Christine Foster, the managing director for innovation at the Alan Turing Institute, the UK’s national institute for data science and artificial intelligence. The institute was set up in 2015 with the goal of advancing fundamental research and applying that research to real-world use cases.
In addition, it also aims to train the next generation of data scientists and data science leaders and advise policy-makers and the public on how to adopt this technology responsibly.
In Foster’s view, the institute exists to give the UK a competitive advantage on the world stage of data science and artificial intelligence. But to do so UK businesses will have to engage with the institute to get that advantage.
Organisations can do so by joining a Data Study Group, to which they can bring in datasets and questions they want to find out from those datasets. The Turing Institute will then put on a week-long hackathon to get those answers.
Large enterprises can also fund research and therefore invest in artificial intelligence and data science alongside the UK government. There is also a research engineering group, which Foster describes as “engineering research and researching engineering." She added: "They are the ones who take something out of a paper and put it into the first usable bit of code.”
"Researchers need to know which problems you are grappling with."
It is also possible to join an interest group such as one on data ethics or social data science. “Researchers always have these different research interest areas but they need to know what actual problems you are grappling with in the practitioner community to know that they are working on the right things,” she said.
One piece of research that was incubated at the Alan Turing Institute came about as the result of collaboration between an ethicist, a lawyer and a computer scientist. They decided to work on automated decisions and tackle the problem of ‘the computer says no’ where the individual doesn’t understand why they were given that particular outcome.
“In this case,” said Foster “we are very proud of the effect the policy influence, the regulatory influence has had in pushing counterfactuals as a valid, meaningful way of giving explanations to individuals.” The resulting research paper “sat in this interdisciplinary spot” and gave an early prototype of how to figure out which vector to go along to get from a no to a yes.
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