Weeknote 5.0

Will things ever be the same?

The team was down to three and we only had four days this week but we’ve still been busy.

We’ve mainly been reflecting on our ‘coffee and cakes’ session with our colleagues at the end of last week — here’s what has got us thinking:

• Our colleagues love an acronym. We decided to inject some interactivity into our presentation and referenced our glossary by providing a list of acronyms for our colleagues to decipher (NB: glossary does not yet cover all these terms…). Have a go yourself and do let us know if we’ve missed any key ones (especially if they’re being used in gov):

(Head to the bottom of the weeknote for the answers…)

• We set out our plans for the workforce and policy making projects, sparking some interesting conversations, in particular the need to have an open mind to the fact that future technology may not just change the way we work but change roles and departments entirely. Teachers often talk about educating children for roles that may not even exist yet and we have to think about technology in the same fashion.

Three things that happened this week

1. Following on from that internal discussion, Marcus has pulled together an initial framework for the workforce report. The rest of us have been poring over it in advance of further discussion once he’s back from leave next week. Which is exciting.

2. As trailed last week, our spreadsheet of examples of future technology being used in government is now online here. Currently slightly unwieldy, and with lots of additions still to make… We’re working on ways of making it more manageable, and thinking about pretty charts that could come out of it (obvious examples: which departments and public bodies have the most future tech projects going on? Which technologies are being experimented with most in government?). Let us know whether you think the categories and classifications make sense, and feel free to just throw things in at the bottom if there are examples you’re aware of! (Don’t worry about checking if they’re there already — leave that sort of fun stuff to us.)

3. We continued preparation for our next Data Bites event, on Tuesday 4 June. You watch previous ones here but this time we’ll be treated to presentations from the Geospatial Commission, BEIS, the ONS and the NAO. Come along or watch the livestream!

People we chatted to

• Ben and Ben from Palantir came over to give us a demo of their SkyWise system, which is used by Airbus and loads of airlines to do predictive maintenance on planes. It spurred an interesting conversation about how you weigh the (usually marginal) accuracy gains from deep learning (compared to other machine learning techniques) against the loss of explainability, the extent to which you keep the human in the loop, and the challenges of working in spaces with less rich, less structured data, such as are common across Government.
• Virtually, quite a few others… We’ve been sending emails left, right and centre (in a non-political way!) to set up interviews for the workforce report, and for our planned trips to Oxford and Cambridge in about a month’s time. Very much an ongoing process, so let us know if you fancy chatting!

What we’re reading and thinking about

• You may remember Gavin was one of a number of IfGers presenting to the Hertie School of Government last week (Weeknote 4.0). He had a great time, and clearly they didn’t have a terrible one, since he’s off to Berlin for a couple of days next week for a conference on ‘Design Implications of Agile Governance in Policy-Making and Public Management’. The Institute wrote about agile project management in one of its relatively early (and award-winning) reports, and it’s unsurprisingly something that’s cropped up since in our more recent work on digital. Gavin will also be revising from Richard McLean’s helpful reading list — any other recommendations very welcome. (Same goes for people he should be meeting in Berlin!) Otherwise, it’s been quiet, celebrating a chart appearing on primetime BBC1, charting the Prime Minister’s time in office, and looking forward to charting with a jazz version of a Shakespeare sonnet, among other things. [Gavin: we sang something different in the end.] Oh, and preparing for next week’s Data Bites — we may still be able to squeeze you in, and there’s always the livestream. And he finally watched The Front Runner, about Gary Hart’s 1988 presidential bid — and agreed more with this four-star review than this two-star one. Relevance to future tech? The impact of technological change on the media and politics, yes, but there’s also a brilliantly roundabout connection — one of the best books ever written about politics has a great word for a key scene, where one character tries to tempt others into a confrontation: trolling. Not bad for a book published in 1992.
• Lewis was always going to struggle to follow that! He’s been trying to work out why more AI research isn’t geared towards complementing human intelligence — when there’s stuff we find really hard and machines find easy, and other stuff we find really easy and machines find hard, it seems there’s a pretty natural division of labour that we could just roll with… He’s also been revisiting the various strategies, frameworks, deals, workbooks and whatever else that the Government has put out in the data/digital/AI space in recent years, trying to pull out key themes, commitments, and gaps.
• Marcus has been on leave, hopefully not thinking too hard and just chilling. He’ll be back in town next week.

What’s coming up next week?

• Did we say it was Data Bites #3 on Tuesday? Then Gavin heads off to Berlin.
• Lewis is heading along to Artificial Intelligence, Privacy and Big Tech: Europe’s Response at the UCL Europe Institute on Monday. It kicks off with EU Commissioner for Justice, Consumers and Gender Equality, Věra Jourová, delivering a keynote on the EU’s approach to tech regulation in the coming years — which will prove significant for the UK whatever happens with Brexit.
• There’s a Personal Data and AI Meetup at Newspeak House on Wednesday night, which looks fun. Lewis would go if it didn’t clash with the IfG/British Academy 5-aside football derby…

Any last thoughts?

• Answers to the acronyms quiz: 1. Artificial Intelligence, 2. Machine Learning, 3. Internet of Things, 4. Virtual Reality, 5. Augmented Reality, 6. Government Digital Service, 7. Centre for Data Ethics and Innovation, 8. Unmanned Aerial Vehicle, 9. Autonomous Aerial Vehicle, 10. Robotic Process Automation, 11. Natural Language Processing, 12. Graphics Processing Unity, 13. Distributed Ledger Technology, 14. Application Programming Interface, 15. Human-Computer Interaction, 16. Reinforcement Learning, 17. Artificial General Intelligence, 18. Public Services Network [obviously some of these acronyms may also stand for other stuff…]
• As ever, let us know if you have any thoughts or feedback — or if you want to chat! Email (digital@instituteforgovernment.org.uk) or Twitter or commenting on this or whatever works best for you — it all works for us.