“Can AI read the writing on Bogotá’s walls?”
30 Jul 2026
Delivering Manchester 2035 – meet the colleagues awarded the Interdisciplinary Pump Priming Awards, whose collaborations reflect the strength and diversity of our interdisciplinary research.
Our Research Committee has announced the recipients of the Interdisciplinary Pump Priming Awards, established to support new collaborations that advance the ambitions of Manchester 2035.
Following a highly competitive call, which attracted 89 applications from across the University, eight projects have been selected for funding. The awarded projects align with the priority areas of the University’s Platforms.
The funded projects reflect the strength and diversity of interdisciplinary research at Manchester, with teams working across areas including health inequalities, sustainable futures, artificial intelligence, creative practice and social resilience. The awards will support research teams to develop bold new ideas, build cross-disciplinary partnerships and lay the foundations for future external funding, impact and innovation.
The recipients include Birte Vogel, working with a Marie-Curie Fellow at the Humanitarian Conflict Response Institute (HCRI), Ümit Seven, a colleague from the School of Computer Science, TingTing Mu, and her PhD student.
“We aim to establish whether AI can provide a rigorous new way of studying visual politics in conflict-affected cities,” Birte explains.
The HCRI team will analyse the street art qualitatively while the Computer Science team will examine the same material with AI, allowing them to discover both what computational methods can reveal at scale and what they miss about politics, place and cultural meaning. They will also try to create a visual data set at scale in a very short time frame that took Birte and her team months to complete on a previous project for a different city.
Birte, whose project falls under Digital Futures, added: “I’m delighted to receive the award because it gives me the chance to take my existing street-art research in a direction I could not pursue alone or my current networks, testing a new approach in Bogotá alongside Computer Science colleagues who were working seriously with AI long before the rest of us started chatting to ChatGPT.
“Basically, we want to figure out: Can AI read the writing on Bogotá’s walls?”
Finding a shared language...and new fields of enquiry
At Creative Manchester, historian of computing James Sumner is collaborating with Yizheng Sun, a computer scientist with a background in generative AI implementation; Sam Hind, a digital media specialist; and Jim Miles and Toby Howard, who look after the archive collection of the Department of Computer Science. They are exploring how far machine learning can be used to identify and classify historic material from an archive and what kinds of human oversight need to be included. They aim to improve collection accessibility and raise awareness of the significance of the material and Manchester's place in the history of computing.
James said: “Interdisciplinary working is a great way to find productive new fields of enquiry that don't fit the existing disciplinary cultures' priorities or ways of seeing. It's also usually the only way to deal with the kinds of challenges that the world has a habit of throwing up without troubling itself about the disciplinary boundaries.
“When the task is to introduce a new way of working, it often turns out that the people who have to build the system are in a different disciplinary tradition from the people who will have to use the system, and so the system won't work unless they can collaborate. That's definitely true of generative AI, which our project works on.”
Social anthropologist Chika Watanebe is working with anthropologists, sociologists, geographers, engineers, disaster researchers and science communication scholars across Faculties and with collaborators in Chile, straddling expertise in disasters, ageing, and visual methods. They are investigating older people’s social care infrastructures in the face of disasters to make a compelling case for protecting social resources and thus a resilient future.
Chika said: “Interdisciplinarity can be challenging when fundamental assumptions are very different, but it can really maximise certain approaches when we can find a shared language, such as the use of visual mapping and storytelling methods through quantitative and qualitative approaches in our project.”
Other winning projects
Congratulations also go to:
- Paul Warren (School of Health Sciences) Challenging sensory spaces: AI-driven approaches to maintaining comfort and functional performance.
- Olivier Allegre (School of Engineering) Engineering Out Inequity: Mechanism-Driven Laser Manufacturing of Orthopaedic Implants for Robust Performance Across Biological Diversity.
- Laura Anselmi (School of Health Sciences) Supply of adult social care services and health inequalities among carers and care recipients
- Claire Hoolohan (School of Engineering) From Net Zero to Fair Zero: Targeting Discretionary Emissions in UK Climate Policy.
- Sarah Mander (School of Engineering) Is there a JET in international shipping? Exploring a “Just and Equitable Transition.”
Thank you to all who collaborated across disciplines and submitted applications.
Discover more
Researchers can access a wide range of support across the University, including faculty-specific research development teams, professional development opportunities, research culture resources, and examples of previous award-winning initiatives: