We are reaching a critical inflection point in which we have to define the role that AI technologies are going to play in social life, including how we want these technologies to mediate our relationship with over a century of film and television. This is too important to be left to a handful of large companies, so I am delighted that ISSA has been awarded through the BFI Innovation Challenge Fund to enable deep collaboration between King's and moving image archives across the UK. This is an exciting project that builds towards critical, responsible and public AI systems.
Dr Daniel Chávez Heras, ISSA Principal Investigator and Lecturer in Digital Culture and Creative Computing
06 February 2025
BFI National Lottery Fund supports King's project exploring AI for screen archives
BFI National Lottery Innovation Challenge Fund awards £192,500 to a King’s project to explore how AI technologies could be used to unlock potential with screen archives.
The BFI National Lottery Innovation Challenge Fund has awarded £192,500 to King’s to support the development of Intelligent Systems for Screen Archives (ISSA), a project that will explore the use of AI technologies for UK moving image archives and their collections.
Intelligent Systems for Screen Archives is a collaboration between the Department of Digital Humanities and King’s Digital Lab. The project aims to advance understanding of the opportunities in working with AI and to develop the tools and skills to support audiovisual collections in documenting, developing, and sharing moving image heritage. ISSA is led by Dr Daniel Chavez Heras, Lecturer in Digital Culture and Creative Computing at King’s, as part of his Digital Futures Institute 2024-2025 Fellowship.
The project brings together five film and television archive partners across the four UK nations: National Library of Scotland, National Library of Wales, Northern Ireland Screen, North West Film Archive, and Yorkshire Film Archive to develop the knowledge, tools, and skills required to rethink large audiovisual collections from a computational perspective.
ISSA is scheduled to complete in 2027 and involves the development of a technical prototype to enable AI experimentation with moving image collections. The prototype will be tested during workshops delivered with the partner organisations. The outcomes will be shared via a publicly accessible code repository and knowledge base. ISSA will conclude with the publication of a report on the common requirements and emerging sector gaps to inform strategic decisions about working with AI in moving image archives.
AI technologies have the potential to unlock enormous potential for screen archives of all scales, however, in this fast-moving space we need a much more comprehensive understanding of the opportunities and the challenges facing audiovisual collections. This project led by King’s College London will provide new tools, skills and insights to establish an R&D framework that could benefit the wider sector in integrating AI technologies in the institutional fabric of moving image archives while ensuring that we prioritise considerations such as copyright and ethical perspectives.
Rishi Coupland, BFI Director of Research and Industry Innovation
The BFI National Lottery Innovation Challenge Fund, as part of the BFI’s National Lottery Funding Plan, 2023-2026, seeks to support new solutions to the UK screen sector’s most critical challenges. Between 2024 and 2026, up to £1.8 million will be distributed across up to six challenges, to help not-for-profit organisations to innovate, developing new approaches to persistent problems, whilst also gaining insights that benefit the whole screen sector.
The Innovation Challenge Fund’s first call focused on the video games industry, followed by the AI for screen archives. The third challenge call which closed last week is addressing new solutions to accelerate the research and innovation around equity, diversity and inclusion (EDI) data monitoring, and support the development of the best possible system to support the sector.
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Lecturer in Digital Culture and Creative Computing