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’m 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 