AI Initiatives at HKUArts

About the Initiative

AI: The Role of Humanities

AI and Humanities Initiative at HKUArts is a faculty-level effort that draws together the Faculty’s AI-related research, public-policy work, creative practice, and teaching into a single coordinated whole. It does not replace the units doing this work — it gives them a shared strategy, a common story, and a senior academic voice within HKU’s wider AI mission and beyond.

The Initiative has three jobs. It coordinates the AI work already happening across the Faculty, so that research groups, degrees, and public programmes reinforce each other. It helps new work get started, by giving people who want to do something with AI a place to bring it and support to build it. And it is the outward-facing home for AI and the humanities at HKU — what a journalist, a funder, a prospective student, or a partner university finds when they ask who at HKU is thinking seriously about what AI means for human culture.

Four Focal Areas

Four verbs structure everything the Faculty does with AI — research, teaching, making, and public engagement.

01

Understand

The humanities studying AI: what it is, what it means, what it does to knowledge, language, and culture.

02

Teach

Preparing students and the public to live and think well with AI — our degrees, the Common Core AI courses, and the Faculty’s teaching and writing policy.

03

Create

Making things with AI and against it — Art and the Alternative Imaginary, the gaming group, and the Arts Technology Lab.

04

Engage

Entering the public and policy conversation — the Global AI Governance Hub, our public events, and the public voice we build.

Current Projects and Initiatives

Already under way

The four focal areas are not aspiration — the map already fills in. Streams of work, each with its own convenors, running across the Faculty.

Understand

AI & Humanity Lab

A world-leading centre for strategic, philosophical thinking about AI and human life — visiting speakers, international conferences, sister centres, and public dialogue.

Engage

Global AI Governance Hub

Positioning HKU at the forefront of AI governance from Asia — applied research, a cross-national network with a focus on the Global South, and closed-door Track 1.5/2 dialogues.

Create

Art & the Alternative Imaginary

A path-breaking Arts × Tech initiative — an annual competition, international festival, and conference reclaiming art as a site of meaning in the age of generative AI.

Teach

Curriculum & pedagogy

Common Core AI courses, AI in the Major pathways, and Faculty teaching and writing policy that keep scholarly standards and creative originality intact.

Create

AI & Humanities Gaming

The HAGG student game-design society and regular Gaming Days at the Arts Technology Lab — exploring AI-assisted design and games as cultural artefacts.

Create

Arts Technology Lab

The Faculty’s shared XR space, VR cave, and workstations — plus seed funding, internships, training modules, and visiting fellowships that support AI-and-humanities work.

Study with us

Degrees built for a human-centred AI

HKUArts offers flagship programmes that place technical fluency and humanistic judgement on an equal footing.

Undergraduate 5 years

JS6298

BA & BEng in AI & Data Science

The world’s first AI & Humanity double degree — a fully integrated curriculum combining the Major in AI & Humanity with a professional core in AI and data science, offered jointly with the School of Computing and Data Science.

Double degree
Arts × Engineering
Human-centred AI
Integrated curriculum

Undergraduate 4 years

JS6286

BA in Humanities and Digital Technologies

Asia’s first dedicated digital-humanities degree. Students combine a humanities discipline with coding, data, and emerging technologies — including generative AI — through internships, group projects, and a final-year capstone.

Digital humanities
Internship
Capstone project
Humanities × technology

Postgraduate 1 year full-time

MA·AIES

MA in AI, Ethics and Society

The first master’s of its kind in Asia. An interdisciplinary programme spanning philosophy, computer science, law, and the social sciences, closely integrated with the AI&Humanity Lab and its visiting scholars.

Interdisciplinary
Capstone portfolio
Lab-connected
Global cohort

Undergraduate Common Core

AoI·AI

AI Area of Inquiry (Common Core)

Cross-faculty modules that introduce AI through the arts and humanities — literacy, ethics, and making, not tool training alone.

Common Core
Cross-faculty
Critical literacy
Creative practice

Plans

Five things, starting now

Beyond coordination, five things worth starting — and a rough order to start them in.

A coordinating website

One place where all of HKUArts’ AI initiatives and events are gathered, with notices to everyone who asks to be kept informed. You are looking at a first draft.

An annual Summit

One flagship AI & Humanities event at HKU each year, drawing the field to Hong Kong. The first in May 2027.

A public Address

Twice a year: one major external figure in conversation with an HKU voice, in a large room, filmed, open to the public and the press.

A public voice

A regular output — writing, a newsletter, a podcast — that makes the Initiative the place people come to when AI and culture are in the news.

A yearly Award

An AI & Humanities Award — possibly one to a faculty member and one to a student — recognizing the year’s best work.

Public programmes

Talks, workshops & seminars

The Initiative runs a year-round public programme across distinguished visiting speaker series, InnoArts workshops, and AI & Teaching seminars — open to all and recorded for the community.

19 February 2027

Workshop

AI Personhood: Legal and Philosophical Perspective

10 November 2026

Lecture

The Dignity of LearningIn the Age of Powerful AI

6:30 · Speakers: Prof Meghan Sullivan (University of Notre Dame)

2026-11-05&06

Workshop

Minds, Meaning, and Machines: New Work in Philosophy of AI

2026-10-16&17

Workshop

PHAI-5 Workshop

Speakers: Jun Otsuka (Zen University)

Our Seminar Series

Standing series that anchor the Initiative across research, teaching, and creative practice.

4 November 2026

Seminar series

Prof Anandi Hattiangadi, University of Stockholm

Speakers: Prof Anandi Hattiangadi

1 November 2026

Seminar series

Prof Simon Hutteger, University of California, Irvine

Speakers: Prof Simon Hutteger

2027-Q1

Seminar series

Prof Jason Brennan, Georgetown University

Seminars · Speakers: Prof Jason Brennan

Our community

Scholars from across the Faculty

The Initiative draws together researchers, teachers, and professional staff from across the Faculty of Arts — philosophy, linguistics, history, languages, digital humanities, Buddhist studies, museum studies, and beyond — alongside partners in computing and the social sciences.