ICAI is City St George’s new space to research and explore strategic impacts at the intersection of creativity, creative work and AI technologies.
It is wilfully interdisciplinary, and involves academics and students from all City St George’s schools.
It is also outward facing, working closely with funding bodies, businesses and other types of organisations to understand the new challenges posed by AI technologies, and offer novel solutions to improve creative work.
The Institute’s remit is broad. Creative work can happen across sectors, from business management and healthcare to journalism and the arts. This work often involves everyday creative thinking.
Pioneering interdisciplinary research
Creativity research is fundamentally interdisciplinary. To understand how AI technologies impact creative work, researchers from different backgrounds need to collaborate on large-scale ambitious projects. Our Institute exists to build these collaborations. New cross-disciplinary projects will investigate and shape how everyday creative activities are changing, from the cognitive, social, economic, political, technological and other perspectives.
With a focus on creativity and innovation, the Institute also serves as a place to discuss fundamental challenges facing creative work involving technologies, and to explore research-led solutions to these challenges.
A space to collaborate
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:
- To understand creative work in the presence of AI technologies and the challenges faced by professional
- To research and develop new forms of co-creative AI technologies to augment creative work across profession
- 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.
- Suzanne Franks will lead on creative industries research. She is Professor of Journalism in the School of Communication and Creativity.
- Stephanie Wilson will lead on interaction design research. She is Professor of Human-Computer Interaction in the School of Science and Technology.
Current projects and activities
Business Sparks: The Institute’s CebAI project, funded by Research England, has launched Business Sparks, a new interactive digital tool to support businesses think more creatively about their business models and strategies. Learn more about and access Business Sparks.
An interdisciplinary research sandpit: Forty academics from across St George’s came together in July to participate in a sandpit to explore creativity and AI research opportunities. The sandpit was a great success. As well as mapping and relating different research activities across the institution, academics worked in groups to generate ideas to tackle grand challenges and generate new research proposals.
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.
'Launching the Institute for Creativity and AI: Exploring the Future of Work' will be held on 9 October at 17:30 at Bunhill Row. Join us for the launch event of the Institute.
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:
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: