leads the arts and digital creativity forum of The Culture Capital Exchange, Innovate UK’s Digital Catapult-Machine Intelligence Garage, and new ESPRC Centre for Doctoral Training in Data Visualisation.

Our new Institute brings these threads together at a critical time, when technologies such as generative AI are transforming creative work.

The management team

The Institute is led by academics from across City St George’s who bring different discipline expertise and skills:

• Eduardo Alonso will lead AI technologies research. He is Professor of Artificial Intelligence in the School of Science and Technology.
• Enrico Bonadio will lead on legal research. He is a Reader in the City Law School.
• Stephanie Wilson will lead on interaction design research. She is Professor of Human-Computer Interaction in the School of Science and Technology.

Indicative papers

Each member of the management team has identified one paper summarising one their interests related to the Institute.

• Digital creativity support for original journalism
• Creative User-Centered Visualization Design for Energy Analysts and Modelers
• Artificial Intelligence as Producer and Consumer of Copyright Works: Evaluating the Consequences of Algorithmic Creativity
• Comic Spin: A Comic Creation Tool Enabling Self-expression for People with Aphasia
• Syllable Neural Language Models for English Poem Generation
• When Should Incumbent Consumer Goods Producers Ally with Digital Platforms?

Current projects and activities

Business Sparks and INSIGHTS: The Institute’s CebAI project, funded by Research England, has launched Business Sparks and INSIGHTS, two new interactive digital tools to support businesses think more creatively about their business models and strategies. Learn more about and access Business Sparks.

Interdisciplinary research sandpits: Academics from across St George’s have come together to explore new interdisciplinary research ideas on themes ranging from creative AI in healthcare to the changing nature of professionalism in the presence of AI. As well as mapping and relating different research activities, academics worked in groups to generate ideas to tackle grand challenges and generate new research proposals. More sandpits are scheduled for early 2025.

A collaboration with Research England: Institute staff are working with Research England, one of the UK’s Research Councils, to explore how AI can augment more creative policy formulation from the information and data available to it. Results from the pilot study will be available in the autumn.

The Institute held a very successful launch event on the 9th October 2024. The event, entitled ‘Exploring the Future of Work’ included a welcome address from City St George’s President Professor Sir Anthony Finkelstein, a keynote delivered by Dr Richard Banks from Microsoft Research in Cambridge, and a panel exploring the impact of AI on creative work in business, the legal profession and the creative industries. We will be posting highlights from the launch event soon.

Partner research centres at City St George’s

Institute members are drawn from all of City St George’s schools. ICAI collaborates closely with at least the following research centres and groups:

• The AI Lab in the Department of Journalism
• City’s Artificial Intelligence Research Centre
• The Centre for Human-Computer Interaction Design
• The Interdisciplinary Centre for Creativity in Professional Practice
• SPARC (Sound Practice and Research @ City)
• The Centre for Online-Safety, Safeguarding, Privacy and Identity

International research partners

The Institute also has formal agreements for research collaborations with:

• The Centre for Digital Creativity at Aarhus University, in Denmark
• The Institute for Technology and Innovation Management at RWTH-Aachen, in Germany
• The SKEMA Center for Artificial Intelligence at the SKEMA Business School, in France
• The BLISS Digital Impact Lab, Ca’ Foscari, University of Venice, Italy
• The University of Technology Sydney, in Australia.

Contact us

For any questions regarding the Institute, please email Prof Neil Maiden.

Tell us how you would like to get involved with the Institute for Creativity and AI, or how we can help you, with our online form: