Research events at the Library

Tuesday 25 April 2023
10am to 5pm

Join us in person or online to consider what the library and cultural sector can do to prepare for the future, and to hear from library leaders, academic researchers and creative industry professionals on how they are using AI in their work to open up collections, develop new services and engage new audiences.

This event will take place on-site in the National Library of Scotland Boardroom, George IV Bridge, Edinburgh and will be live-streamed for online viewing.

Hosted by the National Library of Scotland, RLUK and SCURL.

Programme

9:30am to 10am 
Registration, tea and coffee

10am to 10:15am 
Welcome address
Professor Sir Drummond Bone, Chair of the Board, National Library of Scotland and Amina Shah, National Librarian and Chief Executive, National Library of Scotland 

10:15am to 11am 
Keynote 
Adrian Smith, Institute Director and Chief Executive, Turing Institute 

11am to 11:20am
Break 

11:20am to 12pm 
Talk
Masud Khokhar, University Librarian and Keeper of the Brotherton Collection, University of Leeds 

12pm to 12:45pm
Talk
Chris van der Kuyl, Co-Founder and Chairman, 4J Studios 

12:45pm to 2:15pm
Lunch 

2:15 to 2:35pm 
Collaboration, Transparency, and Technology: AI as a community challenge for Libraries  
Dr Paul Gooding, Senior Lecturer in Information Studies, School of Humanities, University of Glasgow 

2:35pm to 3pm
Art, Cultural Heritage and AI 
Marion Carré 

3pm to 3:15pm
Break 

3:15pm to 4pm
Talk
Vincent Liu, Software Engineer, Google Books team 

4pm to 5pm 
Lightning Talks 
Panel Chair: Kirsty Lingstadt, Director of Library, Archives and Learning Services, University of York 
Panel: Joe Nockels; Lucy Dalgleish; Katie McDonough, Senior Research Associate, Turing Institute; Elle Smith 

Speaker biographies

Adrian Smith

Adrian Smith joined The Alan Turing Institute as Institute Director and Chief Executive in September 2018. In November 2020, he became President of the Royal Society, in addition to his leadership of the Turing. He is also a member of the government's AI Council, which helps boost AI growth in the UK and promote its adoption and ethical use in businesses and organisations across the country.  

Professor Smith’s previous role was Vice-Chancellor of the University of London where he was in post from 2012. He was Director General, Knowledge and Innovation in BIS (now BEIS) between 2008-2012. He has worked with the UK Higher Education Funding and Research Councils and was Deputy Chair of the UK Statistics Authority from 2012 to 2019. In 2014, he was appointed Chair of the Board of the Diamond Synchrotron at Harwell and in 2018, a board member of the UK Atomic Energy Authority. 

Professor Smith is a past President of the Royal Statistical Society and was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 2001 in recognition of his contribution to statistics.    

From 2003 to 2004, Professor Smith undertook an inquiry into Post-14 Mathematics Education for the UK Secretary of State for Education and Skills and in 2017, on behalf of Her Majesty’s Treasury and the Department for Education, published a 16-18 Maths Review. 

In 2006 he completed a report for the UK Home Secretary on the issue of public trust in Crime Statistics. He received a knighthood in the 2011 New Year Honours list. 

Masud Khokhar

Masud is the University Librarian and Keeper of the Brotherton Collection at the University of Leeds. A computer scientist by education, and with libraries in his DNA, Masud is passionate about digital leadership and innovation in the changing library and archive environments. His core interests include strategic development, digital transformation, open research, and inclusive leadership. Masud is also the Vice-Chair of Research Libraries UK (RLUK) and a firm supporter of diversity embedded in our thinking and practice within libraries and collections. 

Chris van der Kuyl

Chris van der Kuyl is an entrepreneur whose expertise combines the start-up, development and market listed business arena in the technology, media and entertainment sectors. 

Founder, owner and Chairman of 4J Studios, which is one of the UK's most successful videogame developers and responsible for the multi-million selling and multi-award winning Minecraft Console editions. Minecraft is a global phenomenon and is currently on track to become the most successful videogame of all time. 

A visiting professor of digital entertainment at University of Abertay Dundee, Chris has been awarded an honorary Doctor of Laws degree from the University of Dundee, an honorary Doctor of Business degree from Edinburgh Napier University and Doctor honoris causa from the University of Edinburgh. 

Elected as one of the youngest Fellows of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, Chris has been convener of the RSE Young People’s Committee and also sits on the boards of TV Squared, brightsolid Online Technology, Scottish Institute for Enterprise, Scottish EDGE Advisory, UK Digital Catapult, Dundee Science Centre, Dundee Museums Trust, High School of Dundee and the Royal Scottish National Orchestra. 

Chris is also the founding Chairman of Entrepreneurial Scotland (ES), the organisation recently formed by the coming together of The Entrepreneurial Exchange and The Saltire Foundation. ES represents all Scotland's Entrepreneurial talent and exists to inspire, connect and develop entrepreneurial behaviour in all Scotland's people. 

Neil Fitzgerald

Neil Fitzgerald is the Head of Digital Research at the British Library. He leads the Digital Research Team that works across the organisation to ensure the Library's collections, systems, policies, and processes meet the emerging needs of those who want to deeply integrate digital content, data, and methods, into their work. He is a digital cultural heritage professional with extensive practical and management experience across the international cultural heritage and higher education sectors.

A member of a number of advisory boards in the fields of digital humanities and digital cultural heritage, Neil has also been accountable for the successful delivery of a number of major digital initiatives in the UK and internationally. Before joining the Library, he worked in the commercial sector. 

Dr Paul Gooding

Dr Paul Gooding is a Senior Lecturer in Information Studies at the University of Glasgow. His research focuses on the impact of digital library collections on institutions and users. Gooding is currently Co-Investigator for the AHRC-funded network, AEOLIAN: Artificial Intelligence for Cultural Organisations, which investigates the role of AI in making digital records more accessible to users.

Marion Carré

Marion Carré is the CEO of Ask Mona, a start-up developing AI solutions to facilitate the daily life of cultural professionals and improve the experience of their audiences. She teaches a course on art and artificial intelligence at Sorbonne University, Sciences Po Paris, French National Conservatory of Arts and Crafts and published a book on this subject.  

She also developed an artistic practice where her main modus operandi is to provoke new comparisons, to create contrasts, anachronisms in order to help take a step back. Her work is equally rooted in the past and in the future, between which he builds bridges to seek to understand the present. In this exploration, new technologies occupy an important place, alternately as medium or subject of study. Archives also have this ambivalent status of subject and material in her work. 

Marion Carré was selected as one of the Forbes 30 under 30 Europe 2023 list and the French 100 women of Culture 2022 award. 

Vincent Liu

Vincent Liu is a software engineer at Google working on the Google Books project. Vincent was responsible for improving the quality and performance of the book scanning process and post-processing pipelines.

Previously, Vincent led the development of the Pixel phone's camera 3A hardware engine. Before joining Google, Vincent worked as a Senior Algorithm Engineer at Himax Imaging, where he focused on developing image processing algorithms for automotive HDR applications.

Vincent holds an MS in Computer Science from the Georgia Institute of Technology, where he focused on computer vision and computational photography, and a BS in Materials Science and Engineering from Zhejiang University. 

Kirsty Lingstadt

As Director of Library, Archives and Learning Services at the University of York, Kirsty leads and manages on open access, support for learning technology, academic skills including information literacy for students and digital skills for the full University community. 

Kirsty holds an MA in Scottish History from University of Edinburgh and an MA in Museum Studies from University of Leicester. Her interest in collections and making collections accessible to different audiences has led her to her current position: combining her enthusiasm for new technologies with a desire to share collections with others. 

She has worked for a number of cultural heritage institutions ranging from museums to archives and historic environment collections where she has explored the use of technology to make content accessible but also ensure that collections and in particular born-digital collections are accessible for future generations. 

Joe Nockels

Joe Nockels is a PhD researcher at the University of Edinburgh and Glasgow, funded by the Scottish Graduate School for Arts & Humanities (SGSAH). His work primarily considers handwritten text recognition (HTR) and best practices in its adoption within cultural heritage settings, both from an institutional and user perspective. 

Dr Katherine McDonough

Katie is a historian of 18th-century France working at the intersection of political culture and the history of science and technology. She completed her PhD in History at Stanford in 2013. She has taught at Bates College and was a postdoctoral researcher in digital humanities at Western Sydney University in Australia. Before joining the Turing Institute, Katie was the Academic Technology Specialist in the Department of History/Center for Interdisciplinary Digital Research at Stanford University. 

Her first book manuscript, 'Public Works Laboratory: Building a Province in Eighteenth-Century France' is a spatial history of the corvée, the forced labor regime used from the 1730s until the Revolution on highway construction sites. 

At the Turing, Katie works on the Living with Machines project. Her research will focus on:

• Developing methods for geographic information retrieval from text and visual sources such as census records and Ordnance Survey maps and;
• Examining how the expansion of transportation infrastructure changed 19th century communities. 

Elle Smith

Elle is a first year PhD student at the University of Leeds. Her project is titled 'Urban Forests through Space and Time' and is looking at how urban forest cover has evolved over time in Leeds and Edinburgh. Elle will use a combination of historic Ordnance Survey maps, machine learning and remote sensing data with the aim of understanding the benefits provided by these urban forests through time.

Prior to her PhD, Elle worked as a software developer at the Centre for Environmental Data Analysis (CEDA) and completed an MRes in Climate and Atmospheric Science at the University of Leeds.

Iain Allan

Iain Allan went to school and university in Edinburgh. He then trained as an actuary and spent most of his career in banking, including 15 years as Group Director, Strategy, at RBS (now known as NatWest). He is an Honorary Visiting Professor in the Faculty of Actuarial Science and Insurance at Bayes Business School, City, University of London.