BFI funds King’s College project exploring AI for screen archives

Intelligent Systems for Screen Archives (ISSA) is designed by King's College London, through a collaboration between its Department of Digital Humanities and King’s Digital Lab.

ISSA will explore AI opportunities for audiovisual archives, developing tools and skills to support collections in their work documenting, developing, and sharing moving image heritage.

The project will run over 30 months and is scheduled to complete in 2027. It will focus on the development of a technical prototype to enable AI experimentation with moving image collections, including modules for data enrichment, exploration, retrieval, and interaction. It will also organise a programme of workshops with six different archive partner organisations to test the prototype with their collections, and to share the outcomes.

The project brings together five film and television archive partners: 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.

The funding was awarded via the BFI National Lottery Innovation Fund.

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.”

Dr Daniel Chávez Heras, ISSA Principal Investigator and Lecturer in Digital Culture and Creative Computing at King’s College London, said: "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."