In the spirit of sharing resources and reminiscing good, sunny times, here's a little throwback from July 2025!
As we continue to travel, present our research and build the community, expect further updates shortly!

Over July 2025, Bristol Digital Futures Institute hosted two Hype Studies researchers, Vassilis Galanos and Jascha Bareis. Both visitors as well as the host, Ola Michalec, spent several days drafting conference programme, discussing the future(s) of the group, but most importantly, ̶d̶a̶n̶c̶i̶n̶g̶ ̶t̶h̶e̶i̶r̶ ̶s̶o̶c̶k̶s̶ ̶o̶f̶f̶ ̶t̶o̶ ̶d̶r̶u̶m̶'̶n̶'̶b̶a̶s̶s̶ ̶i̶n̶ ̶a̶ ̶d̶i̶n̶g̶y̶ ̶b̶a̶s̶e̶m̶e̶n̶t̶, presenting their recent research to the hybrid audience of researchers and members of the public.

Vassilis gave a talk on the history of computing, taking us on a journey through the many seasons of AI hype, while making the case for explanations going beyond the dichotomy of summers and winters.

Vassilis also designed and delivered an interactive workshop, aiming to enable a reflection on common exaggerations, framings and trends in participants' own domains of interest. We encourage everyone to use, remix and adapt the methodology for non-commercial purposes, in line with the CC BY-NC-SA license. You can download the slides here.

Jascha ran a book launch to celebrate the publication of "The Realities of Autonomous Weapons". The event was organised as a hybrid panel, featuring contributions from Prof Lucy Suchman and Thomas Christian Bachle, who joined us online. Our speakers did a great job at unpacking the common tropes of 'efficient' killer robots or machines as 'rational killers'. In the conversation that span videogames, international human law and innnovation policy, we learned that the real-world developments are far more incremental, and politically entangled than sci-fi hypes. You can access the online version of the book here.