About the ICDF
RATIONALE OF THE INTERDISCIPLINARY CENTRE FOR DIGITAL FUTURES (ICDF)
The ICDF, created at the University of the Free State wants to act as a conduit to enhance a responsible digital immersion through the development of expertise in both social scientific and technical competencies of the digital in all its guises. The ICDF strives to ensure that the deployment and adoption of technological advancements related to the Fourth Industrial revolution (4IR) happen in an ethical, socially responsive, and critical manner. This requires an understanding of digital technologies and its embeddedness within society and its wider environment. It also encompasses the engagement with much-needed change management to understand the challenges of adoption and integration of technologies into societal spaces. In addition to this, the ICDF focusses on including a further set of inquiries associated with the potential unintended consequences of digitalization such as the erosion of privacy, increased surveillance, cybercrime and unforeseen social, psychological and political impacts.
Together with industry, communities, and government the ICDF wants to spearhead a digital future where the world of “the digital” becomes accessible and useful to a wide range of agents. The ICDF strives to be a collaborative, co-creative space – where social scientists, humanities, natural scientists, engineers, health scientists collaborate and interact outside partners to provide a unique eco-system, driving the digital future for the benefit of society, economic growth and prosperity. Its projects will typically be interdisciplinary in nature, combining social, natural and digital sciences to explore and find answers to real-world questions.
ICDF PROJECTS
The current priority projects of the ICDF focus on the development of sustainable solutions that are not only technologically driven, but that also take into consideration the complex social issues related to the emergence and evolution of the 4IR.
The first collection of projects integrates information in an interoperable manner to lead to the creation of usable data lakes. In order to ensure more fluent data sharing practices, the ICDF works in close collaboration with industry and government (in domains such as agriculture and health care). This is done to establish not only the ethical and policy related frameworks and processes, but also to aid the development of a functioning digital backbone capacity. These initial data lakes projects have the potential to assist policy makers, industry, academic institutions and the enhancement of open science for more democratic decision-making processes.
The second collection of projects within the ICDF relates to the creation of an enterprise management cluster, interconnecting the entire value chain of a project from a research and innovation perspective. Within these cluster management projects, the ICDF serves to facilitate the adoption of projects that require innovation which will be implemented by industry and governed by policy. The importance of the ICDF’s involvement in these cluster management projects is especially focused on the impact 4IR technologies and processes will have on society.
The third collection of projects in the ICDF focuses on the advancement of “digital science”. Digital science includes the engagement with the plethora of data from the digital domain, including the internet – scraped, stored, and analysed with the aid of artificial intelligence like machine learning, and interpreted by people using principles and theoretical lenses prevalent in the social sciences. This emerging field brings together digital technologies into traditional humanities spaces to gain insights of activities in the virtual world. To date, the ICDF has provided such services to government and industry to deepen an understanding of complex and challenging issues as these are commented on in cyberspace. Together with the assistance of five different working groups including staff from all corners of the University of the Free State’s campuses, the ICDF continues to build its network and increase its impact in the academic space, and in society more generally. To build a better future together, we need people, and the ICDF acknowledges that people are the drivers behind a digital future that we aspire to.