Tech Events by Edinburgh Futures Institute

with James McVeigh (, Festivals Edinburgh) · Tomas Vancisin (, Edinburgh Futures Institute)

A data visualization meetup on how to make the eleven Edinburgh festivals' data readable: ticket sales, venues, programmes, audiences and community reach. James McVeigh of Festivals Edinburgh explains how the festivals are organised and how they've changed. Tomas Vancisin of Edinburgh Futures Institute talks about using visualization to connect them. Students from October's Edinburgh Festivals Hackathon show their work. The format mixes short talks with discussion and sketching, and touches on the Culture and Community Mapping Project and apps built on the Festivals Listings API. No prior experience needed. 90 minutes in Room 0.7 at EFI. Why go: a real public dataset, the people who own it, and the people visualising it in one room. Good for data designers, civic-tech builders and anyone working with the Festivals API.

with Javier Ruiz Diaz (Technology and Human Rights Lead, Amnesty International UK) · tèmítópé lasade-anderson (Executive Director, Glitch) · Haylea Campbell (Senior Associate, Pro Bono Practice, Hogan Lovells Cadwalader) + 2 more

A fireside chat in the Edinburgh Futures Institute's large event space on how AI is reshaping fundamental rights — speech, labour, privacy and freedom of movement — and the politics around them. Chaired by Dr Zeerak Talat of the Centre for Technomoral Futures, the panel is Javier Ruiz Diaz (Technology and Human Rights Lead, Amnesty International UK), tèmítópé lasade-anderson (Executive Director, Glitch), Haylea Campbell (Senior Associate in the pro bono practice at Hogan Lovells Cadwalader) and Professor Michael Veale (Technology Law and Policy, UCL). Part of the Technomoral Conversations series. Free, 18:00 to 19:30, with audience questions. The event is hybrid and live-captioned, with a real room at Lauriston Place. Why go: a human-rights lawyer, a digital-harms organiser, a City pro bono lawyer and a tech-policy professor rarely share a stage, and the questions are the ones AI teams get asked by their own legal departments. Best for people shipping AI in regulated or public-facing products, and for policy and legal staff who have to review it.

Edinburgh Futures Institute on work, knowledge and what the next economy actually pays for.

Edinburgh Futures Institute on what the university of 2050 looks like structurally — leadership, funding and strategy.

An Edinburgh Futures Institute panel on university decision-making and its public consequences.

A Future University session at Edinburgh Futures Institute on AI, free speech and institutional power — who gets to decide what counts as true when the tooling is automated.

Edinburgh Futures Institute on what generative AI is doing to teaching and assessment, and what a university that takes it seriously looks like.

Edinburgh Futures Institute opens its Future University season with a session on what AI does to the research process itself — to method, evidence and the pace of discovery.

Beth Simone Noveck (NYU professor of technology, civic tech pioneer and former US Deputy CTO under Obama) in conversation with Oliver Escobar on the civic role of the university in the age of AI. A timely public lecture at the Edinburgh Futures Institute exploring how AI, democracy and public imagination intersect — and what universities owe the publics they serve. Strong pick for anyone working at the intersection of tech, policy and civil society.