The Faculty of Science and the Faculty of Humanities join forces in the Centre for Digital Humanities (CDH) at Utrecht University. Investigating the implications of AI and datafication for our digital society requires concerted interdisciplinary and even transdisciplinary efforts. The CDH aims to effectively respond to this urgent need, and to connect better with various societal partners to different research disciplines at the cross-sections of Humanities and Sciences. 

The coming years the Faculty of Science is committed to expand socially engaged research and teaching for professionals. Their activities with government organisations, companies and NGO’s have a focus on online public debates, and responsible AI and data practices. With their entrepreneurial research we seek to not only investigate but also actively participate in building the digital society. 

To further strengthen the collaboration between Sciences and Humanities the Utrecht Data School (UDS) has become part of the CDH. This coincides with the new position of Mirko Tobias Schäfer at the department of Computing and Information Sciences, as programme manager for the interdisciplinary Master programme Applied Data Science and UDS project lead in the Faculty of Sciences. Karin van Es is the UDS project lead within the Faculty of Humanities.

The closer collaboration between the faculties is already unfolding: Recently two teams consisting of members from both faculties have been won grants of the first AI Labs call. One project, Appraisal interview develops in cooperation with regulations authorities NVWA and Agentschap Telecom an audit for algorithmic systems. The project inquires how the development context and the use context determine outcomes which might be in violation of rules, or negatively affecting societally shared values.

The other project explores value-driven recommendations in cooperation with DPG Media. Revisiting indicators currently used for personalization of news media, the project aims to develop additional indicators that allow to make a wider range of values (e.g. media pluralism, diversity, neutrality, etc.) explicit and optimize the personalisation accordingly.

This article was written by the Faculty of Science and was originally published here.