Mission Statement
I am passionate about enhancing awareness and improving critical engagement with ethics and AI in the creative industries – and excited to be working with colleagues across Europe on this.
Biography
Nicola Osborne (they/them) has been Manager of the Institute for Design Informatics at University of Edinburgh (UoE) since 2022. They are Director of Partnerships and Equality, Diversity and Inclusion (EDI) for the Designing Responsible Natural Language Processing Centre for Doctoral Training; EDI lead for CoSTAR Realtime Lab and Ethics Mentor for CoSTAR IDEATE; and Creative Industries Lead for BRAID (Bridging Responsible AI Divides). Nicola works on the EU-funded ekip project (including on the ekip ethics group and AI policy theme); they also contribute to the EIT Culture & Creativity though Una Europa.
Nicola managed the Creative Informatics (CI) creative industries cluster (2018-2024), including leadership of the Scottish AI Demonstrator project. CI nurtured data driven innovation in the creative and cultural sector in the Edinburgh region leading to 45 startups, 212 new products, services and experiences; 445 new jobs; £7.62m in further funding and estimated £78.5m GVA. Nicola directly supported creative SMEs across the cluster on their ethics approach, using the CI Ethics Statement which Nicola co-authored. Nicola’s own research currently focuses on applied ethics in the context of creative industries SMEs; and potential opportunities and challenges around the use of AI in the creative industries, including ethics and data integrity implications.
Questionnaire
Where do you want to foster change and why?
Best practices are only meaningful when manifested in real products/processes/organisations. That’s hugely challenging but presents exciting challenges and provocations for future/s we want to create.
What or who influenced you during your professional career?
I’ve been privileged to work with a huge diversity of projects and organisations and I think it continually learning from diverse people, contexts, and ideas that has most inspired and influenced me.
We all have those significant moments or situations (success or failure); which one was yours, and what did you learn from it?
For me one of the most significant shifts was beginning to work directly with many creative SMEs (on CI) to scaffold funding applications and product development and building trust relationships enabling direct and honest feedback. The learnings were invaluable for shaping our work but also in improving my own practices around providing meaningful and relevant support, advice and mentoring.