Fantastic Futures 2023 - Save the Date

We are so pleased to announce the dates and location of our Fantastic Futures 2023 Conference. Come join us at the Internet Archives Canada Headquarters in Vancouver, Canada from the 15th-17th November 2023. Initial details can be found on the official website hosted be Internet Archives: https://ff2023.archive.org/. 

Over the next coming weeks, we will be releasing more details about what to expect and a general agenda as well as opening our call for papers. In the meantime though, why not get the gears turning on potential topics for presentation by looking back at some of our previous conferences:

FF2018 - National Library of Norway

Our first ever Fantastic Futures hosted by the National Library of Norway saw discussions and talks on the role that AI could & should be playing in libraries, with such topics as:

• How AI misunderstands the world - Meredith Broussard

• Nancy, the AI librarian, experiences from the National Library of Norway - Svein Arne Brygfjeld

• Library inspired artificial intelligence - Catherine Nicole Coleman

As well as topics more generally on machine learning, cultural heritage, and digital humanities, such as:

• Cognitive semantics and information: a new frontier for knowledge economy - Ruggero Gramatica

• Computing the classics - Barbara McGillivray

• Machine learning and inspiration - Christian Boesgaard

FF2019 - Stanford Libraries

Year 2 of Fantastic Futures moved across the globe to Stanford University, where the keynote address got straight to the heart of the issue:

• Information professionals and intelligent machines: Can we save the librarians?

This was followed by discussions and lightning talks, all centred on the idea of the application of and intersectionality of cultural heritage and AI, including:

• AI and Data Privacy - Ashley Jester

• Democratizing AI - Rachel Thomas

• From the Corpus Project to the BnF Lab - Emmanuelle Bermès

Finally, the conference concluded with a conversation on Traditional Values and Fantastic Futures.

FF2021 -  Bibliothèque nationale de France

After a brief break in 2020, Fantastic Futures returned to Europe and was hosted at the BnF, featuring three days of workshops, presentations, round tables, discussions and poster shows! Topics ranged from general introductions to broad ideas, to specific demonstrations of specific software, to the legality and ethics of AI in GLAM. 

Presentations included:

• What can art do for artificial intelligence? - Marion Carré (keynote)

• Artificial intelligence and/or cosmolocal studies - Yves Citton (keynote)

• AI and Data Mining at the service of thematic access to library resources - Ronald Ganier, Julien Colin

• AI in relation to GLAMs: an overview of the findings of the EuropeanaTech taskforce on AI - Marloes Bontje, Mirjam Cuper

Posters covered topics such as:

• Dalgocol

• NewsEye

• GallicaSnoop

Virtual Event 2022

Finally, last year's event saw us hosting an online, multiday event, with discussions, workshops and presentations hosted by volunteers and organisations across the globe and in all timezones.

Our keynote speakers addressed:

• BigScience: A community effort to create a large open language model - Margaret Mitchell 

• Reproducibility Crisis in Machine Learning Based Science - Sayash Kapoor 

With discussions on:

• Applying AI in the smaller research library - Andrew Cox, Emmanuelle Bermès, Sam Thomas

• Teaching and Learning AI for GLAM - Claudia Engel, Mike Trinza, Daniel van Strien

And workshops covering:

• Introduction to Computer Vision - Giles Bergel

• A Proposed Framework for Operationalizing AI in LAMs - Abigail Potter, Meghan Ferriter

And there were so many more interesting talks and discussions over the years - for more information on any of the above conferences, follow the links to the hosts' pages. You can find more details, more topics, and even recordings, slides, and posters from our previous conferences.

We can't wait to see you in November, and look forward to all that will be shared and learned! Remember to keep an eye out for our official call for proposals coming in just a few weeks!