SPRITE+ Expert Fellows Meeting 2025
- spriteplus
- Jun 13
- 2 min read
Updated: 3 days ago
A key framing of discourse about AI is human-AI relationships. As an explicitly sociotechnical network, SPRITE+ aims to have a strong collective position on this. The focus of the 2025 Expert Fellows meeting was to develop that collective position.
DAY 1:
We began the day by welcoming Dame Wendy Hall for a fireside talk on AI futures with SPRITE+ Director Mark Elliot. As an appointed high level advisory board member on AI to the United Nations and a Regius professor of Computer Science, Wendy is one of the key figures in UK AI research, and it was fantastic to hear her thoughts on the future of AI.
This was followed with an insightful talk by SPRITE+ Expert Fellow and BT Group Research Manager Zeba Khanam, PhD: 'Securing the Future: Industrial Research Insights on Leveraging AI for Cybersecurity'. Zeba also presented some questions on cybersecurity and AI for discussion amongst our Expert Fellows.
Next, we welcomed long-standing SPRITE+ Expert Fellow, and internationally recognised expert on AI and Ethics Dr Marie Oldfield CSci, CStat, FIScT, SFHEA, APAI to give a talk on this topic. Marie discussed themes including profit vs human safety, human-centred AI and standards on AI, as well as presenting her steps for best practise:
Our final talk of the day was from Dr Andreas Haggman, a SPRITE+ Expert Fellow and advisory board member, as well as Privacy Security and Academic Partnerships Principal at Ofcom. Andreas gave a talk on AI Regulation, presenting his personal takeaways from the Online Safety Act.
Day 2:
Our second day began with a Social Design Jam introduced by Sownak Roy, Senior Engineering Manager at Cheqd. The group discussions focused on how AI agents for diverse applications and contexts could/should be designed in order to develop, build, maintain and end healthy and trustworthy relationships with human users.
Our closing keynote talk was from Kanta Dihal, a SPRITE+ Expert Fellow and Lecturer in Science Communication at Imperial College London. This was a captivating talk exploring the human fascination with the notion of autonomous intelligent machines, from early civilisations to the present day.
Dr Dihal highlighted the similarities and differences in the stories humans have constructed about intelligent machines across ages and cultures, showing that there are many and varied ways to ‘imagine a future’ with AI.
At the end of the event there was a call for working/writing group participants that had a strong response. The writing group will establish/produce and document the SPRITE+ collective position on AI.
