I’m Sam Hind, a lecturer in digital media and culture at the University of Manchester, UK. I’m based in the department of Art History and Cultural Practices (AHCP), and a member of the Centre for Digital Humanities, Cultures and Media. I was the founding Programme Director (2023-25) for the MA in Digital Media, Culture and Society.
I’ve always been interested in how technologies scale from the ‘lab’ to the ‘real world’. To this end, my main research interests include:
- machine vision and machine learning cultures
- tech innovation and competitions
- automotive industry/platform automobility
- autonomous driving
- history of computer simulation
- environmental impacts of AI
My first monograph was on the phenomenon of autonomous driving, Driving Decisions: How Autonomous Vehicles Make Sense of the World (Palgrave, 2024). The book considered how different mapping, sensing, and machine learning (ML)-dependent capabilities are gifted to autonomous vehicles through different kinds of technical work: from computer science students annotating visual data in industry-funded research centres to software engineers designing ‘end-to-end’ ML models at autonomous vehicle start-ups.
You can see my publications here and find my university research portal here.
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I was previously a research associate in the Navigation in Online/Offline Spaces project of the Media of Cooperation SFB1187 at the University of Siegen, Germany. Before that I was in Locating Media, and received my PhD from the Centre for Interdisciplinary Methodologies at the University of Warwick, UK. I was also a research assistant on the Playfields project.
I was co-author of Playful Mapping in the Digital Age (2016), and co-editor of both Time for Mapping: Cartographic Temporalities (2018) and Interrogating Datafication: Towards a Praxeology of Data (2022).
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Inspired by the AIAAIC repository we (Lucie Kealey, Olivia Shaw, Yihan Chen, Jiahui Tang, Amy Bower and myself) built an environmental AI (EAI) database, a public resource collating material on the environmental impact of AI. Check it out here: https://sites.google.com/view/eaidatabase/home
I manage the Creative AI studentships, six fully-funded PhD projects exploring the relationship(s) between creativity and AI.
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You can email me at sam.hind@manchester.ac.uk and I’m (still, just about) on X: @samhind10
Sam Hind 