Jeni's Musings

Last week I was at the Canada-UK Colloquium on AI in Toronto. These are some things I learned and thoughts I had while there, in no particular order.

We live in a world where a few, mostly US-based companies hold huge amounts of data about us and about the world. Google and Facebook, and to a lesser extent Amazon and Apple, (GAFA) make money by providing services, including advertising services, that make excellent use of this data. They are big, rich, and powerful in both obvious and subtle ways. This makes people uncomfortable, and working out what to do about them and their impact on our society and economy has become one of the big questions of our age.

Earlier in the year I went to an OECD workshop on enhanced access to data. The workshop covered four general themes: open data, data sharing communities, data marketplaces and data portability. The discussion on the implications of data portability were particularly interesting.

My eldest daughter is now in secondary school and, while she enjoys and is good at Maths, what she really loves studying is History and English. Watching the critical thinking and analysis skills that she is learning and using for those subjects, I have started to wonder if we should be approaching data literacy from a different angle.

It’s been a while since I gave an update about my attempt to build an agent-based model for the information economy. That’s partly because I got distracted crowdsourcing election candidate data and results for Democracy Club. It’s also partly because of this: