The BFI National Lottery Innovation Fund has awarded a grant to King’s College project exploring how artificial intelligence can help with screen archives.

Funding of £192,500 has been provided to King’s College London under the BFI National Lottery Challenge Fund. The grant is intended to support the Intelligent Systems for Screen Archives (ISSA) project, which aims to advance the understanding of AI opportunities and develop tools to assist audiovisual collections with documenting, developing and sharing their moving image inventories.
Scheduled to run over 30 months, the ISSA project has four main areas of activity:
- Developing a technical prototype to enable AI experimentation with moving image collections, including modules for data enrichment, exploration, retrieval, and interaction
- Delivering a programme of workshops with six different archive partner organisations, testing the prototype with their collection and enabling user research about AI systems in the cultural sector
- Creating a publicly accessible code repository and knowledge base, sharing outcomes from the workshops, tools and processes, and providing insight on the best practice developed as a result
- Publishing a list of common requirements and sector gaps that emerge, which can be used to attract future funding and inform strategic decisions about working with AI in moving image archives
Rishi Coupland, BFI director of research and industry innovation, said, “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.”
ISSA brings project partners from across the UK together, featuring the National Library of Scotland, National Library of Wales, Northern Ireland Screen, North West Film Archive, and Yorkshire Film Archive in collaboration with King’s Digital Lab. Film Archives UK will also be involved in the project workshop.
Dr Daniel Chávez Heras, ISSA principal investigator and lecturer in digital culture and creative computing at King’s College London, commented, “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 College London and moving image archives across the UK. This is an exciting project that builds towards critical, responsible and public AI systems.”
The BFI National Lottery Innovation Challenge Fund aims to support new solutions to challenges faced by the UK screen industry. A future Innovation Challenge Call may further explore areas such as how AI might affect production, areas and skills.