Data conference: Data-Driven Innovation's Jarmo Eskelinen on a mission to tackle major challenges

Opening this year’s event, Jarmo Eskelinen, DDI’s director, said: “We are on track to smash our targets, with more than 60,000 students supported in data
science qualifications.” — Opening this year’s event, Jarmo Eskelinen, DDI’s director, said: “We are on track to smash our targets, with more than 60,000 students supported in data science qualifications.”

This year marks the fifth anniversary of the First Minister and Prime Minister signing the Edinburgh and South East Scotland City Region Deal.

The venue for the signing ceremony was the newly built Bayes Centre, one of six datadriven innovation (DDI) hubs created through the £1.5 billion investment.

The universities wanted to be part of the Deal to join organisations across the public, private, and third sectors with academia to create innovation opportunities with tech and data. For researchers, this offers the chance to leverage the scale and resources of large organisations through collaboration, while delivering economic and social benefits in the region where they live and work.

The DDI initiative continues to partner with The Scotsman’s data series because it provides a live event where academics and industry can get together, building collaborations, sharing challenges, and exchanging ideas.

This fosters the partnerships and activities that help the DDI initiative deliver ambitious targets as a partner in the Deal.

Last year, the initiative supported 35 start-ups and almost 20,000 students to undertake a DDI-related qualification, MOOC [Massive Open Online Courses], or a continuing professional development course.

Opening this year’s event, Jarmo Eskelinen, DDI’s director, said: “We are on track to smash our targets, with more than 60,000 students supported in data science qualifications.”

Data for good is still a big part of DDI’s mission to make the City Region data capital of Europe by the end of the decade.

In previous years, the conference has covered big topics such as diversity, ethics, and – during the pandemic – sharing data to tackle Covid 19. This year, AI has been grabbing headlines for months, including claims of its existential threat to humanity. The same week as the conference, Prime Minister Rishi Sunak voiced concern about the possibility of terrorists using AI to produce weapons that could escape human control.

Such stories were put into perspective by one of the event’s keynotes, Professor Shannon Vallor, who said narratives of existential risk only distract public attention from the immediate need to address issues of safety, trustworthiness, and inclusivity, diverting resources into what she referred to as a “speculative future”, based on unfounded and often far-fetched claims.

Another of the day’s keynotes, Stephanie Hare, offered an example of this when she spoke about the need for greater transparency around AI’s energy footprint. The author and broadcaster explained how the reality of the “cloud” is large, energy-hungry data centres that consume huge amounts of water, adding that many tech companies need to be more transparent instead of treating their energy use as proprietary information.

She said: “AI applications such as ChatGPT need to ‘drink’ 500ml of water for a 20-50 question exchange with a user. This highlights why we, as consumers, need more transparency around data in order to make informed choices about using it.”

Find out more at ddi.ac.uk or follow us on @DataCapitalEd