Sabina Leonelli (University of Exeter)

Pandemic Data Science: What Have We Learnt?

About the lecture
How has the COVID-19  pandemic affected data science and AI, their impact within and beyond research, and their perceived role within society? And what does this teach about the significance and characteristics of responsible data science and related training? This talk approaches these questions by considering how data science contributions to the pandemic response have been imagined and projected into the future, and reflecting on how such imaginaries inform allocations of investment and priorities within and beyond the scientific research landscape. I argue that it is imperative for data scientists to spend time and resources scoping, scrutinizing and questioning the possible scenarios of use of their work – particularly given the fast-paced knowledge production required by an emergency situation such as this pandemic. The failures and successes experienced over the last year point to the fundamental role of ethics and participatory knowledge production in the development and implementation of AI systems that can help to tackle a social crisis. In other words, we have seen once again how scientifically sound and socially effective research requires ethical and transdisciplinary practices. This observation clashes with the obsession over automated “technical fixes” that continues to dominate the scientific and political discourse around AI. 

References: Krige, J and Leonelli, S (2021) Mobilizing the Translational History of Knowledge Flows: COVID-19 and the Politics of Knowledge at the Borders. History and Technology; Leonelli, S. (2021) Data Science in Times of Pan(dem)ic. Harvard Data Science Review 3(1) https://doi.org/10.1162/99608f92.fbb1bdd6; Leonelli S, Lovell B, Fleming L, Wheeler B and Williams H. (2021) From FAIR data to fair data use: Methodological data fairness in health-related social media research. Big Data and Society 8 (1).

About the speaker
Sabina Leonelli is Professor of Philosophy and History of Science at the University of Exeter, where she co-directs the Centre for the Study of the Life Sciences and leads the governance strand of the Institute for Data Science and Artificial Intelligence. She is Fellow of the Alan Turing Institute and the Académie Internationale de Philosophie de la Science; Editor-in-Chief of History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences; Associate Editor of Harvard Data Science Review; and twice ERC grantee. Her books include Data-Centric Biology: A Philosophical Study (2016), Data Journeys in the Sciences (2020) and Data in Society: A Critical Introduction (in press).

photo credit: University of Exeter

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Monday, 6. July 2021, 18:15-19:45 (CEST)

Zoom Webinar
Details to access the keynotes will be made public on a timely basis at http://uhh.de/inf-cepe-iacap2021