The Cruïlla Festival will become a citizen innovation space to explore artificial intelligence and digital identity

The Cruïlla Festival will become from 8 to 11 July a space for exploring the role that artificial intelligence can play in the field of arts and music, within a context of open science and innovation. Research, public administrations and companies from the innovation ecosystem collaborate in this initiative to test new technologies in a real context, with citizens at the center of the activities.

This action is promoted by the ENIA UAB-Cruïlla Chair for Research in Artificial Intelligence in the Field of Music and the Arts, –a joint initiative of the Autonomous University of Barcelona (UAB) and Barcelona Events Musicals, promoter of the Cruïlla Festival–, directed by Dr. Fernando Vilariño, Department of Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence at the UAB, and with the collaboration of the Computer Vision Center (CVC).

The proposal will turn the festival into a living laboratory where attendees will be invited to explore socially acceptable uses of AI through business and academic demonstration prototypes. This year, under the theme “Cruïlla is home: your identity and AI”, examples of the potential consequences and impacts on digital identity will be shown in a practical and concrete way in aspects such as the representation of the human body and hypersexualization, the interpretation of preferences or the tensions between individual and collective identity.

But, beyond the technological experience, the objective is to incorporate the perspective of citizens in the validation of new solutions before their implementation, promoting open, responsible innovation aligned with European values.

The festival, an ephemeral city for innovation

The initiative is part of the mission of the ENIA UAB-Cruïlla Chair to transform both the UAB campus and the Cruïlla Festival into living laboratories of innovation, where research in artificial intelligence is developed, giving citizens the opportunity to participate in the debate on what AI is socially acceptable.

For four days, the Cruïlla Festival is transformed into an ephemeral city, where nearly 80,000 people share spaces, activities and cultural experiences and in which AI is present in multiple dimensions: from the generation of creative content to logistics, audience management and planning. This ecosystem offers a unique environment to observe how new technologies interact with people in real situations and to incorporate this experience into the innovation process.

In this context, and with the collaboration of the Catalan Data Protection Authority (APDCAT), the Chair contributes to developing at the festival an unprecedented and unique model in the territory of an open experimentation space (a sandbox to accompany regulatory learning), which will allow artificial intelligence prototypes to be validated with all the guarantees of rights protection. This model, integrated into the new ordinance of experimentation spaces of the Barcelona City Council, will also allow the presented demonstrators to emerge prepared to comply with the new regulations on data protection and artificial intelligence, within the framework of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and the Artificial Intelligence Act (AI Act), with the participation of citizens in the definition of socially acceptable uses. To this end, the Chair has had the advice of the APDCAT to reduce the impacts on fundamental rights in the use and design of AI systems. Specifically, the Authority has provided support for regulatory compliance, promoting privacy by design and by default, and has made the Catalan FRIA model available to the project, a pioneering methodology in Europe for the design and use of reliable and responsible AI systems, promoted by the APDCAT within the framework of the 'DPD en Xarxa' community.

Four AI initiatives to be validated in a real environment

The space will bring together four initiatives – two business and two academic – that will be validated with the direct participation of festival attendees. Among the business initiatives will be Lainapp, which emerged from the AI4ALL program, coordinated by the UAB Research Park, which develops artificial intelligence tools to personalize content and monitor massive events in real time, with the aim of improving the experience of attendees. Also participating is Tecous, a startup promoted by the AI ​​Accelerator program, coordinated by the RDI-IA Network, which is developing a platform to facilitate the understanding of the terms and conditions of digital services.

The space will also include two demonstrators developed in the academic field. The first, “Same face, same beat”, has been developed by students of the UAB’s Artificial Intelligence degree as part of a challenge-based learning project. Based on a photograph and a short questionnaire, the system generates a personalized musical composition, identifies musical affinities and suggests connections with artists and other festival attendees. This demonstrator explores the potential of AI systems to interpret tastes and preferences from different sources of information and, at the same time, invites the public to reflect on the limits of these inferences and on the responsible use of personal data.

The second academic demonstrator, CraftGraffiti, developed by the Center for Computer Vision, invites visitors to become the protagonists of the posters of the Cruïlla Festival. Based on a photograph, a generative artificial intelligence system creates a personalized visual narrative inspired by the musical universe of the festival and the aesthetics of graffiti, one of its most characteristic artistic expressions. Beyond the creative experience, the demonstration invites questions about how generative models represent identity, the human body and the stereotypes they can reproduce.

Citizens, protagonists in the development of responsible AI

The demonstrations will be accompanied by multimedia material for reflection, developed based on the work with the Technovalues ​​Committee of the UAB-Cruïlla Chair, which has contributed to analyzing these technologies from the ethical, regulatory and social impact dimensions. The aim is for attendees not only to experiment with artificial intelligence, but also to participate in an open conversation about the risks, opportunities and values ​​that should guide its development.

For the UAB-Cruïlla Chair, citizen participation is a fundamental part of building artificial intelligence that responds to the needs of society. The arts and cultural festivals offer a privileged context to generate this dialogue, bringing research closer to people and incorporating their perspectives into the innovation process.

An alliance between university, research and culture

The ENIA UAB-Cruïlla Chair is a public-private initiative of the Autonomous University of Barcelona and the Cruïlla Festival, with the participation of the Computer Vision Centre as a collaborating entity. Its activity is structured around three main lines of work: AI as a creative tool (AI-CREATE), as a support for artistic creation processes (AI-SUPPORT) and as a tool to enrich the cultural experience (AI-EXPERIENCE).

The project brings together research staff from the UAB, the Computer Vision Centre and the Institute for Research in Artificial Intelligence (IIIA-CSIC), who work together with Barcelona Music Lab, Eurecat and the Épica La Fura dels Baus Foundation, to promote open, responsible research aimed at generating a positive social impact. The project is partially financed with European Next Generation funds, through the ENIA strategy (National Artificial Intelligence Strategy) of the Ministry of Economic Affairs and Digital Transformation of the Government of Spain.