Black Founders Programme
The Black Founders Programme is an accelerator targeted at pre-seed or seed stage, Black-founded companies creating innovative products and services...
In November 2020, our blog AI in Visual Arts and Media: Why now is the right time to accelerate support for AI startups driving innovation in the Creative Industries identified the possibilities that artificial intelligence (AI) offers to push boundaries and accelerate new possibilities for the creative sector. Since then, Digital Catapult has launched its second themed Machine Intelligence Garage cohort with the 11 cutting-edge startups selected for the acceleration programme focused on the creative industries, specifically the areas of visual arts and media.
The idea behind the themed cohort is that it allows the programme to better address market gaps and accelerate innovation directly to the industries where innovation has the biggest potential to create shifts and transformations. Run in addition to our sector agnostic cohorts, these themes are layered upon the foundational support that we know is pivotal to all early stage AI startups to create market-ready solutions:
- Compute resources and technical support
- Business and Investment support
- Responsible AI support
In addition to this support, the themed cohort has tapped into sector specific support in partnership with leading academic, industry and regulatory organisations. Examples include:
- Data sharing and corporate R&D collaboration workshop with the BBC NI and the Rewind digital archive project
- AI Ethics in the creative industries workshop with Burkhard Schafer, a member of our Ethics Committee
- Media industry workshop with the DPP, Cognizant, Codemill & BBC R&D
- Data protection and copyright webinar with the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) and the Intellectual Property Office (IPO)
- IP workshop and 1-on-1s with Lewis Silkin
- Opportunities to participate in related programmes like the new centre for the Decentralised Digital Economy (DECaDE).
Through combining the programme support with focused workshops, the cohort has been able to learn from each other, as well as our partners. For example, as part of the AI Ethics workshop participants were separated into cross-team breakout rooms to discuss a responsible AI case study. The startups also had the chance to refine their commercial propositions and learn more about real industry needs in the media industry workshop with the DPP and Cognizant as well as the challenges of scaling AI/ML media workflows with Codemill.
The journey towards widespread and responsible adoption of AI within industry is a long one. There are many ethical and commercial questions that need to be effectively addressed; from the responsible use of generative adversarial networks (GANs) (deep fake) techniques to establishing data sharing practices that are not only compliant, but clear and fair. However, we are sure that the best way forward is in collaboration with a broad set of key stakeholders from the startup ecosystem, leading industry players, regulators and experts in the responsible use of AI.
If you would like to learn more about the startups on the creative cohort then you’re in luck! After having been through the programme activities to further accelerate and refine their offerings and develop market ready solutions, the startups are going to demo their products to a tailored audience of companies working in the creative industry during our creative cohort Demo Day happening on April 29th 2021. This pitching event will shine a spotlight on AI powered solutions for the creative industries including music recognition, video metadata enrichment, 3D meshing, and even interactive storytelling and bringing TV characters to life! Find out more and book your place online here.