On September 19th, SHAPE held an all-day seminar for all employees, as many new Postdocs and AIAS-SHAPE fellows have joined the centre recently. While the program of the seminar had an academic focus, the day was just as much meant as a way for both old and new SHAPE-people to get to know one another.

The day was filled with interesting discussions and conversations, and also featured a workshop in which participants discussed the three themes of Democracy, Citizenship and Digitalisation, which are at the core of SHAPE, to show different perspectives of these themes.

Furthermore, the new AIAS-SHAPE fellows shared presentations of their respective projects. These are:

Jan Løhmann Stephensen’s project titled ‘Chat Democracy: AI, Democratic Talk, and a New Shared Language’, focusing on the kinds of publics and communities that emerge when discussions on political issues become entangled with and assisted by AI-driven ‘info-discursive auxiliaries’.

Ilya Utehkin’s project titled ‘News flow analytics: A data science method for eliciting censorship and showing bias’, investigating how to estimate censorship and show bias in news coverage by developing methods based on the measurement and comparison of agenda from different Russian media, and on NLP techniques.

Iben Have’s project titled ‘Resonating synthetic voices and listening citizens: Democratic implications of TTS-assisted communication’, exploring how text-to-speech (TTS) technology and synthetic voices influence the website-communication between Danish public authorities and citizens and which democratic implications this imply.

Janet Frances Rafner’s project titled ‘Human-AI co-creativity to engage policy makers, general public and researchers in societal issues’, which centers around the use of human-AI co-creative tools to foster public engagement in societal and civic dialogues.

Maj Nygaard-Christensen’s project titled ‘A street-level examination of digital service journeys among socially marginalized people’, in which she will be working through ethnographic data collected in 2023-2024 that explores and maps street-level service journeys of people at the intersection of homelessness and drug use, as they seek to navigate digitalized health solutions

Thank you to everyone who participated!