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Programme December 2024 - June 2025

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Our free online seminar series is suitable for all - students, practitioners, tech companies, researchers, lecturers and anyone else with an interest. Each event explores a single peacetech theme with presentations from both tech and peacebuilding perspectives. 

Our diverse network encompasses tech, academic and practice institutions and organisations across the UK and beyond. Our focus is on building understanding and skills between the peacebuilding and tech worlds. All contributions and insights are valuable as this emerging field develops, so we'd love to see you there!


Winter 2024/2025

Series 1 – Building bridges in virtual spaces: Finding zones of agreement amidst political polarisation​

Convenor - David Curran, University of Coventry 

Three seminars that examine the use of front-of-field tech as a tool to identifying areas of consensus between different groups in polarised contexts. How are online tools with generative AI capabilities being used at local and national levels? Presenters offer real-life examples of how to integrate these tools into peacebuilding initiatives, as well as the dilemmas of using their results to inform policy and action.

In exploring the collaboration between specialists in the peacebuilding and tech fields, speakers will reflect on the challenges this presents and the opportunities which have been uncovered by working together.


The next steps of Peace - Polling in divided societies (December 2024)
Dr C
olin Irwin, expert on public opinion, public diplomacy and peace processes, on working with tech specialists to build and institutionalise peace.  

Video of the talk

More on Peace Polling

Slides from the talk 


Understanding Polis: an online tool to find consensus (February 4th, 2025, 4-5pm UK time).
Shannon Y Hong of OpenFuture presents the potential and challenge of Polis, a virtual tool for peacebuilding

Bridging protracted conflict (March 4th, 2025, 4-5pm UK time) 
David Curran will lead a review of how innovative tools can act as a mechanism to manage strong disagreement between groups on particular policy areas, identifying common values in areas where protracted conflict has been present. 


Register here for online seminars




Late Spring 2025

Series 2 - Data for peacebuilding: understanding what works ​

Data collection is at the heart of every research and intervention aimed at building peace, but is it always used to best effect? The goal of these seminars is to introduce some ideas from quantitative data analysis and suggest how they might augment (but not replace) qualitative techniques for peace applications.

Both talks below are free and online at 4-5pm UK time. Register now to reserve your place and receive the zoom link for the meeting in the week before. 



April 1st 2025 - Deciding what counts – under the hood of AI models for natural language processing 
Huw Day, Data Scientist at the University of Bristol, Data Ethics Club Co-Organiser

The goal of this talk is to illustrate the utility and limitations of AI models for natural language processing in the context of large-scale qualitative data analysis – if you have thousands of text responses, how are you going to analyse them all? 

In such situations, where we need to think carefully about where to dedicate resources for qualitative analysis, we can use more quantitative techniques to augment and inform where to look. When we do so, we have to think carefully about what methods we use, how we can validate their effectiveness and how we go on to express our results. 

But what level of certainty can we expect from tools and will AI ever replace qualitative research methods? (The answer is no, but come to this talk to find out why!)


May 6th 2025 - Data visualisation: objective viewpoints from subjective standpoints
Jessica Woodgate, PhD student in AI Ethics and Multi-Agent Systems at the University of Bristol, Data Ethics Club Co-Organiser

When analysing and visualising data, decisions must always be made in order to format and simplify data into a narrative that others can understand. These decisions are not neutral and can reflect biases and assumptions of the people doing the analysis.

The commonly accepted ‘best practice’ in data visualisation is to minimise the data-ink ratio, influenced by Edward Tufte in the 1980s. In Tufte's view, any ink used for something other than the data itself (e.g. background colour, iconography or embellishment) is wasteful and an intruder to the graphics.

Is this still a useful ‘best practice’ idea? 

Based on chapter 3 of Data Feminism by Catherine D'Ignazio and Lauren Klein, this talk will present and discuss examples to illustrate the myth of objectivity implicit in data visualisation.