The future has been neglected as an object of anthropological study, even though our complex social, ecological and now, with COVID-19, biopolitical crises demand novel imaginations of the ‘yet-to-come’. Moreover, anthropologists have urged the decolonisation of existing studies of the future that are often based in the global north’s concerns. ANTHROFUTURE shifts the focus of the anthropology of the future to the pandemic-induced acceleration of the future into the present. The project identifies the art world – historically featuring a high degree of experimentalism, a strong future-orientation, and, particularly in emerging markets in the global south, an openness to risk and speculation – as a crucial site for ground-breaking anthropological knowledge on the future. The pandemic forced the art world to quickly develop innovative digital solutions to replace physical events; the result is a new, fully integrated physical and digital system. While pre-pandemic scholarship on the art world largely focuses on institutions, professionals and activities as physical phenomena, there is no scholarship on this new digital-physical infrastructure. ANTHROFUTURE further acknowledges the global south as the most vital site for modeling the future by situating its research in India and Pakistan as active and mutually entangled art world locations. ANTHROFUTURE introduces three novel modes of inquiry: 1) systematic research on the digital-physical art world as an ethnographic site for the study of the future; 2) innovative multimodal methodologies for studying the future that combine in-person, digital and visual ethnography, large-scale social media data harvesting, and artist subprojects; 3) analytical and theoretical advancements on the future as a time zone in comparative terms and across the regional contexts. Embedded in anthropology, the project pursues these objectives driven by the PI’s extensive research on the past and present of the art world and the global south.

The vision of IASIS is to turn the wave of data heading our way into actionable knowledge for decision makers. This will be achieved by integrating data from disparate sources, including genomics, electronic health records and bibliography, and applying advanced analytics methods to discover useful patterns. Big Data in healthcare is in its early days, and most of the potential for value creation is being unclaimed. One of the main challenges is the analysis of acquired data. While information is becoming ever easier to obtain, the infrastructure to collect, integrate, share, and mine the data remains lacking. These data are an invaluable resource for deriving insights to improve decision and policy making. The goal is to turn these large amounts of data into actionable information to authorities for planning public health activities and policies. The integration and analysis of these heterogeneous sources of information will enable the best decisions to be made, allowing for diagnosis and treatment to be personalised to each individual. IASIS aims to pave the way towards comprehensive access to data from disparate sources and the results of analysis, in the form of actionable knowledge for policy-making. The project will offer a common representation schema for the heterogeneous data sources. The infrastructure will be able to convert clinical notes into usable data, combine them with genomic data, related bibliography, image data and more, and create a global knowledge base. This will facilitate the use of intelligent methods in order to discover useful patterns across different resources. Using semantic integration of data will give the opportunity to generate information that is rich, auditable and reliable. This information can be used to provide better care, reduce errors and create more confidence in sharing data, thus providing more insights and opportunities. Data resources for two different disease categories will be explored, dementia and lung cancer.