Author: Mark Say
Publisher: UKAuthority
Publication Year: 2022
Summary: The following article discusses the Public Policy Programme, a first-of-its-kind agency that encourages collaboration between data scientists and policymakers. Typically, statisticians and programmers do not know the first thing about how to apply their discoveries and that policymakers do not adequately understand the algorithms being touted as ground-breaking, so creating a middleman agency to oversee this changing of hands makes sense. The program is hiring 50 researchers to reach a broad conclusion or solution on their 4 main goals: 1). Using data science and artificial intelligence (AI) to inform policy making, 3). Improving the provision of public services, 3). Building ethical foundations for the use of data science, and 4). AI in policy making, and contributing to policy that governs how they are used. Further, the program will work to ensure more women become data scientists and public policy practitioners are guided about the merits and pitfalls of AI through their leading role in the AI Standards Hub. It is crucial that the tools the program creates are generalizable to many different industries so that, at that point, government entities no longer have to worry as deeply about the ethical considerations of the data and algorithms they deploy.