As far back as the mid 2000s museums were talking about Artificial Intelligence (AI), however while these technologies have become increasingly pervasive in wider society from voice activated systems such as Alexa to the promise of Tesla's self driving cars, they are only beginning to be explored, in a museum context. With the National Gallery (UK), The Metropolitan Museum of Art (US), American Museum of Natural History (US), MoMA (US), Cooper-Hewitt (US) all beginning to explore the potential of AI this network will bring together a range of senior museum professionals and prominent academics to develop the conversation around AI, ethics and museums. AI technologies including machine learning, predictive analytics and others, bring exciting possibilities of knowing more about visitors and collections. However, it raises important challenges to ethics. With the increasing awareness and regulations about data usage, museums, must approach AI with both caution and fervour. To successfully achieve this senior museum professionals need to be provided with the opportunity to examine what this model might look like, and the wider impact that museums can have when it comes to advocating for new ethical standards. This research project will bring together museum professionals and scholars to discuss the cost, and indeed skills required to successfully adopt the true possibilities of AI. Cost and skill, have thus far acted as a barrier for museums, however with these technologies becoming more pervasive and skills more in demand, this is a timely moment for museums to explore the possibilities and ethical challenges of AI across their work from visitors to collections. As such this network seeks to challenge this known issue - ethics as an afterthought - by embedding it into the conversation on AI in Museums at this critical moment. A conversation that will help to inform funders and senior managers about the opportunities and challenges this technology poses for the sector.

The world's biodiversity is dominated by complex communities of animals (particularly insects) and plants. Though we know something of how these communities function (for example, who eats whom), we know very little about how they come to be: do they consist of species that have interacted for millions of years, or do they consist instead of sets of species that have only very recently come together from different sources? Which of these is true is important for the way in which we interpret adaptations in predators and prey. Long associations mean that predators and prey may have evolved very specific responses to each other - in a form of evolution commonly termed an 'arms race'. In contrast, if communities are only recently put together, the biology of component species is unlikely to have been shaped by the other community members. Which of these is true is also likely to be important in conservation: if species share a long evolutionary history, then the interactions they share (such as a predator eating its prey, or a pollinator's relationship with a plant) are also ancient, special, and should be preserved. In contrast, if communities are commonly assembled over short periods (on an evolutionary timescale) from available sets of species, then it shows that community interactions can also evolve relatively quickly, and that communities are evolutionarily young. If communities are young, it also means that they are vulnerable to invasion by new species - requiring careful management of species that humankind introduces either intentionally (as in biocontrol agents) or unintentionally. In this project, we will work out which of these scenarios is more true for one particular community - the insects inhabiting galls on oaks and other plants. These communities are easy to study, and match in many important respects other insect-plant communities. We will use DNA sequences to work out where different types of predators and prey in the gall communities originated and then spread around the world. If species in communities have a long shared history, then we expect each species to originate in the same place and spread in the same way. In contrast, if predators have 'latched on' to their prey at a range of points through evolutionary time, then we expect different community members to have different origins and patterns of range expansion. We will look at the question at two levels - globally (across North America, Asia and Europe), and regionally (for the Western palaearctic, which includes Europe and Asia Minor). An important component of our project is assessing the importance of regions just east of Europe (particularly Turkey) for European conservation. Many 'European' species (such as the 'English oak', and house mouse) are found far to the east of Europe, but the conservation value of eastern regions is not usually considered. Initial information for the oak gallwasp system we are studying suggests that oaks and gallwasps both diversified there before spreading into Europe. We will look at the predators in oak galls to see if this 'out of the east' pattern is in fact true for the whole community.

Novel anatomical adaptations and mechanisms for feeding are often postulated as 'key innovations' that spark the diversification of major clades. However, the mechanics of these adaptations are rarely quantitatively or rigorously tested, seriously undermining the validity of these hypotheses. Moreover, the majority of biomechanical analyses are carried out on single exemplar organisms, whereas a comparative phylogenetic context is critical to understanding the impact of feeding on evolutionary history and testing macroevolutionary hypotheses. Dinosaurs dominated terrestrial ecosystems for >130 million years, exhibiting a tremendous range of body sizes, shapes and ecologies. The earliest dinosaurs and their ancestors were generalists and minor faunal components. Dramatic increases in body size, diversity and abundance occurred during the Late Triassic-Early Jurassic (230-180 million years ago), and various factors have been implicated in dinosaur success. It is thought that the appearance of novel feeding adaptations permitted ecological diversification. However, this engaging 'functional story' has not been tested in a quantitative, hypothesis-driven comparative framework and previous work has focused on derived dinosaur taxa with extreme morphologies (e.g., Tyrannosaurus, Diplodocus), ignoring forms close to the base of Dinosauria. For these reasons, dinosaurs are an ideal model system for integrating data on feeding biomechanics with phylogeny, allowing more rigorous investigation of the relationship between functional diversity and clade dynamics. In this project we aim to comprehensively understand the consequences of functional changes in dinosaur skull biomechanics during the origin and early evolution of dinosaurs, a key moment in life's history. The proposed project is particularly timely given the availability and integration of cutting-edge computational methods for biomechanical analyses and new discoveries of early dinosaurs and their ancestors. We will integrate principles and methods from palaeontology, biology and engineering to reconstruct skull anatomy and function in 15 early dinosaur and dinosauriform taxa. CT scans and visualization software will be used to create 3D computer models. Information from the original fossils and living crocodilians, birds and lizards will be used to reconstruct head musculature. Using these reconstructions and multi-body dynamics analysis, we will model jaw motions during feeding, estimate bite forces along the tooth row and calculate maximum jaw closing speed. We will integrate results from dynamic models with finite element analysis and geometric morphometrics to test how the skulls respond to feeding-induced loads. In addition, we will run simulations on three living species to ensure model predictions are accurate. Results from these analyses will provide evidence for the jaw function and potential diet of early dinosaurs, and whether they became more specialized in terms of feeding performance during their evolution. Finally, we will compare the appearance of feeding characters to dinosaur diversity patterns to determine what role feeding had in their early evolution and success. Palaeontologists, anatomists, biomechanists, evolutionary biologists and engineers will benefit from this work, which will set new benchmarks for performing evolutionary biomechanics in living and fossil animals and will establish new UK, European and overseas collaborations. This project will also generate new methodological advances that can be applied to other clades and other functional questions. Finally, the technological and visual aspects of this work and its focus on early dinosaurs will appeal to the general public, offering numerous engagement opportunities and media interest that will contribute to increased public understanding of scientific principles and methods, and will ensure wide dissemination of this work.