Public sector organisations should take an iterative approach to data ethics that encompasses every stage of a project, from initial data collection all the way through to live implementation and beyond, so that the lessons learned can be truly incorporated into future work, says data ethicist Haroon Ahmed. Ahmed, commercial partner for data capability […]
The Department for Education (DfE) has been given a reprimand but escaped a £10m regulatory fine for a data breach that saw a database of personal information held on 28 million people misused by a third-party organisation over a “prolonged” period between September 2018 and January 2020. The Learning Records Service (LRS) database contains […]
The BBC has developed a web app that uses live personal data from the BBC, Spotify and Netflix to create a media profile for users. According to BBC Research, this media profile allows the user to view and edit their entire media viewing history in one place. Built on an open source tool called […]
At a time of ongoing skills and talent shortages across most areas of the economy, the idea of wooing prospective employees with a compelling candidate experience is garnering increased attention. Whereas it used to be considered a “nice-to-have” that was explored after other elements of the recruitment process had been dealt with, “intense competition […]
Most people have heard of data-driven decision making – the admirable desire to make better decisions through data. The conventional justification is that given the world’s complexity, organisations need data to make decisions. Such ideas exist across organisations from governments to companies to hospitals. In fact, they are wrong in principle and misleading in […]
While ransomware remains one of the top cyber security concerns for organisations today, the state of ransomware defence is failing. Historically, organisations have relied on a combination of people, process and technology to thwart cyber threats – from regular software patches and backups to threat modelling and password awareness – but these tactics alone […]
“For the next several years, leading technology providers must play a leading role in helping enterprises navigate the current storms of disruption,” says analyst firm IDC, promoting its forthcoming round of crystal ball predictions for 2023. No pressure then. Of course, we’ve known for some time now that technology can be a differentiator. As […]
“A sun of our own and it’s made in Britain!” crowed the headline. The UK Atomic Energy Authority (UKAEA) believed its 120-ton experimental reactor Zeta was almost certainly generating neutrons from fusion, the nuclear reaction that powers the sun. It claimed it could soon start generating electricity safely and cheaply from deuterium extracted from […]
During his two-decade stint with holiday firm TUI, Marc Jennings, CIO of analytics and AI, has seen the company undergo rapid transformation. Through a series of mergers and acquisitions, the German-headquartered firm has grown into one of the world’s largest travel and tourism businesses. The pace of change has continued to increase over the […]
The Data Lab’s Data Summit conference in Edinburgh took the ethical use of data as an over-arching theme. Speakers included science broadcaster Hannah Fry, Nasa’s chief science data officer, Kevin Murphy, Edinburgh University global public health chair Devi Sridhar, and Tom Arthur, minister for public finance, planning and community wealth in the Scottish government. […]